For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] Suzanne Scanlon’s Committed: On Meaning and Madwomen excavates some of her most formative memories for clues to her evolving selfhood. The death of her mother when Scanlon was nine years old, her relationship to literature, particularly the writings of Marguerite Duras, and her years spent institutionalized are linchpins in this layered examination of sanity … Read more
[ad_1] The eeriness and isolation of uncolonized, hostile worlds make S.A. Barnes’s sophomore novel, Ghost Station, feel claustrophobic. Yet it also remains a work about community and personhood that centers on self-knowledge and self-chosen identity. These opposing thematic threads reflect the motivating force of the story personified in Ophelia Bray, the black sheep of an … Read more
[ad_1] In fall 2020, Zito Madu moved to Venice for work. He nervously left his parents back at their home in Detroit, and entered a city usually packed with tourists and now comparably deserted, shops opening and closing at unexpected times, the curving streets often empty except for him. Within the labyrinth of an eerie … Read more
[ad_1] The main character of Amor Towles’s debut, Rules of Civility, slips into a movie theater in the middle of a Marlene Dietrich film and watches the second half, then stays to watch the first half in the next showing. In the movies, she says, “things looked dire at the midpoint and were happily resolved … Read more
[ad_1] Clare Beams is a writer’s writer. Whenever I talk with fellow writers about work we admire, the fact of Clare’s genius is one on which we all seem to agree. From the moment her remarkable and wholly original debut story collection, We Show What We Have Learned, appeared, I fell in love with Clare’s … Read more
[ad_1] It was the cover of Marissa Higgins’ debut novel A Good Happy Girl that initially caught my eye: a young woman in profile, mouth open so wide her jaw nearly distends as she devours a burger. It speaks to the unbridled need in its pages, and I knew, right away, I had to read … Read more
[ad_1] Towards the end of The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson writes that she considered writing a letter to her son before he was born but decided against it because it felt too much like an act of naming, or of “irrevocable classification, interpellation.” She briefly recalls Linda Hamilton at the end of The Terminator heroically recording … Read more
[ad_1] Is it possible to be star-struck after you’ve already met the person? Yes. Yes, it is. I met Ada Limón at a faculty reading during my first semester in the MFA program at Queens University of Charlotte, where Ada has taught since 2014 even as the 24th US Poet Laureate, a position she has … Read more
[ad_1] Jonathan Corcoran has been writing about West Virginia and Appalachia since before I met him. We were both attending graduation programs at Rutgers University–Newark. After graduating, we continued meeting semi-regularly for an informal writing workshop where we would critique each other’s work and gossip about writers we knew. It was here, nine years ago, … Read more
[ad_1] Jonathan Corcoran has been writing about West Virginia and Appalachia since before I met him. We were both attending graduation programs at Rutgers University–Newark. After graduating, we continued meeting semi-regularly for an informal writing workshop where we would critique each other’s work and gossip about writers we knew. It was here, nine years ago, … Read more