For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] Though the COVID-19 pandemic has understandably dominated most of the conversation around public health in the last year and a half, it has been running alongside—and intertwining with—another crisis: the “loneliness epidemic.” For years leading up to 2020, experts have been warning us about the effects that modern-day loneliness can have on our minds … Read more
[ad_1] In her debut short story collection Site Fidelity, Claire Boyles has tapped into a largely untouched goldmine of stories about environmental issues in the American West, and the people involved in the often-lonely fights for their jobs, their land and their resources on a changing planet. By writing this book, Boyles provides a peek … Read more
[ad_1] I’ve been thinking a lot lately about why I like to read fiction; I think I feel fulfilled after reading a book with particularly beautiful prose or a really interesting plot, inspired to create and go out into the world with a renewed sense of vigor. I believe that time can’t be wasted; especially … Read more
[ad_1] In 2019, after the release of her widely-lauded album “Norman Fucking Rockwell!,” Lana Del Rey got an unexpected bad review. Actually, it wasn’t a bad review at all: it was a thoughtful, insightful deep-dive that contained a few harsh sentences. Nethertheless, Del Rey sicced her Twitter followers on the reviewer, NPR’s Ann Powers, who … Read more
[ad_1] Soylent, the nutrient-packed, colorless meal replacement drink, was introduced to the American public in 2014 after a wildly successful crowdfunding campaign proved people just don’t want to waste precious time and energy eating anymore. When Rob Rhinehart, Soylent’s inventor, was working on a technology startup in San Francisco, he started to see buying, cooking … Read more
[ad_1] The first two-thirds of Sisters is filled with allusions to the event that lies at the crux of the story; these sprinkled tidbits of information slowly work to clear the dirt away from the truth of what happened. When you discover the details of that event, you might be shocked, like I was, or … Read more
[ad_1] While reading “Your Second Wife,” the second-to-last story in Laura van den Berg’s I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, you might immediately think that it’s a criticism of society at large, another argument against late capitalism and its blatant excess thinly-veiled in fiction. “We have stopped seeing each other as people, as fellow … Read more
[ad_1] There has been a contemporary movement, stirred by the unease and anxiety that is so prevalent in this stage of late capitalism, of books about women who are unhappily employed, lonely, self-loathing, and–this one’s important–often intoxicated. And Jean Kyoung Frazier’s Pizza Girl definitely fits into that category, joining novels like Halle Butler’s The New … Read more
[ad_1] In Samanta Schweblin’s latest book, Little Eyes, characters occasionally ask point-blank, “What is this book about?” The answer is easy enough to grasp at; the novel is about a world obsessed with a gadget called the “kentuki,” the robot you might get if you mixed Amazon Alexa with a Furby, sprinkling in some inspiration … Read more