For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] Want author Lynn Steger Strong stretches her scope from the nuclear to the extended family in Flight, a story of adult siblings and their partners and children gathering for Christmas for the first time since their mother’s death. Helen, the recently deceased and seemingly universally beloved matriarch, has passed away just eight months prior, … Read more
[ad_1] “Give me my robe. Put on my crown. I have / Immortal longings in me,” announces Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, in one of her famous—and final—invocations. In Emery Robin’s sweeping space opera, The Stars Undying, Cleopatra’s crucial accessory is not her crown but a pearl-sized computer, alleged to contain the consciousness of Alekso, her god. This … Read more
[ad_1] While award-winning creative flutist, composer, and bandleader Nicole Mitchell Gantt is no longer based in Chicago, she has certainly left a legacy. She was the first woman president of Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) and founder of the Black Earth Ensemble (BEE), “a musical celebration of the African American cultural … Read more
[ad_1] The old adage begins with a drunkard and a streetlight. Hunched over, he strains his eyes toward the ground; cursing, as he looks for the keys he has somehow misplaced on his nightly walk home. A neighbor strolls by and our drunkard—now quite desperate for a helping hand—explains his predicament. The neighbor asks while … Read more
[ad_1] Vladimir Sorokin’s Day of the Oprichnik imagines a near-future dystopia in which a wall separates Russia from the rest of the world and the old Tsarist autocracy has been restored, complete with Ivan the Terrible’s Oprichnina, a sixteenth-century forerunner of the secret police. Sorokin’s novel, which was translated by Jamey Gambrell, envisions a Russian … Read more
[ad_1] “Who is to say which is the original and which is the imposter?” queries Graeme Macrae Burnet in his 2022 Booker-Prize-nominated novel, Case Study. The question is applicable to a character in the novel, to documents reproduced within the novel and, most intriguing, to the author himself. Burnet is the ultimate unreliable narrator, and … Read more
[ad_1] Jamil Jan Kochai was sitting with his parents, aunts, uncles, and cousins on the second story of his aunt’s home in Logar, Afghanistan, sipping tea and taking in the evening breeze around sunset, when his phone buzzed, and he saw that he was tagged in a tweet by the National Book Foundation. But before … Read more
[ad_1] If an aspiring storyteller were to pick up Haruki Murakami’s Novelist as a Vocation, translated by Philip Gabriel & Ted Goossen, expecting a step-by-step guide to putting a novel together, they may well be disappointed. However, what Murakami’s memoir does offer is certainly of equal value. It is one novelist looking back over his … Read more
[ad_1] Judge Dee must himself stand trial before his fellow vampires for the loss of a valuable manuscript, even as those vampires are murdered, one by one, by an unknown hand. 1. A thin layer of frost lay over the bluebells and violets that grew in profusion on the low slopes, and thunder … Read more
[ad_1] One version of the American dream is based on the idea of owning a piece of the land. That dream seems harder to achieve every year for most Americans priced out of home ownership. Colorado’s San Luis Valley promises an exception. Cheap land can be yours in five acre plots at an affordable price. … Read more