For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] Please note, this review contains mentions of sexual assault. Several years ago during a dinner party at my home, a friend from South Africa noticed that I had a copy of J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace on my bookshelf. It became an instant conversation piece. The friend reported that the book, published in 1999, had caused … Read more
[ad_1] Like Gone Girl, Antoine Wilson’s Mouth to Mouth is a thriller titled after its inciting incident. It’s the early nineties, and Jeff Cook, an aimless recent college graduate saves the life of a drowning swimmer off of Santa Monica beach by diving into the surf and performing CPR on the man. Though he doesn’t … Read more
[ad_1] The oracular in Gwen E. Kirby’s Shit Cassandra Saw is tense business—fraught with the dynamics of shared experience, speaking and listening. This collection of short stories reminds me of a woman who used to ride Chicago’s Red Line. You could tell when she was on the train because when it pulled into its next … Read more
[ad_1] For Hawa Allan, history is a recurring nightmare. “Does this sound dramatic?” she asks in the beginning of her book Insurrection: Rebellion, Civil Rights, and the Paradoxical State of Black Citizenship. “I don’t care, because it’s true.” Allan is a lawyer, but also a writer of fiction and poetry. She is a lecturer at … Read more
[ad_1] Winter is the best time to be a reader–it’s the perfect excuse to stay in, get cozy, and read! Here are some of our favorite wintery picks for your TBR this season (AND the perfect places to read them in!) About the book: You go through life thinking there’s so much you need. … Read more
[ad_1] “One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn’t going to go off. It’s wrong to make promises you don’t mean to keep.” – Anton Chekhov During that terrible summer of 2020, when my wife and I lived only eight blocks from the U.S. Capitol, it felt like we were … Read more
[ad_1] Among the most ancient and revered forms, which the amorphous siren known as prose may assume, is that of satire, used for millennia to critique, to side-eye and expose, to lay bare the ills of society in narrative or verse. From The Frogs of Aristophanes to Voltaire’s Candide, from James Joyce to Larry David, … Read more
[ad_1] There is an inarguable ephemerality about Dante Alighieri, the author of the Divine Comedy (in Italian, Commedia—the “Divine” was a publisher’s later addition). C.S. Lewis put it well in Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature (1966): “There is a curious feeling that [the Commedia] is writing itself, or at most, that the tiny figure … Read more
[ad_1] Well everyone, we’ve made it to the start of another year, though not without some bumps and scrapes along the way. As we round day six-hundred-and-seventy of the pandemic, give or take, it can be easy to lose sight of all the good that’s happened, too. There are still things to celebrate. If you … Read more
[ad_1] Please enjoy what has become a quiet holiday tradition in the Tor.com offices: the reading of Neil Gaiman’s original story: “I, Cthulhu, or, What’s A Tentacle-Faced Thing Like Me Doing In A Sunken City Like This (Latitude 47° 9’ S, Longitude 126° 43’ W)?” *** I. Cthulhu, they call me. Great Cthulhu. … Read more