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] Please note, this review contains mentions of sexual assault. Several years ago during a dinner party at my home, a friend from South Africa noticed that I had a copy of J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace on my bookshelf. It became an instant conversation piece. The friend reported that the book, published in 1999, had caused … Read more
[ad_1] Like Gone Girl, Antoine Wilson’s Mouth to Mouth is a thriller titled after its inciting incident. It’s the early nineties, and Jeff Cook, an aimless recent college graduate saves the life of a drowning swimmer off of Santa Monica beach by diving into the surf and performing CPR on the man. Though he doesn’t … Read more
[ad_1] The oracular in Gwen E. Kirby’s Shit Cassandra Saw is tense business—fraught with the dynamics of shared experience, speaking and listening. This collection of short stories reminds me of a woman who used to ride Chicago’s Red Line. You could tell when she was on the train because when it pulled into its next … Read more
[ad_1] For Hawa Allan, history is a recurring nightmare. “Does this sound dramatic?” she asks in the beginning of her book Insurrection: Rebellion, Civil Rights, and the Paradoxical State of Black Citizenship. “I don’t care, because it’s true.” Allan is a lawyer, but also a writer of fiction and poetry. She is a lecturer at … Read more
[ad_1] “One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn’t going to go off. It’s wrong to make promises you don’t mean to keep.” – Anton Chekhov During that terrible summer of 2020, when my wife and I lived only eight blocks from the U.S. Capitol, it felt like we were … Read more
[ad_1] Among the most ancient and revered forms, which the amorphous siren known as prose may assume, is that of satire, used for millennia to critique, to side-eye and expose, to lay bare the ills of society in narrative or verse. From The Frogs of Aristophanes to Voltaire’s Candide, from James Joyce to Larry David, … Read more
[ad_1] There is an inarguable ephemerality about Dante Alighieri, the author of the Divine Comedy (in Italian, Commedia—the “Divine” was a publisher’s later addition). C.S. Lewis put it well in Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature (1966): “There is a curious feeling that [the Commedia] is writing itself, or at most, that the tiny figure … Read more
[ad_1] Well everyone, we’ve made it to the start of another year, though not without some bumps and scrapes along the way. As we round day six-hundred-and-seventy of the pandemic, give or take, it can be easy to lose sight of all the good that’s happened, too. There are still things to celebrate. If you … Read more
[ad_1] Last year, we featured 18 notable debuts by trans, nonbinary, and gender non-conforming authors. This year, the list stands at 34, and still, this is probably just the tip of the iceberg for expansive, compassionate, and daring literature by TGNC authors. While the United States bans or restricts access to queer books across the … Read more
[ad_1] Reading H. Melt’s poetry collection, There Are Trans People Here is like walking through a city you love (sometimes begrudgingly) and being able to see its past, present, and future all at once. Today there might be transphobic landlords, but one day there will be a Trans House. Today there might be doctors and … Read more