For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] If there’s one thing that was certain about this year, it’s that nothing was certain. And yet, the impulse to make sense of our world and its persistent forms continued. Texts that critically surveyed our world—presented in varied genres and approaches—drew us in to consider—with hope, curiosity, dismay, and startling surprise—all that abounds. From … Read more
[ad_1] It would be remiss to read Lucille Clifton’s Generations: A Memoir, recently reissued by New York Review of Books, without considering the moment in which this book—Clifton’s sole memoir—was first released. Published in 1976, Generations emerged the year before the miniseries “Roots” aired on national television eight consecutive nights in a row, a year … Read more
[ad_1] First published in 1929, the extended essay by Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, advanced the idea that women’s creative liberation could be garnered by securing two things: time and solitude. In material form, Woolf likened time and solitude to a room and independent, financial means. At the center of this landmark feminist … Read more
[ad_1] The title of Cody Lee’s debut screenplay, The Everys, refers to the family at the heart of this ode to the family sitcom. Normal yet far from normal, the Everys reflect the positionings and scriptings of all that we’ve come to expect from the sitcom form. And yet, there’s something about the family’s clay … Read more
[ad_1] Paul Mendez’s debut novel, Rainbow Milk, begins in 1956 in the voice of Norman Alonso, a skilled gardener who arrives from Jamaica to the industrial town of Blixton with his wife and their two children. Norman and his family are among the first wave of migrants of the Windrush generation who traveled from the … Read more
[ad_1] The title of Gina Frangello’s debut memoir, Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason, can be read as an imperative: to destroy with the body a space created, inhabited, and processed by the self. This idea invites a certain scrutiny: why would anyone be moved to create such a rupture … Read more
[ad_1] In her final, incomplete work, The Life of the Mind, Hannah Arendt sought to consider how thinking—an action so obvious its exploration appeared unnecessary—links vita activa, the active life, with vita contemplativa, the contemplative mind. Drawing on the intellectual history of ideas, Arendt posited that thinking creates neither morality nor understanding itself; but, instead, … Read more
[ad_1] In Nancy Johnson’s debut novel, The Kindest Lie, a story of desire and identity unfolds around a young, Yale-educated Black chemical engineer named Ruth. Her story, told with attention and sincerity, is not a simple narrative of homecoming. Rather, Ruth, who returns to her Indiana hometown in the midst of an economic depression, comes … Read more
[ad_1] Works of criticism, or more broadly, texts that critically survey our world, often don’t subscribe to fixed genres or easily distinguishable forms. During a year that rattled our attention and pulled hard at our ability to concentrate, these books, in their varied forms, drew us in. Through their joy (and pessimism) and critical perspective, … Read more
[ad_1] “It is poetry that holds the songs of becoming, of change, of dreaming, and it is poetry we turn to when we travel those places of transformation, like birth, coming of age, marriage, accomplishments, and death. We sing our children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren: our human experience in time, into and through existence.” So begins the … Read more