For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] This Mental Health Awareness Month, our team sat down to think about some of our favorite books that depict mental health and mental illness in thoughtful and considered ways. Living with mental illness can all too often be an isolating experience. Thankfully, books offer us a window into someone else’s mind and life, allowing … Read more
[ad_1] Annelyse Gelman’s curiosity and passion for language, multi-disciplinary collaboration, and experimentation imbue all her projects. Two of them—her new full-length poem, Vexations, and website Midst—also prove her fascination with craft and process. In our free-ranging conversation—encompassing poems as objects, durational art, text scores, endless beginnings and endings, and generative collaborations—Gelman’s enthusiasms are front and … Read more
[ad_1] Of all the people who ever lived, only a tiny proportion have their names remembered by history. And even when someone’s name is remembered, celebrated, taught in the history books, the knowledge of who that person actually was—not just a name we recognize—is elusive. This is particularly true of women in history, and even … Read more
[ad_1] Brandon Taylor’s new novel, The Late Americans, begins with a character you wouldn’t want to be stuck with in your MFA workshop. Seamus is the only white male student in his graduate poetry seminar, where he doesn’t think anyone’s work is any good, since it’s all tied up in their individual traumas and not … Read more
[ad_1] When you get to know someone, you aren’t presented with their life story in a linear narrative with well-timed beats. Instead, anecdotes and feelings bubble to the surface irregularly; clear personal development is established in retrospect, if at all. Jane Wong’s debut memoir, Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City, resembles the latter, creating what … Read more
[ad_1] Rachel Louise Snyder’s propulsive new memoir Women We Buried, Women We Burned begins with the death of her mother. Her father then marries another woman, moves to the Midwest, and raises Snyder in a suffocating Christian household where religion is repeatedly used to justify abuse. Snyder’s impeccable prose lets us live vicariously through her … Read more
[ad_1] There are worse things than a local gangster’s cronies lurking in New Jersey’s wetlands… It was a June night, warm but breezy. Lynn and the kids had gone to bed, and I was sitting out next to the giant rose bush with my neighbor Phil. The back of our house faced across … Read more
[ad_1] Sean Maguire was supposed to be the exception. After making it out of a West Belfast community haunted by economic precarity and the ever-present ghost of the Troubles, Sean was destined to get his college degree in Liverpool and never return. But outpacing your past, and leaving behind the city that molded you, is … Read more
[ad_1] In King: A Life—the first major biography of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. published in decades—Jonathan Eig describes King as “a gravitational force” in the Freedom Movement. From the earliest days of his involvement, Eig writes, King proved capable of “pulling in reporters, financial donors, and young volunteers,” and transforming a social … Read more
[ad_1] Maheshwata Devi’s urban novella, Truth/Untruth, set in 1980s Calcutta, is a story about dirty pasts that catch up with the present, and how money is often built on this belief that it won’t. It’s fiction that tingles with real-world politics. Translated by Anjum Katyal, the book begins in Khidirpur, a seedy part of central-west … Read more