For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] The main character of Amor Towles’s debut, Rules of Civility, slips into a movie theater in the middle of a Marlene Dietrich film and watches the second half, then stays to watch the first half in the next showing. In the movies, she says, “things looked dire at the midpoint and were happily resolved … Read more
[ad_1] Bryan Washington sets the table in Family Meal with an abundance of ordinary details. His characters are busy with their hands, for instance: they might play with their thumbs, twirl a pen, throw the peace sign, or flick a cherry tomato. Fingers press into orifices and bodily fluids, press cell phone screens, and press … Read more
[ad_1] “Who is to say which is the original and which is the imposter?” queries Graeme Macrae Burnet in his 2022 Booker-Prize-nominated novel, Case Study. The question is applicable to a character in the novel, to documents reproduced within the novel and, most intriguing, to the author himself. Burnet is the ultimate unreliable narrator, and … Read more
[ad_1] Marcie Rendon’s mystery novels simultaneously inform and entertain readers, presenting current Native American issues through her heroine’s efforts to solve crimes perpetrated against society’s more vulnerable members in the early 1970s. When the Cash Blackburn series’ third volume opens, a body surfaces in the Red River Valley’s meltwater; the spring floodwaters on this North … Read more
[ad_1] “Anyway, a proper pandemic might be quite good for the environment,” says a character in Sarah Moss’s 2009 debut novel, Cold Earth. “Depopulation from the plague did wonders for medieval fauna and flora.” More than a decade later, The Fell—which was published in the UK in 2021—explores that “proper pandemic” scenario through the lives … Read more
[ad_1] “Anyway, a proper pandemic might be quite good for the environment,” says a character in Sarah Moss’s 2009 debut novel, Cold Earth. “Depopulation from the plague did wonders for medieval fauna and flora.” More than a decade later, The Fell—which was published in the UK in 2021—explores that “proper pandemic” scenario through the lives … Read more
[ad_1] Marlon James’ drive to explore African mythology—beyond boyhood Anansi stories in Jamaica—required a “fact-finding mission to find my own history.” In a New York Times interview, he expresses his desire to create an “electrifying” story: his Dark Star trilogy. Assuming multiple roles—anthropologist, archeologist, historian, skeptic, and scholar of religion—to develop the shapeshifters, vampires, and … Read more
[ad_1] Neel Patel’s Tell Me How to Be opens with both narrators spent: Akash and his mother, Renu, are weary and anxious. Decisions they made years ago have grown burdensome, seemingly inescapable: “No one ever told me that happiness was like a currency: that when it goes, it goes.” This is from Patel’s short story … Read more
[ad_1] In her debut novel, The Opium Prince, Jasmine Aimaq centers a frequently overlooked aspect of tumult in Afghanistan: if opium were not in demand, possessing it wouldn’t translate into power. A hierarchy – a royalty of sorts – exists around the creation and distribution of opiates in the East, in no small part because … Read more
[ad_1] In the opening pages of Evie Wyld’s third novel, The Bass Rock, Viv notes: “Somewhere, out in the darkness, I can hear waves breaking against the Bass Rock though I cannot see it.” It is a literal reminder of the story’s setting — the east coast of Scotland, where the rock rests a mile … Read more