For The Book Obsessed
[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] The Wild Cards universe has been thrilling readers for over 25 years. In Alan Brennert’s “Skin Deep,” we see for the first time the events of September 15, 1946 from the viewpoint of someone living on the West Coast of the United States. Trina Nelson is a pretty, popular sixteen-year-old high school student whose … 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] Ever wonder what a book trailer looks like behind the scenes? Well, you’re about to get a sneak peek! Jessica Goodman’s They’ll Never Catch Us is hitting shelves July 27th, and we went along for the ride (or should we say run?!) to see what the making of a book trailer is like! First off, have … 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