For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] The following excerpt is from S.L. Wisenberg’s The Wandering Womb: Essays in Search of Home. Spanning years and continents, this new collection follows Wisenberg as she combs through history books and family records in her search for home and meaning. S.L. Wisenberg is editor of Another Chicago Magazine and author of the fiction collection, The Sweetheart … Read more
[ad_1] Laura Spence-Ash’s debut novel, Beyond That, the Sea, spans thirty years, two continents, and eight points of view, but it never loses focus, momentum, or its loving attention to detail. As German bombs fall over London in 1940, Millie and Reginald Thompson make the difficult choice to send their eleven-year-old daughter, Bea, to America … Read more
[ad_1] Nathan Ballingrud’s The Strange is set on Mars in the early 20th century—not a scientifically accurate Mars, but one more like Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles or earlier planetary romance, with a breathable atmosphere and signs of earlier civilizations. Colonized by Americans, among others, this is a distinctly frontier-like Mars, with most of the main … Read more
[ad_1] The first time someone called me a faggot, I was nine or ten years old. I was standing on the grass near a chain link fence by a baseball diamond. I don’t remember why I was there, the park near my childhood home in Levittown, on Long Island. Maybe my brother was nearby, or … Read more
[ad_1] Poet Charif Shanahan’s work has garnered an impressive list of accolades. His first collection, Into Each Room We Enter Without Knowing, was selected by Allison Joseph as the winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award, and it was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the … Read more
[ad_1] Jinwoo Chong’s debut novel Flux bends time and identity equally as three characters take turns sharing the narrative spotlight in a story that explores trauma, regret, Americanness and dealing with everything in between. Bo, who is eight years old, suffers the tragic loss of his mother and finds solace in a detective show. Brandon, … Read more
[ad_1] You may scoff, but I attribute the day that I watched my first K-pop video as one of the most influential days in my short life. In May 2020, the Minnesota lakes were heating up amidst a raging pandemic. I returned home in March as everything shut down, desperate for stability while people fell … Read more
[ad_1] A friend explains that the world is divided into paragraph and sentence writers. A paragraph writer is like a brick mason, working with consistent materials and focused on maintaining a clean line as a wall unfolds. Building a stone wall, a sentence writer in contrast begins with a pile of rocks—clots of material formed … Read more
[ad_1] While Ramadan is most commonly known as the month during which Muslims abstain from eating and drinking from dawn until sunset, it is also a month of increased contemplation and reflection. This month-long spiritual retreat brings with it an opportunity to get a better understanding of one’s self and spiritual state, and to rejuvenate … Read more
[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