For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] Termush, a 1967 novella by Sven Holm (translated into English by Sylvia Clayton), is an understated accounting of events at a luxury resort that has been transformed into a safe haven for a select group of survivors of a nuclear disaster. While concerns about wealth inequality and post-apocalyptic survival remained relevant throughout the Cold … Read more
[ad_1] An avid reader of the short story will soon learn the basic elements that make the form tick: an irresistible opening line, clearly established characters, a central conflict, well-placed details, a satisfying ending. For the writer, these are more of a hypothesis than a formula. Each element can be elusive in its own way, … Read more
[ad_1] The whiplash changes that mark our days have made us ripe for new forms of expression that can help us see our way through. Even as 2021 saw the Black Lives Matter movement attain global impact, Confederate and colonialist monuments come down, and institutions grapple with ways to respond appropriately to calls for equality, … Read more
[ad_1] “If you are squeamish don’t prod the beach rubble” is a line by Sappho* that serves as sound advice for the novels of Marguerite Duras. If you are squeamish, don’t crack the cover. There will be grief, there will be a threat of madness, there will be sensuality mottled with darkness, a family may … Read more
[ad_1] “Some languages, but by no means all, have the luxury of the word ‘daughter,’ but in many—and French is one of them—your sex is not distinct from your relationship to your parents. You will only ever have this one word to describe your being and your lineage, your dependence and your identity.” This entwinement … Read more
[ad_1] “Most literature, like life, is about how to have less and how to have more,” says Deborah Levy in Real Estate, the third volume of her “living autobiography” of her life as a writer and woman. In this latest chronicle, Levy wonders what it might mean to have more as she turns 60 and … Read more
[ad_1] The narrator of Antonio Muñoz Molina’s To Walk Alone in the Crowd is a man with a 20th-century sensibility exiled in the excesses of the 21st. He’s recovering from a terrifying depressive episode, in a state alternating between “the twin poles” of nostalgia and anxiety. And because he is, above all, a passionate reader, … Read more
[ad_1] Online and in an assortment of counter-cultural convergences, a movement to cultivate, research and celebrate fungi, the most unknown of kingdoms, grows every day. All the while pharmaceutical companies, ambitious marketers and other profit-seekers watch and wait for the right moment to strike. In Search of Mycotopia: Citizen Science, Fungi Fanatics, and the Untapped … Read more
[ad_1] When recalled over morning coffee, intense, meaningful dreams dissolve into confused fragments that escape language and leave even a sympathetic listener out in the cold. But what if a dream could be pinned down with all of its illogically tantalizing details, its particular atmosphere, primal details, shifting scenes, to arrive, finally, at some essential … Read more
[ad_1] “Home has no walls, no ceiling, nor is its purpose to protect.” So declares Gretel Ehrlich about the moment she identified Wyoming as home in 1975, at age 29, reeling from grief at the loss of her partner and creative collaborator. It’s an authoritative statement and the tone resists contradiction, though it’s not the … Read more