For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] Bookseller, co-owner, and self-proclaimed libromancer at Porter Square Books in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Josh Cook offers us a backstage view of some of the inner workings of the world of independent bookselling in his new work of nonfiction. What is a libromancer, you might ask? The suffix –mancer indicates someone who uses magic and the … Read more
[ad_1] Before coming to America in search of a safer life as a transgender woman of color, renowned activist, performer, and now writer, Cecilia Gentili grew up in the small city of Galvez, Argentina, as the daughter of an Italian father and Argentinian mother. Faltas: Letters to Everyone in My Hometown Who Isn’t My Rapist, … Read more
[ad_1] Who among us doesn’t enjoy the idea of escaping the hectic pace of existence for a faraway, uninhabited island—a haven from life’s challenges and woes? For Artt, the enigmatic scholar and priest at the center of Emma Donoghue’s new novel Haven, set in seventh-century Ireland, the decision to turn his back on the sinful … Read more
[ad_1] Lidia Yuknavitch knows misfits. Much of her writing concerns people—especially girls and women—on the margins, on the edges of experience, surviving, resilient, and magical, but never quite fitting in. Their trauma and suffering, and their regeneration through the act of storytelling, are reflective of Yuknavitch’s own: “Writing, making stories, drawing and painting and making … Read more
[ad_1] Rare are books that can truly – in the most genuine and interesting sense – be called experimental, but Alexandrian poet and writer Noor Naga’s first prose novel is one such rarity. Sharp, switched-on, and self-interrogating, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English masterfully continues, long after the last page is read, to provoke uncomfortable … Read more
[ad_1] Following the tremendous success of her summer 2020 blockbuster, Mexican Gothic, Mexican-Canadian writer Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s new novel, Velvet Was the Night, arrives just in time for us to enjoy it at the peak of this sultry season. Described by the author in the novel’s afterword as “noir, pulp fiction…based on a real horror story,” … Read more
[ad_1] In the hands of a writer less skilled in nuanced storytelling, The Woman from Uruguay could have been a tired tale of a man in the midst of a mid-life crisis, led astray and ultimately made a fool by his baser instincts. But in his latest novel, celebrated Argentinian writer and poet Pedro Mairal … Read more
[ad_1] From the earliest pages of English poet Sam Riviere’s debut novel, Dead Souls, the reader is catapulted into an extended internal monologue satirizing the follies of the literary world, particularly its poets. And there’s no winding up to the action: from its beginning, the novel’s pace is manic and relentless, evincing the unnamed narrator’s … Read more
[ad_1] Sarah Moss’s seventh novel, Summerwater, follows her acclaimed Ghost Wall (2018), and takes its cue from 19th century English poet Sir William Watson’s “The Ballad of Semerwater.” The poem tells an old legend about a mysterious traveling beggar who arrives in the prosperous town of Semerwater in northern England’s Yorkshire Dales. In response to … Read more
[ad_1] “We think we remember the past and imagine the future. What if in reality it’s the other way around?” So ruminates Lucy, the narrator in Vancouver-based writer Zsuzsi Gartner’s much-anticipated first novel The Beguiling, a seductive work that thoroughly upends comfortable notions of narrative linearity and offers up—in the end—a bewildering twist à la … Read more