For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] Royalty is an enduring topic in popular culture, from beloved animated princesses to historical monarchs and their tourist-inviting palaces. Many films, television shows, and books have imagined the life of the ruling class from their point of view, but Jac Jemc’s latest novel, Empty Theatre: Or the Lives of King Ludwig II of Bavaria … Read more
[ad_1] The Atacama Desert is one of the best places on earth to see the stars. Because of its low light pollution, dry climate, and more than 200 cloudless nights a year, northern Chile offers a window to space—and to the past, since starlight takes so long to reach us. When she was little, Chilean … Read more
[ad_1] The highest highs and the lowest lows of life often lead us down the path of memory. The destination? The single decision that set us on the road to our current reality. Sometimes, we are baffled by our own good fortune at forming incredible friendships, dwelling in a town or city where we thrive, … Read more
[ad_1] My Last Innocent Year, Daisy Alpert Florin’s debut novel, takes place nearly twenty years before the #MeToo movement took off. Isabel Rosen, at the onset of her last semester at Wilder College, has finally begun to feel like she belongs at the prestigious institution―until a nonconsensual sexual encounter with Zev, someone she considered a … Read more
[ad_1] The mid-1990s seems like a pretty good era in retrospect. America was in the middle of the longest period of economic growth in history. Global pandemics were the stuff of science fiction, the Great Depression was a history lesson, the threat of global nuclear war seemingly had collapsed along with the Berlin Wall, and … Read more
[ad_1] I’ve been using a meditation app lately, part of a new year’s resolution to turn myself into a person possessed of inner calm. At the start of a recent session, the voice guiding me toward serenity made a statement that would have stopped me in my tracks had I not already sentenced myself to … Read more
[ad_1] “I dreamed of writing love letters to the homies,” José Olivarez tells the reader in the author’s note to Promises of Gold, his multilayered and much-anticipated second collection of poetry, which can be read in English and in Spanish translation. Seeing a bilingual edition of contemporary poetry from a major American publisher is rare, … Read more
[ad_1] D Doon Arbus’s debut novel, The Caretaker, feels both firmly grounded and strangely out of time. It’s textured, densely, with brick and cloth, with an overabundance of artifactual detritus, furtively character-driven, and yet one could easily forget what century it’s from. Arbus embraces a slightly awkward distance from her subjects, enough to leave the … Read more
[ad_1] Dizz Tate’s Brutes is a dark coming-of-age story that follows a gang of ruthless 13-year-old girls as their latest obsession, an older girl named Sammy, disappears from their Florida town of Falls Landing. Having tracked her every move and watched her sneak out to meet with a boy by the lake, the girls witness … Read more
[ad_1] There is something uniquely intimate about getting to know someone through their voice. To hear a person without seeing them allows our imaginations to flourish. We form an identikit based on an accent or a specific intonation, or how they mispronounce a certain word. We pay attention to how they express themselves and tell … Read more