For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] Science and technology make for strange gods in Benjamín Labatut’s The MANIAC. Picking up where his sensational When We Cease to Understand the World leaves off, The MANIAC finds Labatut concerned once again about the unruly limits of materialism. This is his first novel written in English and if one wants or expects a … Read more
[ad_1] Roland Barthes, in his lecture course The Preparation of the Novel, was especially interested in the practical, lived dimensions of what it might be like to write something of considerable length. In Kate Briggs’ latest book, The Long Form—taking its title, and an epigraph, from this very same lecture course, which she translated into … Read more
[ad_1] Athena Dixon is lonely. A middle-aged single woman without children or pets, she lives alone and works remotely, more than 350 miles from her family. In The Loneliness Files, a thought-provoking memoir in essays, she explores the many facets of her solitude and what they lead her to understand about herself and the world … Read more
[ad_1] How far will you go to keep your family? What would you do if you and your loved ones are thrust in the middle of a scandal that might tear everything apart forever? That’s at the heart of Lori Rader-Day’s forthcoming domestic suspense novel, The Death of Us. What happened to Ashley Hay? Would … Read more
[ad_1] Jonathan Lethem’s newest book, Brooklyn Crime Novel, is proof positive he unequivocally loves Brooklyn. His command of place and time is ever-present in this work: he mixes fond remembrance with futuristic language told through a narrator who knows the ending but enjoys telling the tale—and teasing his audience—because it’s his to tell. Brooklyn is … Read more
[ad_1] Have You Been Long Enough at Table, a debut poetry collection by Leslie Sainz, bubbles over with poetic range. There are sonnets and prose poems and ghazals and a narrator grappling with her Cuban American identity and family history of immigration and displacement. The poems bring the reader to the table covered in ancestral … Read more
[ad_1] The annual cross-cultural, bilingual literature and arts festival Lit & Luz is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year! Since the launch of the festival ten years ago by MAKE Literary Productions, Lit & Luz has brought together dozens of artists and writers between Mexico and the United States into conversation with one another, producing … Read more
[ad_1] Chicago was a tinderbox. In 1871, the city was packed with wood-frame houses, wooden sidewalks, and hay-filled barns, nestled alongside lumber processing mills, paper factories, wood-frame churches, and saloons. Thirty-four years since its municipal incorporation, Chicago was now home to over 300,000 people, roughly half of them immigrants who journeyed to the city seeking … Read more
[ad_1] Margo Steines knows something about pain. At seventeen, while growing up in New York City, she became a dominatrix, her first-ever job. She was a sex worker for a decade, later running her own S/M dungeon—kicking, punching, and otherwise assaulting consenting, paying adult males for a living. She developed a romantic—albeit increasingly tumultuous and … Read more
[ad_1] “What’s the point of going home if nobody is there?” Agata Izabela Brewer asks in the opening pages of her memoir, The Hunger Book: A Memoir from Communist Poland. She’s narrating a dream of dreadful abandonment, in which she holds hands with her brother, mushroom hunting while her family disappears behind them leaving them … Read more