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] Who do stories belong to? Some would say a story belongs to the author who wrote it, and copyright law would back up that interpretation, at least for the first 75 years after publication. In the case of a story based on a person from history or myth, the discussion broadens: is ownership even … Read more
[ad_1] Katie Kitamura’s fourth novel, Intimacies, is deeply concerned with place. At lunch with her boss, our unnamed protagonist is asked, “Where is your family,” meaning, where do you belong? It’s a question that comes up more than once, and one the protagonist can’t answer. She’s stuck between cultures, between languages, between moral positions; even … Read more
[ad_1] Recently I got coffee with a friend and we fell, as one does these days, to talking about the awkward process of socializing again in the post-pandemic world. “I feel like I’m emerging from a cave with these weird new habits I have to explain,” she said. I compared myself, not entirely ironically, to … Read more
[ad_1] The defining element of slasher film franchises of the ‘80s and ‘90s was the “final girl.” The one who runs for her life as a serial killer cuts down her friends one by one just behind her. The final girl is plucky and resourceful. She runs from the monster until backed into a climactic … Read more
[ad_1] “My name is Tetley Abednego, and I am the most hated girl in Garbagetown.” From this very first sentence of The Past is Red by Catherynne M. Valente, Valente ensures her readers know where Tetley stands. Tetley knows too, but it doesn’t bother her. “Everyone says they only hate me because I annihilated hope … Read more
[ad_1] Caveat lector. You’ll have a decision to make when you start reading Yan Ge’s Strange Beasts of China. Will you willpower yourself to one story a night and savor each paragraph, immersing deeply in an alternate world? Or will you forego sleep and race through, riding the momentum of breathtaking inventions and repetitions that … Read more
[ad_1] Reading the poet Mary Jo Bang’s new translation of Dante Alighieri’s Purgatorio, I thought of a widely-circulated photograph from the COVID pandemic. An Italian doctor in a surgical gown and two face masks holds a sign reading, “When this hell ends:/…And then we emerged again to see the stars.” The quote is from the … 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] In the hands of a writer less skilled in nuanced storytelling, The Woman from Uruguay could have been a tired tale of a man in the midst of a mid-life crisis, led astray and ultimately made a fool by his baser instincts. But in his latest novel, celebrated Argentinian writer and poet Pedro Mairal … Read more
[ad_1] Henry David Thoreau observed that men often lead lives of quiet desperation, and although he omits women, they often also lead lives of quiet desperation, as is the case for the women under examination in Genevieve Plunkett’s debut story collection, Prepare Her. In this collection, the domestic lives of female protagonists come under scrutiny, … Read more