chris borrelli Book Recommendations & Book Mentions

chris borrelli

“Planes”... which reads like vintage Don DeLillo at his most thoughtful, is a short work of recent history about the way our choices resonate beyond our view.

chris borrelli

A genre-trip full of detours into history, folklore, memoir and art, moving state by state, told by a Chicago native determined to push past the archetypes of one region to get at the ways in which the entire country’s legacy of contradictions protects us from hard truths.

chris borrelli

The plot of Adam Levin’s big new novel Mount Chicago is something of a daydream for a lot of Chicagoans: The Loop and most of Michigan Ave falls into a sinkhole. It’s a really good book. My conversation with Levin. https://t.co/wqIPvT3cmA

chris borrelli

Unstable in the very best ways, ambitious without driving you to distraction, touching without sentiment, this snapshot of loneliness in a Midwest apartment block is a transcendent debut.

chris borrelli

I talked to ⁦@NK_Adjei⁩ about his great topic - America’s talent for allowing a certain amount of “acceptable violence.” His new novel, Chain-Gang All-Stars, is so rousing and violent you find yourself wincing. https://t.co/a9VCA10hEl

chris borrelli

Culture writer Rob Sheffield’s 'Heartbreak is the National Anthem' is an impressionistic portrait of Taylor Swift, a slender one, not remotely definitive, but rather, more interesting — the first serious attempt to place Swift inside a music history.

chris borrelli

A big smile of a read. That academic title is a wink. Dylan selects more than 60 of his favorite songs then leaps into freewheeling history, lots of associative memories and, here and there, thoughts on songwriting and creativity and even a few subjects he has long avoided...

chris borrelli

One of the most eccentric memoirs I've read in years: Garner, a longtime New York Times critic, boils (dices and purées) his existence down to a pair of obsessions--books and food--so completely, it's both honest and hard to say where the man ends and M.F.K. Fisher begins.

chris borrelli

The Position of Spoons, by ultra-prolific Deborah Levy, plays like a lunch with an especially sharp, scattered pal, with brief (often one or two pages total) thoughts on celebrity death, Collette, female friendships, lemons...

chris borrelli

Vintage noir, with an air of “Heart of Darkness,” played at America’s Southern border, for all the racism and heartache that implies. What you’re not expecting is magic realism (and that bit of horror) paired to pitch-dark crime fiction about cyclical violence.