For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] Rarely do you read a novel that makes you want to get up and finish that essay you’ve let sit idle in your word document for months. Even more rarely do you read a novel that reminds you why you became a writer in the first place. Nathan Hill’s debut, The Nix, took the … Read more
[ad_1] I dance to save myself, and find / Swimming in sweat, it’s in our common breath I fly. Paul Verlaine On the morning of June 13, 2016, I woke up to a text reading “did you hear the news?” The day before, Omar Mateen had shot up the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, killing 49 … Read more
[ad_1] The Midwestern town of Ephrem, Illinois, is a place that exists only in author Janice Deal’s imagination. But in her beautifully woven linked story collection Strange Attractors: The Ephrem Stories, the town and its residents are so completely realized I found myself poking around Google maps, trying to determine which actual place it might … Read more
[ad_1] Reading Ben Lerner’s new collection of poems, The Lights, I was reminded of a couplet from his 2004 debut, The Lichtenberg Figures: “I wish all difficult poems were profound. / Honk if you wish all difficult poems were profound.” With The Lights, Lerner has made good on this wish: for whatever difficulty the poems … Read more
[ad_1] As a crime fiction writer and fan, I always get excited when a new Laura Lippman book is announced. When I heard that Prom Mom was on the way, I leapt to snag an opportunity to read it and ask Lippman a few questions. Turns out, I did that last time a new Laura … Read more
[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] Though a fairly slender book, and a compelling read, Lavie Tidhar’s The Circumference of the World is difficult to summarize—a stream of stories and events flowing into each other like a Möbius strip. Delia Welegtabit, a mathematician, reflects on her island childhood in Vanuatu and hires a rare book dealer to track down her … 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