For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] Working-class literature is a bit of an oddity. Do we mean it’s any type of literature written by an author with a working-class background? Is it literature written about the working class? I believe it is both to some extent. For me, working-class literature is at its best when it doesn’t use members of … Read more
[ad_1] Influences are strange things. They’re active, sought out, even entreated. But they’re also elusive, enigmatic, disguised. In art, in life, in social media, influences are all the rage, personified as nouns and stacked in neat Wikipedia sidebars. The bizarre nature of language, the way in which it follows patterns and shape-shifts into a facsimile … 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 feel the most ridiculous thing is certainty,” the writer Yiyun Li once told Alexandra Kleeman in a profile for The New York Times. Li’s latest short story collection, Wednesday’s Child, shows once again how strongly she holds this. The collection’s eleven stories, written over the course of fourteen years, cover familiar ground for … 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] Imagine putting your relationship under a microscope and then sharing what you’ve discovered with the world. That is exactly what Jennifer Lang has done in her memoir Places We Left Behind, and we are all the better for it. When American-born Lang, a secular tourist, falls in love with French-born Philippe, an observant immigrant, … 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] “Checking out Historical Chicago” is a feature series devoted to the work of historical worldbuilding. The world each featured writer builds is Chicago. And yet, each writer brings Chicago to life differently, with different hammers and bricks, brushes and hands. This series approaches Chicago as a city constantly under construction: a story that is, … Read more
[ad_1] Let me start with a big claim: In what has already been a fantastic year for readers, September may just be the most exciting month of new releases yet. As our team sat down to prepare for this month, we were astounded to see so many books we couldn’t wait to read coming out … Read more