For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] When Laura Chow Reeve and I first met in 2022, we were students at the same low-residency MFA program, Randolph College. We workshopped pieces of novels in progress and learned from many brilliant faculty mentors. Now, in 2024, Laura is a graduate of the program and is celebrating the publication of her debut short … Read more
[ad_1] This year’s Booker prize longlist has featured numerous introspective, hyperfocused character studies, and Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow’s All the Little Bird-Hearts is no exception. Centering Sunday Forrester, an eccentric woman who lives her life according to a highly structured, self-made routine, the novel takes an intriguing and slightly sinister turn as new neighbors move in: the … Read more
[ad_1] To follow SJ Sindu’s work over the past few years is to admire diversity of form. From novels (Marriage of a Thousand Lies, Blue-Skinned Gods) to children’s literature (Shakti) to chapbooks (Dominant Genes) to short stories, Sindu proves there are so many ways interpret modern life—through fairy tale tropes, literary parallels, and tightly framed … Read more
[ad_1] In 2019, C. Pam Zhang enchanted readers with her vision of the American Gold Rush in How Much Of These Hills is Gold, her words rendering that dusty, bleak landscape with the fresh perspective of children. This narrative of children transporting their father’s body recalls Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, but Zhang’s story is … Read more
[ad_1] In her debut collection examining the myriad identities of modern Asian and Asian-American women, Cleo Qian does not shy away from both the real and surreal aspects of longing. Indeed, longing is the most palpable feeling of Let’s Go Let’s Go Let’s Go, and Qian embodies this feeling in all its dimensions. Whether the … Read more
[ad_1] In his debut story collection, The Best Possible Experience, Nishanth Injam creates characters in tight, liminal spaces, between homes and countries, and in transitional phases of life. From a young girl waiting for a gaggle of boys, to a man on a city bus, to a granddaughter and grandfather reflecting on their changing relationship, … Read more
[ad_1] In the mid-1950s, my great-uncle was a young Indian physicist in the United States, where he met and married a white Catholic woman from Boston. They were married for over sixty years, with three children and numerous grandchildren, and lived happily until both passed in their late eighties, within two years of each other. … Read more
[ad_1] Abraham Verghese’s The Covenant of Water opens with a map of the state of Kerala. All its regions, ranging from the mountainous Wayanad to the urban Cochin to the southernmost point of Trivandrum. It is akin to any detailed map in an epic fantasy, and in many respects that is the narrative Verghese has … Read more
[ad_1] Chana Porter, author of the acclaimed speculative novel The Seep, has returned in full force to her imaginative worldbuilding and incisive cultural commentary that made that book so successful. In The Thick and the Lean, she explores a religious society where delicious food is taboo, and the act of eating is as inelegant and … Read more
[ad_1] Comparing a brand-new novel against an established piece of media is often tempting, but can be far from accurate without casting a broader lens. Your Driver is Waiting by Priya Guns has been described endlessly as a gender-bent Taxi Driver. And while there are similarities between the debut novel and the Robert DeNiro movie, … Read more