For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] When disaster strikes, we’re confronted with our own mortality, however close we are to the loss. The pandemic, for one, uprooted and interrogated our sense of normalcy—what our daily lives meant to us, our relationships, our age, our sense of time. We realized that the structures we’d always depended on were quicksand. That whatever … Read more
[ad_1] Lisa Cupolo’s debut book, Have Mercy on Us, won the W.S. Porter Prize for short story collections. The ten stories are a rich exploration of people continually seeking, wrestling, and walking the line of great tension in their relation to others, and also within themselves. There is an abiding sense of hope and mystery as … Read more
[ad_1] When Martin Riker’s novel The Guest Lecture opens, its main character, Abby, is lying awake in a hotel bed, trying not to wake her husband and daughter, anxiously planning a lecture on the economist John Maynard Keynes that she’s scheduled to give the next day. When the novel ends, Abby is lying awake in … Read more
[ad_1] Reworking, adaptation, reconsideration. There is always an appeal to mining the Ancient Greek poets for a timely retelling. Most recently—with the likes of Madeleine Miller’s Circe and Pat Barker’s two Trojan novels, The Silence of the Girls and The Women of Troy—there has been an interest in shifting the balance by gifting the often … Read more
[ad_1] I’d like to ask Kevin Maloney if he’s familiar with “Return of the Grievous Angel,” the Gram Parsons’ song with themes of wandering, life on the road, and a kind of longing that leads to an inevitable return. I kept hearing this song in my head as I read Maloney’s novel The Red-Headed Pilgrim, … Read more
[ad_1] No book has influenced how I approach book reviews more than Craft in the Real World by Matthew Salesses. The book challenges the lens many readers use, one shaped by white, Western values, and is a call not only to make space for diverse storytelling, but to evaluate it on its own terms. And, … Read more
[ad_1] The threat posed by technocratic fascism has played out in real time on the timelines of social media users in recent months. Whether we’re sharing words or videos or memes or embarrassing grade school yearbook photos, we’ve ceded enormous power to too few gatekeepers. The rapid changes in technology has meant our cultural critique … Read more
[ad_1] While I was reading Marisa Crane’s elegant debut novel, I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself, I thought a lot about how much of ourselves we hide from other people. In Marisa’s speculative near future, punishment is a constant public spectacle, surveillance is everywhere, and those deemed wrongdoers by a totalitarian U.S. government are given … Read more
[ad_1] Any time I ask my mom about the Lahore of her childhood, the present moment glitches for a split second, and she disappears to some place within herself. Upon return, the edges of her lips curl into a sly smile, and—each time, without fail—she prefaces her answers with a single phrase: “Lahore Lahore hai” … Read more
[ad_1] Fantasy is all about situating the reader in a compelling fictional world, but some worlds are more fictional than others. Some authors in the genre excel at putting fantasy first, creating new worlds so different from our own that they have their own geography, magic, culture, conventions, and language. Others sketch the outlines of … Read more