For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] In Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights, historian Dylan Penningroth points to the journey towards civil rights for Black Americans beginning “in the fields and cabins of slaves.” Here, in the thick of Antebellum slavery, slaves crafted a knowledge of the law through acts such as accumulation and claims of … Read more
[ad_1] Martin Ritt’s 1976 film The Front delivers a vivid re-creation of the 1950s Red Scare in which many of Hollywood’s most talented writers, actors, and directors found themselves blacklisted and prevented from working in the film and TV industry because of past or present Communist associations and their refusal to name names. In the … Read more
[ad_1] In the early pages of Oksana Vasyakina’s Wound, the narrator finds herself tucked into a small car with distant acquaintances in a small town outside Volgograd, on her way to pick up her mother’s ashes, where she cannot help but overhear her companions’ conversation: “The cousin said that Western propaganda had gotten really shameless. … Read more
[ad_1] I vividly remember a moment when someone in one of my writing workshops described my writing as “blue collar” because I was writing about my father’s work as a Chicago firefighter. Until then, I had always viewed my upbringing as comfortably middle class. My parents worked incredibly hard and sacrificed often in order to … Read more
[ad_1] Mary Jo Bang’s acclaimed translation of Dante Alighieri’s Inferno starts with this unforgettable verse: “Stopped mid-motion in the middle / Of what we call our life, I looked up and saw no sky—Only / a dense cage of leaf, tree, and twig. I was lost.” As I am “mid-motion in the middle” of my … Read more
[ad_1] I’d promised myself I would take a break from contributing for a few months, but broke that promise when I saw Etaf Rum’s Evil Eye on the list of September releases. I couldn’t resist the opportunity to talk to Etaf again, as we’d had such a great conversation in 2019 about her debut novel, … Read more
[ad_1] Grief is a powerful emotion. It demands and deserves respect. We may fight it, repress it, or swim against it, but in the end, denying grief only prolongs the pain that must eventually come. For the poet and novelist Brendan Shay Basham, that reckoning transpires in the body. While the mind may try to … Read more
[ad_1] In the summer of 2017, when she was feeling particularly overloaded, Anna Funder returned to the work of George Orwell, a writer she had “always loved.” She hoped that by reading his analyses of “the tyrannies, the ‘smelly little orthodoxies’ of his time” she would be able “to liberate myself” and in particular to … Read more
[ad_1] Once you see how the publishing sausage is made—how few books make it all the way through the gauntlet, and that at times it seems there is no rhyme or reason to why certain books succeed and others don’t—you can become disillusioned and quit, or become even more persistent in your efforts. The hard … Read more
[ad_1] There’s a certain serenity implicit on a “quiet street.” A quiet street is calm, peaceful; perhaps even a bit dull in its lack of activity. Such an atmosphere seems an appropriate place from which to reflect on past experience, as Nick McDonell does in his memoiristic exploration of the one percent, Quiet Street: On … Read more