For The Book Obsessed
Should you read that book you’ve had your eye on? Will it totally rock or sink like a stone? Check out these book reviews from book lovers like you to help you find your next great read!
[ad_1] The subtitle of Christine Emba’s Rethinking Sex: A Provocation is revealing yet misjudged. The description tells us a lot about Emba’s understanding of her own work but does not accurately describe the book, which frustrates rather than provokes. The issue is not just that its conclusion, that the “best sexual world is perhaps a … Read more
[ad_1] In the conversation surrounding Elaine Hsieh Chou’s debut novel Disorientation, I expect to see discussion of her carefully crafted satire, her inclusion and destruction of campus tropes, and the meticulous unpacking of Asian American identity in the lens of violence and fetishism. These should all be discussed, but I hope the conversation also includes … Read more
[ad_1] It’s perhaps an unfortunate aspect of art that the value we perceive in it is at least partially derived from public opinion. Who was the work’s creator, and from what circumstances was it made? In Portrait of an Unknown Lady, the second novel from Maria Gainza that has been translated into English by Thomas … Read more
[ad_1] It’s a recognizably portentous way to begin a war film: a field of farmers bent over stalks of tomato plants, picking their crop under a blazing sun. Viewers like myself, accustomed to Deer Hunters and Apocalypse Nows, will be primed for these peasants to be mowed down momentarily in a hail of machine gunfire. … Read more
[ad_1] The four essays in Body Work, the new book by Melissa Febos, pull at several underlying power struggles that are inherent in acts of creative writing: vulnerability risks judgment, writing your side of the story privileges your memories and perspective over others in the story, presenting a perspective at odds with hegemonic forces invites … Read more
[ad_1] Translation—the conveyance of ideas, sentences, a story, a feeling, from one language to another—is inherently contradictory: be as exact as possible, or risk failing at the act. But since the transference of meaning is something so subjective, so tied to cultural and social cues, one could argue “exact” is impossible. Translation becomes its own … Read more
[ad_1] Irene Solà is an award-winning Catalan poet, novelist, and visual artist who won the 2020 European Union Prize for Literature for her second novel, When I Sing, Mountains Dance. Translated by Mara Faye Lethem, When I Sing, Mountains Dance depicts the griefs and joys of one human family against the vibrant backdrop of the … Read more
[ad_1] For all the antagonizing, ruminating, and even moralizing that comes with defining the parameters of literary fiction, perhaps the one point of (near-) universal agreement debators enjoy is over the notion that such a book should be in some way realistic, should faithfully reflect life and those who live it. How this is to … Read more
[ad_1] In Defense of Witches: The Legacy of the Witch Hunts and Why Women Are Still on Trial, by Mona Chollet, is a revelatory collection of histories and experiences that have been carefully ignored across centuries of time. Even a devoted reader will find it difficult to think of a book besides Chollet’s that does … Read more
[ad_1] Among the array of ignorant comments some Americans make about immigrants is one that anyone is lucky to live here. Setting aside this country’s terrible history (and very flawed present), such reductionist remarks ignore the significant costs of leaving one’s home country. Sindya Bhanoo’s debut story collection, Seeking Fortune Elsewhere, confronts these tolls head-on, … Read more