For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] Open Catherine Lacey’s Biography of X and you will find a fictional book called Biography of X—though its writer, CM Lucca, admits early on that the title is a lie. Lucca’s wife, X, a multidisciplinary artist with a career full of controversy, has died and an unauthorized biography has been published. Lucca is determined … Read more
[ad_1] By most accounts, one is considered a wild success if he grows up in poverty in a rural village in India and then overcomes the obstacles imposed by those circumstances to become become a surgeon in London, then a senior department leader in a hospital, and then retires in a riverside penthouse—the type of … Read more
[ad_1] Anthologies are simultaneously one of the most important venues for literature and an almost impossible task to create. Readers expect to be enlightened on multiple levels, with each individual entry telling a cohesive story while also working collectively with the other entries to add up to a larger meaning. At the heart of every … Read more
[ad_1] Salomea Künstler, known as Mamie and all of eleven, has just arrived in California with her parents and grandfather when Cathleen Schine’s Künstlers in Paradise begins. An orange tree grows in the garden of their new home in Santa Monica, and in the “odd, shining fog” of their first morning, they ate oranges, “as … Read more
[ad_1] A list of Patricia Smith’s achievements in poetry could take up much of this interview. A poet, playwright, essayist, educator and mentor, she’s deservedly won nearly every accolade and award, including the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement, and earlier this year she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. … Read more
[ad_1] Our unnamed narrator meets Jude, a local antique dealer and washed-up actor, while on vacation with her mother in an isolated Australian coastal town. Jude is forty-two. Our narrator is twenty-four. Jude recognizes her copy of Marguerite Duras’s The Lover. Our narrator is smitten. And so we embark on a doomed romance serving as … Read more
[ad_1] Dan Egan writes, “An exquisitely balanced phosphorus exchange existed for billions of years before humans corrupted the element’s flow through the environment.” Egan’s task in his new book, The Devil’s Element: Phosphorus and a World Out of Balance, is to explore that “exquisite exchange,” detailing the element’s breakdown and passage through wetlands and across … Read more
[ad_1] Melinda Moustakis’ fiction is an expert tutorial in braiding a story’s environment with its characters’ paths, as much as it is an unveiling of how that braid is not a braid at all but an inseparability, place inextricable from human life. In her debut collection, Bear Down, Bear North, which won the Flannery O’Connor … Read more
[ad_1] Our lives aren’t movies, no matter how much we may dream of the cinematic pan out of a “happily ever after” conclusion. In real life, juries don’t reach a verdict within a 90-minute runtime, the killer doesn’t always face justice, and memories don’t play back clearly like a full scene. Oftentimes the truth is … Read more
[ad_1] Comparing a brand-new novel against an established piece of media is often tempting, but can be far from accurate without casting a broader lens. Your Driver is Waiting by Priya Guns has been described endlessly as a gender-bent Taxi Driver. And while there are similarities between the debut novel and the Robert DeNiro movie, … Read more