For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] A decade ago, the success of wizard books and vampire franchises had caused something of a stir in literary New York. Culture writers Lindsay Weber and Amanda Dobbins declared in Vulture that “Mermaids are the New Vampires.” More than one literary agent even went as far as telling me they were seeking out a … 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] In the earliest days of publishing my writing, before I had really figured out who I was as an artist, when I was willing to submit my work far and wide without much consideration, I realized I had a natural inclination to pander toward style and subject matter I thought were more likely to … Read more
[ad_1] We all have a story we tell about our lives. There is a certain power we harness in storytelling that lets us be whoever we want to be. But perhaps the telling becomes most powerful when we can speak truthfully, when we can come to terms with reality. In Laura Adamczyk’s debut novel, Island … 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] Perhaps there are no more famous witches than Shakespeare’s three “weyward” wenches. The crookedness of the Bard’s (and Britain’s) witches represented a cultural fear of an empty womb—the childless, the menopausal. Women were to be coupled and birthing. If they were not, they were witchy. Evil. Monstrously magical. But, for the reader, the witches … 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