For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] In the early pages of Oksana Vasyakina’s Wound, the narrator finds herself tucked into a small car with distant acquaintances in a small town outside Volgograd, on her way to pick up her mother’s ashes, where she cannot help but overhear her companions’ conversation: “The cousin said that Western propaganda had gotten really shameless. … Read more
[ad_1] I vividly remember a moment when someone in one of my writing workshops described my writing as “blue collar” because I was writing about my father’s work as a Chicago firefighter. Until then, I had always viewed my upbringing as comfortably middle class. My parents worked incredibly hard and sacrificed often in order to … Read more
[ad_1] Mary Jo Bang’s acclaimed translation of Dante Alighieri’s Inferno starts with this unforgettable verse: “Stopped mid-motion in the middle / Of what we call our life, I looked up and saw no sky—Only / a dense cage of leaf, tree, and twig. I was lost.” As I am “mid-motion in the middle” of my … Read more
[ad_1] I’d promised myself I would take a break from contributing for a few months, but broke that promise when I saw Etaf Rum’s Evil Eye on the list of September releases. I couldn’t resist the opportunity to talk to Etaf again, as we’d had such a great conversation in 2019 about her debut novel, … Read more
[ad_1] Beyoncé’s 2020 musical Black Is King was heralded as an example of “Black excellence,” featuring top-notch talents like Naomi Campbell, Lupita Nyong’o, Jay-Z, and Kelly Rowland. While discussing the musical on Good Morning America, Beyoncé explained why she hired these celebrated performers: “the word Black…has always meant inspiration and love and strength and beauty … Read more
[ad_1] Beyoncé’s 2020 musical Black Is King was heralded as an example of “Black excellence,” featuring top-notch talents like Naomi Campbell, Lupita Nyong’o, Jay-Z, and Kelly Rowland. While discussing the musical on Good Morning America, Beyoncé explained why she hired these celebrated performers: “the word Black…has always meant inspiration and love and strength and beauty … Read more
[ad_1] Grief is a powerful emotion. It demands and deserves respect. We may fight it, repress it, or swim against it, but in the end, denying grief only prolongs the pain that must eventually come. For the poet and novelist Brendan Shay Basham, that reckoning transpires in the body. While the mind may try to … Read more
[ad_1] In the summer of 2017, when she was feeling particularly overloaded, Anna Funder returned to the work of George Orwell, a writer she had “always loved.” She hoped that by reading his analyses of “the tyrannies, the ‘smelly little orthodoxies’ of his time” she would be able “to liberate myself” and in particular to … Read more
[ad_1] A weary resilience worker should know better than anyone: no one is safe when the world is always ending… The nail gun was busted so I was up on the roof with an actual hammer. It wasn’t bad: a minor storm had come in overnight and swept the heat away. The morning was … Read more
[ad_1] Once you see how the publishing sausage is made—how few books make it all the way through the gauntlet, and that at times it seems there is no rhyme or reason to why certain books succeed and others don’t—you can become disillusioned and quit, or become even more persistent in your efforts. The hard … Read more