Well, it certainly showered in April. With any luck, the May flowers are on their way!
May is often the start of summertime reading, a time to get outside and enjoy some fresh air and an even fresher read. We have plenty to look forward to this month, and perhaps most exciting is the variety of books to choose from. From insightful nonfiction to genre blending speculative novels and everything in between, our list is sure to offer you a hot start to the summer!
Hardly Creatures
By Rob Macaisa Colgate
Tin House Books
In his debut collection, Rob Macaisa Colgate explores the beauty of the disabled community through poetry that expands the limits of the poetic form. Each section is structured like a gallery room in an art museum, highlighting their own unique visual and linguistic approach. From poems that mimic sensory rooms and scrambled abecedarians to inventive plays on social media posts and culture allusions, Hardly Creatures shows readers the limitless possibilities poetry has to reimagine and reach new heights.
Metallic Realms
By Lincoln Michel
Atria Books
Metallic Realms tells the story of a sci-fi writing group known as Orb 4 and a man who is driven to preserve their work, Michael Lincoln. Michael becomes obsessed with the group’s greatest series, The Star Rot Chronicles, as well as the interior lives of each of the writers. Michael commits himself to bringing the world of the book into his own at any costs, threatening to blend the stories Orb 4 has created into their real world. Like any good book-within-a-book, Lincoln Michel’s latest is a complex tale that also finds intimacy and depth in its characters at every turn. The brilliance of Metallic Realms will burn your senses.
Run for the Hills
By Kevin Wilson
Ecco
We will always cheer a new release from Kevin Wilson here at the Chicago Review of Books, as few writers can match his trademark blend of wit, wonder, and tenderness. Run for the Hills follows Madeline Hill, a lonely young woman living with her mom after their dad left them twenty years ago. When a man named Reuben arrives and lets her know that he believes she’s his half sister and that he’s tracked down their father, he asks that they leave home for the craziest kind of road trip. Kevin Wilson’s new novel moves from madcap to heart wrenching from ease, proving once again that no one can create a family drama like him.
The Words of Dr. L
By Karen Bender
Counterpoint
From National Book Award finalist Karen Bender comes The Words of Dr. L, a delightfully strange short story collection about the varieties of dystopias on our doorstep and horizon. A couple is separated from their son and encased in globes orbiting the Earth. Society makes a plan to leave their burning planet for a life on Mars. Bender perfectly narrows the gap between the speculative and the frighteningly real, drawing on the connection between parents and their children to craft stories that ache with familial love. If you didn’t already know that Karen Bender was one of our greatest short story writers working today, let The Words of Dr. L make it perfectly clear.
The Emperor of Gladness
By Ocean Vuong
Penguin Books
When Hai, the hero from Vuong’s 2019 novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, prepares to jump off a bridge in East Gladness, he’s saved by Grazina, an 82-year-old woman with dementia. Hai becomes her caretaker, and with the help of his cousin Sony, he is also able to get a job at a fast-casual chain restaurant. Ocean Vuong is uniquely talented at capturing the tender and wrought feelings of loss. His novels are live wires of emotion, crackling at each page with possibility. The Emperor of Gladness is no different.
Things in Nature Merely Grow
By Yiyun Li
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
In Things in Nature Merely Grow, Yiyun Li honors the life of her sons Vincent and James, who died by suicide at sixteen and nineteen. The book is an honest and open-hearted exploration of their lives and the love and pain they experienced. Things in Nature Merely Grow is an impossible book, yet through Li’s deftness and determination she transforms the book into an intricate and nonlinear portrait of loss and love.
The South
By Tash Aw
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Following his grandfather’s death, Jay travels south to the property his family inherited, a once flourishing farm that’s fallen into disrepair. As Jay begins to work the farm in an attempt to restore its life, he meets Chuan, the son of the farm’s manager. In his latest novel, Tash Aw has crafted a family story that is ever the more sweeping through it’s constraint; The South is an heartbreaking and elegant look into the power of place and the lives who call it home.
The Set Up
By Jon Wynn
Belt Publishing
Looking for a crime novel that has the pulse of your favorite heist movie? The novel follows characters who are entangled with a multi-level marketing scheme known as The Set Up. But while the money is good at first, the death of an influential developer in Las Vegas brings unwanted attention in their direction. The Set Up is a clever take on the crime novel and offers a fascinating look into the grime and glitz of Las Vegas.
Apocalypse: How Catastrophe Transformed Our World and Can Forge New Futures
By Lizzie Wade
Harper
Who hasn’t had their thoughts spiral in recent months? Lizz Wade’s latest is a historical study of the human conception of apocalypse and the ways in which cataclysm is not an irrevocable ending, but instead a transformation. Apocalypse is a book ultimately about survival and reconstruction, dispelling misconceptions of great falls such as the Old Kingdom Egypt and the Classic Maya Empire to show us how people lived following collapse.
After Hours: Scorsese, Grief and the Grammar of Cinema
By Ben Tanzer
IG Publishing
In After Hours, Chicago author Ben Tanzer weaves together thoughtful film criticism of Martin Scrosese’s famous 1985 film and memoir to highlight the ways one wild night in NYC taught him how to find and live a life of meaning. Tanzer’s work is always insightful, and his latest book is a perfect example of his talent. After Hours is a perfect fusion: part Roger Ebert, part Joan Didion, and wholly Ben Tanzer.
Foreign Fruit: A Personal History of the Orange
By Katie Goh
Tin House Books
Few fruits have as interesting and fraught history as the orange. In Foreign Fruit, Katie Goh uses the fascinating story of the orange to frame her own search for heritage. Spanning the globe from east to west and back again, Katie takes readers from her upbringing as a Chinese-Malaysian-Irish in a northern Irish household to her ancestral home in Longyan, China, while also exploring the orange’s roots in colonialism around the world. Foreign Fruit is a book you’ll want to peel back the layers on and savor to the last page.
A Sharp Endless Need
By Marisa Crane
The Dial Press
Star point guard Mack Morris finds chemistry and comfort in transfer student Liv Cooper following the death of her father. But as she struggles to protect their budding relationship from Liv’s conservative mother, Mac’s desire and grief collide. Marisa Crane’s follow-up to I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself is a triumph of young love on par with iconic depictions such as Call Me By Your Name and Love & Basketball.
