For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] In this provocative and rich retelling of the Greek myth, Orpheus, the musician son of Apollo and Calliope, successfully rescues his wife Eurydice from Hades after her untimely death. First Step Orpheus puts a plate of eggs down in front of her. The eggs are perfect; after everything, he finally got … Read more
[ad_1] Jonas Eika—author of After the Sun, translated into English by Sherilyn Nicolette Helberg—has managed to do the impossible; or, at least, the very difficult. He’s written a book that both feels bleeding-edge now, and seems like it will still feel bleeding-edge in a decade. Certainly, the complexities of our modern world are no stranger … Read more
[ad_1] Horologist Thomas Mudge’s Fleet Street shop began offering watches which included the ingenious new mechanism of lever escapement sometime around 1769. Mudge’s design regulated the device’s movement with a T-shaped bit of gold or silver which pushed forward the timepiece’s gears to a much greater degree of accuracy. Soon lever escapement became a preferred … Read more
[ad_1] “Most literature, like life, is about how to have less and how to have more,” says Deborah Levy in Real Estate, the third volume of her “living autobiography” of her life as a writer and woman. In this latest chronicle, Levy wonders what it might mean to have more as she turns 60 and … Read more
[ad_1] I discovered the seminal punk band Angry Samoans when I was 14, thanks to the lurid cover of their second and best-known album “Back From Samoa.” The songs were idiotic, with titles like “Tuna Taco” and “My Old Man’s a Fatso,” but they winked knowingly at the listener. There is wisdom in madness, they … Read more
[ad_1] In a climate of planetary crises and collapses of democracy, Aruni Kashyap’s There is No Good Time for Bad News talks about renewed prospects and survival after violence. The poems in this collection are about a landscape that has much catching up to do compared to its nation’s momentum of progression. In “Alpha Ursae … Read more
[ad_1] “You do not have to be white to be a white feminist,” Rafia Zakaria writes in the author’s note to her latest collection of essays, Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption. It is also possible, she further argues, to be white and feminist and still “not be a white feminist.” The term, then, seems … Read more
[ad_1] More than a hundred years from now, an arborist fighting to save the last remaining forest on Earth discovers a secret about the trees—one that changes not only her life, but also the fate of our world. Inspired by the real-life “Future Library,” a long-term environmental and literary public art project currently underway in … Read more
[ad_1] Following the tremendous success of her summer 2020 blockbuster, Mexican Gothic, Mexican-Canadian writer Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s new novel, Velvet Was the Night, arrives just in time for us to enjoy it at the peak of this sultry season. Described by the author in the novel’s afterword as “noir, pulp fiction…based on a real horror story,” … Read more
[ad_1] “The proper function of a critic,” wrote D. H. Lawrence in 1923, “is to save the tale from the artist who created it.” Punish the writer, he was saying, but don’t destroy the art. When Lawrence published those words in Studies in Classical American Literature, he wasn’t talking specifically about himself, but the experience … Read more