For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] Maheshwata Devi’s urban novella, Truth/Untruth, set in 1980s Calcutta, is a story about dirty pasts that catch up with the present, and how money is often built on this belief that it won’t. It’s fiction that tingles with real-world politics. Translated by Anjum Katyal, the book begins in Khidirpur, a seedy part of central-west … Read more
[ad_1] The twenties have been wild for the Internet. Titanic companies like Facebook and Twitter have gone through major changes. Millions have been laid off, and in the past month alone, two popular online journalism portals, Buzzfeed and Vice News, trimmed their operations with the former completely shutting down. Is the Internet, as we know … Read more
[ad_1] Cathy Curtis’s subject in A Splendid Intelligence: the Life of Elizabeth Hardwick is mighty. A writer whose career spanned decades—a ‘literary lion’. It is a chronological account of the writer’s life. The first couple of chapters trace Hardwick’s origins. It draws a portrait of a young Elizabeth whose “bookish tastes made her an anomaly … Read more
[ad_1] “You do not have to be white to be a white feminist,” Rafia Zakaria writes in the author’s note to her latest collection of essays, Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption. It is also possible, she further argues, to be white and feminist and still “not be a white feminist.” The term, then, seems … Read more
[ad_1] In a 2018 interview with the Public Voice Salon, Vivian Gornick responded to a question regarding her role in the revival of the memoir genre by saying, “I did not do anything extraordinary; it was a genre whose time had come.” She echoes this opinion in many of her interviews. According to her, memoir … Read more
[ad_1] Susie Yang’s debut White Ivy is focused around issues of identity, belonging, and the inherent anxieties that accompany those who simultaneously seek to conform and hide. Where does an “average and nondescript” Chinese American girl belong in white America? In what form does racial prejudice make itself visible in a fractured modern world? Yang … Read more
[ad_1] On April 8, 1921, Virginia Woolf notes in her diary, “and I ought to be writing Jacob’s Room, and I can’t, and instead I shall write down the reason why I can’t…” What might a present-day adaptation of a writer’s jottings look like? Fleeting and mostly lost in the vertically moving digital social archives. … Read more