For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] For three years, Preti Taneja taught creative writing in a program overseen by Cambridge University called Learning Together, in which undergraduates travelled to a local high-security prison to study alongside prisoners. On November 29, 2019, Usman Khan, a former prisoner and one of Taneja’s former students, travelled to London to attend an event at … Read more
[ad_1] The literary critic James Wood once wrote dismissively of historical fiction, saying that it is “merely science fiction facing backwards.” We inject the concerns of the present into the past, Wood suggests, the same way that we do when we write about the imaginary future, and this can result in a text that feels … Read more
[ad_1] The characters in María Ospina’s debut collection are haunted by the marks that time and trauma have left upon their bodies. Variations on the Body (translated from the Spanish by Heather Cleary) features a cast of loosely connected characters, all hailing from Ospina’s hometown of Bogotá, Colombia. Thematically, with its emphasis on the complex … Read more
[ad_1] “Home is a route anchored in memory,” writes Mariana Oliver in Migratory Birds. These short, lyric essays explore notions of migration and the ways that language both complicates and enriches the search for home. Oliver was born and resides in Mexico City, and Migratory Birds, her debut, received the José Vasconcelos National Young Essay … Read more
[ad_1] Yelena Moskovich’s third novel A Door Behind a Door is a phantasmagoria about immigration, death, and queer desire with a plot that defies easy description. It centers on a young immigrant in Milwaukee named Olga. When Olga was a baby back in the Soviet Union, a boy in her apartment building stabbed an old … Read more
[ad_1] The surrealist painter Leonora Carrington is enjoying a renaissance of late, with renewed interest in both her visual art and literary work. The last few years have seen the publication of The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington (Dorothy Press), the memoir Down Below (New York Review Books), and, just this January, Carrington’s masterpiece The … Read more
[ad_1] “I saw my mother raise a man from the dead,” Libertie Sampson tells us at the beginning of Kaitlyn Greenidge’s second novel. Libertie is a young girl living with her mother, a trained physician, in a community of free Blacks in Brooklyn, and the man is an escaped slave she calls Mr. Ben who … Read more
[ad_1] “For me, ghosts are never the spirits of strangers. They are the people I love most dearly,” confesses the narrator of one of the stories in Elvira Navarro’s collection Rabbit Island. Translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney, these stories often cross the line between delusion and reality, constructs that in Navarro’s hands prove … Read more
[ad_1] In November 2001, a Japanese woman named Takako Konishi was found dead in the woods near Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, not far from the border with North Dakota. According to a local newspaper article, she was believed to have frozen to death while searching for the ransom money buried in a snowbank at the end … Read more
[ad_1] It’s hard to sum up Marie NDiaye’s That Time of Year (Un temps de saison, translated from French by Jordan Stump), a short novel that unfolds with a dreamlike logic. Every year Herman, a math teacher from Paris, spends the month of August with his wife Rose and their son in a small country … Read more