For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] A friend explains that the world is divided into paragraph and sentence writers. A paragraph writer is like a brick mason, working with consistent materials and focused on maintaining a clean line as a wall unfolds. Building a stone wall, a sentence writer in contrast begins with a pile of rocks—clots of material formed … Read more
[ad_1] Dan Egan writes, “An exquisitely balanced phosphorus exchange existed for billions of years before humans corrupted the element’s flow through the environment.” Egan’s task in his new book, The Devil’s Element: Phosphorus and a World Out of Balance, is to explore that “exquisite exchange,” detailing the element’s breakdown and passage through wetlands and across … Read more
[ad_1] They say that time is money and that fiction is time. Does that mean that money is fiction as well? What measures a good book about work? With Halloween upon us, can one imagine a greater work of horror than the collected emails of a corporate fraud artist like Enron’s “Kenny Boy” Lay? Christine … Read more
[ad_1] If you take the Amtrak from Chicago to Springfield, you run smack into time as you enter Illinois’s capital city. The train crawls along bricked roads and Springfield’s history-soaked downtown, the Capitol itself just blocks from the tracks. That journey in time and space is also taken by Ray Long in The House That … Read more
[ad_1] The oracular in Gwen E. Kirby’s Shit Cassandra Saw is tense business—fraught with the dynamics of shared experience, speaking and listening. This collection of short stories reminds me of a woman who used to ride Chicago’s Red Line. You could tell when she was on the train because when it pulled into its next … Read more
[ad_1] One of the most stunning poems written out of grief is Hilda Morley’s “For Stefan 26 Months Later.” There, the poet imagines the grand gestures of loss, but is left, …wish[ing] only to see you sitting with me at a table & a red-and-white tablecloth between us, nothing more Morley’s poem cuts to the … Read more
[ad_1] In his latest release, MPH and Other Road Poems, Ed Roberson recounts a motorcycle trip across the United States with two friends in 1970. This journey is taken through the poet’s return to a recovered manuscript previously written in that time, analogous to his own life’s ongoing journey through the Americas’ extended geographies. In … Read more
[ad_1] Founded in 1906, the history of Gary, Indiana, has curious, layered aspects, comprised of silt, slag, and blood. You gain access to it in a car ride, your passenger noting, “My family used to own that building…” You overhear it in an impromptu conversation, a shared recollection of close detail and laughter. You cross it … Read more