For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] Boldness incarnate. A laugh in the face of subtlety and propriety. These are fragmented phrases to describe Crosshairs by Catherine Hernandez, and they do not go far enough. Hernandez writes for herself, for the communities she represents, and for anyone who has ever felt othered in society. Her feminism is intersectional, her prose electric, … Read more
[ad_1] I am twenty-five years old and have no memory of 1999. What I know of Y2K comes from my father’s nostalgic laughter and from the Mike Judge classic Office Space. So to understand the vague paranoia underlying Thomas Maltman’s The Land, I admit to not having the proper context clues. However, I did feel … Read more
[ad_1] Approaching a genre for the first time is like learning a new language. Sifting through the impenetrable for words you understand, learning the conventions and tropes as one would nouns, adjectives, and verbs. And while most start with simple phrases, others take on ambitious, intimidating projects and throw themselves in headfirst. I, a new … Read more
[ad_1] In 1966, Jean Rhys published Wide Sargasso Sea, a reimagining of Jane Eyre that delved into the past and present of Mr. Rochester’s first wife, Bertha Mason. Simply seen as the omnipresent ‘madwoman’ in Bronte’s novel, Rhys gave her a complex inner world and humanized her apparent madness. There have been numerous spiritual successors … Read more
[ad_1] At fourteen years old I was assigned Paolo Coelho’s landmark novel The Alchemist for summer reading. I threw it on my bed in disgust, barely able to finish the slim volume. To my literal mind it read like nothing more than vague, repetitive abstractions, amounting to almost nothing in the end. Today, over ten … Read more
[ad_1] It became clear to Jia Jia that Chen Hang must not have considered, not even for a moment, that such a place was improper for a death. These are the thoughts that surface for Jia Jia mere moments after she finds her husband dead in their bathtub. As Jia Jia awaits an ambulance, she … Read more
[ad_1] Books, perhaps more so than other media, have the remarkable ability to stay timeless after generations on end. The author’s dilemma is finding balance between establishing setting through concrete detail without allowing the material to become dated. But what happens when the author throws this idea out the window? Jeet Thayil’s Low could only … Read more