For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] From the Kenzie and Gennaro novels that established him as a master of new noir, to the haunting crime thriller Mystic River and his magnum opus of the 1919 Boston Police Strike, The Given Day, Dennis Lehane has captured Boston neighborhoods with more grit, vitality, and unerring precision than any writer in recent memory. … Read more
[ad_1] Poet Amy Key’s first foray into nonfiction, Arrangements in Blue: Notes on Loving and Living Alone, uses Joni Mitchell’s Blue as a foundation for a personal meditation on long-term singledom that has endured into middle age. Using the album’s tracklist as a thematic guide, Key probes her lifelong desire for romantic love from various … Read more
[ad_1] A novel playlist is a very serious thing. While I draft, I curate mine obsessively because I know I’ll need it. Each song is a portal to a memory or an emotion, and listening to the right one at the right time can inspire me in a way nothing else can. Finding a song … Read more
[ad_1] Full disclosure first: I worked with Jen St. Jude at Chicago Review of Books for a number of years. Like many of the creative professionals here, I knew they were at work on a book though I didn’t know many of the details. Reading If Tomorrow Doesn’t Come first offers the pleasure of seeing … Read more
[ad_1] Abraham Verghese’s The Covenant of Water opens with a map of the state of Kerala. All its regions, ranging from the mountainous Wayanad to the urban Cochin to the southernmost point of Trivandrum. It is akin to any detailed map in an epic fantasy, and in many respects that is the narrative Verghese has … Read more
[ad_1] The whiplash changes that mark our days have made us ripe for new forms of expression that can help us see our way through. Even as 2021 saw the Black Lives Matter movement attain global impact, Confederate and colonialist monuments come down, and institutions grapple with ways to respond appropriately to calls for equality, … Read more
[ad_1] It’s an odd thing, about trends. A trend seems to take on a life of its own, morphing and consuming its way through the zeitgeist. How do they begin, why do they die? There’s something of Orwell’s groupthink, removed (usually) of its menace and totalitarian bent, but nonetheless reflective of the base human need … Read more
[ad_1] In Nicholas Binge’s Ascension, a mountain of nearly unimaginable size appears suddenly in the middle of the ocean, its sides plunging steeply into the sea, its mysterious peak looming unattainably in the clouds, nearly 10,000 feet higher than Mount Everest. The mountain stuns physicist Harold Tunmore, not just because of its sudden materialization, but … Read more
[ad_1] What does it mean to love the art but recoil at the artist? Claire Dederer, author of the acclaimed memoirs Poser and Love and Trouble, breathes new life into this question in her stirring and revelatory book Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma. Building on her viral Paris Review essay, “What Do We Do with the … Read more
[ad_1] Growing up in the 1980s, I could not escape Fiddler on the Roof. I sat through professional theatrical productions as well as amateur productions at our local public school—my brother’s girlfriend played Tzeitel—and the private Jewish day school I attended through eighth grade. I watched the movie at home, in school, and at Jewish … Read more