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chris borrelli Book Recommendations & Book Mentions

This list consists of recommendations or mentions of books spotted in media, social media accounts, podcasts or other public websites.

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Christopher Borrelli is a features and culture writer for the Chicago Tribune. Chicago Tribune features writer. Militant Rhode Islander. Northwestern/Harvard/Syracuse. Nieman fellow. DM for tips here. email: cborrelli@chicagotribune.com

21 books
Book Cover for: Planes, Peter C. Baker

Planes

Peter C. Baker
chris borrellichris 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.

Paperback, 2023

$18.00$9.00 + Free shipping50% off your first book
Book Cover for: South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation, Imani Perry

South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation

Imani Perry
chris borrellichris 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.

Paperback, 2023

$19.99$9.99 + Free shipping50% off your first book
Book Cover for: Mount Chicago, Adam Levin

Mount Chicago

Adam Levin
chris borrellichris 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

Paperback, 2023

$20.00$10.00 + Free shipping50% off your first book
Book Cover for: The Rabbit Hutch: A Novel (National Book Award Winner), Tess Gunty

The Rabbit Hutch: A Novel (National Book Award Winner)

Tess Gunty
chris borrellichris 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.

Paperback, 2023

$17.00$8.50 + Free shipping50% off your first book
Book Cover for: Chain Gang All Stars: A Read with Jenna Pick: A Novel, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

Chain Gang All Stars: A Read with Jenna Pick: A Novel

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
chris borrellichris 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

Paperback, 2024

$18.00$9.00 + Free shipping50% off your first book
Book Cover for: Heartbreak Is the National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music, Rob Sheffield

Heartbreak Is the National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music

Rob Sheffield
chris borrellichris 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.

Hardcover, 2024

$27.99$13.99 + Free shipping50% off your first book
Book Cover for: The Philosophy of Modern Song, Bob Dylan

The Philosophy of Modern Song

Bob Dylan
chris borrellichris 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...

Hardcover, 2022

$45.00$22.50 + Free shipping50% off your first book
Book Cover for: The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading about Eating, and Eating While Reading, Dwight Garner

The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading about Eating, and Eating While Reading

Dwight Garner
chris borrellichris 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.

Hardcover, 2023

$27.00$13.50 + Free shipping50% off your first book
Book Cover for: The Position of Spoons: And Other Intimacies, Deborah Levy

The Position of Spoons: And Other Intimacies

Deborah Levy
chris borrellichris 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...

Hardcover, 2024

$26.00$13.00 + Free shipping50% off your first book
Book Cover for: The Devil Takes You Home, Gabino Iglesias

The Devil Takes You Home

Gabino Iglesias
chris borrellichris 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.

Paperback, 2023

$17.99$8.99 + Free shipping50% off your first book