For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] Palestinian-American poet, novelist, and clinical psychologist Hala Alyan always has a way of replicating the unreliability of time and delivering one-line monumental truths. Her latest poetry collection, The Moon That Turns You Back, experiments with form and represents the disjointedness of what the in-between looks and feels like. Alyan often writes about diaspora and … Read more
[ad_1] Writer and professor Rachel DeWoskin’s second poetry collection, absolute animal, subtly exposes the thin line separating humans from other living things, those inarguable similarities to the earth and how they lead us to long for its connection. She has a way of questioning and erasing the distance we insist is there. We are, simply, … Read more
[ad_1] It’s easy to trust the enchanting people we encounter who make us feel like the most important thing in the world. Especially when we’re young and are always looking for new sources of joy and self-esteem. But as Catherine Chidgey reminds us in her latest novel, Pet, the most charming role models often warrant … Read more
[ad_1] Most of us would kill for the chance to have one last goodbye with a lost loved one. What if you had that chance? Could even spend a whole road trip with them, revisiting all the ways your lives had intersected? In Lorrie Moore’s first novel since 2009’s A Gate at the Stairs, the … Read more
[ad_1] The character of the old maid is not new to literature, as spinsters have appeared in classics from Charles Dickens to the Brontë Sisters to Virginia Woolf to Jane Austen. Most of us today would hesitate to use the same term to describe single, childless women of a certain age, but that doesn’t mean … Read more
[ad_1] We all have a story we tell about our lives. There is a certain power we harness in storytelling that lets us be whoever we want to be. But perhaps the telling becomes most powerful when we can speak truthfully, when we can come to terms with reality. In Laura Adamczyk’s debut novel, Island … Read more
[ad_1] When disaster strikes, we’re confronted with our own mortality, however close we are to the loss. The pandemic, for one, uprooted and interrogated our sense of normalcy—what our daily lives meant to us, our relationships, our age, our sense of time. We realized that the structures we’d always depended on were quicksand. That whatever … Read more
[ad_1] It’s a fantasy we’ve all imagined—winning the lottery. Most of us know exactly which debts we’d pay off first, what we’d buy, and who we’d help out if we found ourselves instant millionaires. But we’ve also heard story after story of a winning gone wrong—cautionary tales that highlight humanity’s greed. How money can make … Read more
[ad_1] American Book Award-winning author Sandra Cisneros has had a decades-long career publishing both prose and poems, and is perhaps most well known for her first book, The House on Mango Street, a novel told in vignettes. She often mixes Spanish and English, putting to words the in-betweenness of her dual U.S.-Mexico citizenship. Woman Without … Read more
[ad_1] Ottessa Moshfegh’s fourth novel, Lapvona, is a gruesome experiment in historical fiction. There’s grisly death, cannibalism, rape, mysticism, deception, revenge, hints at pedophilia, and very little love. The characters bleakly reflect the worst in humanity, and grotesque antics dot almost every page—facts that compete with great storytelling and end up creating few opportunities for … Read more