For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] Reworking, adaptation, reconsideration. There is always an appeal to mining the Ancient Greek poets for a timely retelling. Most recently—with the likes of Madeleine Miller’s Circe and Pat Barker’s two Trojan novels, The Silence of the Girls and The Women of Troy—there has been an interest in shifting the balance by gifting the often … Read more
[ad_1] Already a finalist for the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, as well as a co-host of The Poet Salon podcast, it’s hard to believe that Judas Goat is Gabrielle Bates’s debut collection. The two-score poems within display a sensitive and assured voice and a candid exploration of human relationships and the … Read more
[ad_1] I’d like to ask Kevin Maloney if he’s familiar with “Return of the Grievous Angel,” the Gram Parsons’ song with themes of wandering, life on the road, and a kind of longing that leads to an inevitable return. I kept hearing this song in my head as I read Maloney’s novel The Red-Headed Pilgrim, … Read more
[ad_1] Everyone has those moments in their lives that didn’t turn out the way they thought they might. Whether by making the wrong choice or saying the wrong thing or being impacted by chance, time and the world continue to move further and further from that moment, and the human life impacted at that exact … Read more
[ad_1] With the publication of her first memoir, Burn the Place, Michelin-starred chef Iliana Regan carved a space for herself between the culinary world and the literary world. She was longlisted for the 2019 National Book Award, the first food writer recognized since Julia Child. The New Yorker distinguished Burn the Place as one of “the great memoirs of addiction, … Read more
[ad_1] No book has influenced how I approach book reviews more than Craft in the Real World by Matthew Salesses. The book challenges the lens many readers use, one shaped by white, Western values, and is a call not only to make space for diverse storytelling, but to evaluate it on its own terms. And, … Read more
[ad_1] The threat posed by technocratic fascism has played out in real time on the timelines of social media users in recent months. Whether we’re sharing words or videos or memes or embarrassing grade school yearbook photos, we’ve ceded enormous power to too few gatekeepers. The rapid changes in technology has meant our cultural critique … Read more
[ad_1] While I was reading Marisa Crane’s elegant debut novel, I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself, I thought a lot about how much of ourselves we hide from other people. In Marisa’s speculative near future, punishment is a constant public spectacle, surveillance is everywhere, and those deemed wrongdoers by a totalitarian U.S. government are given … Read more
[ad_1] Any time I ask my mom about the Lahore of her childhood, the present moment glitches for a split second, and she disappears to some place within herself. Upon return, the edges of her lips curl into a sly smile, and—each time, without fail—she prefaces her answers with a single phrase: “Lahore Lahore hai” … Read more
[ad_1] Fantasy is all about situating the reader in a compelling fictional world, but some worlds are more fictional than others. Some authors in the genre excel at putting fantasy first, creating new worlds so different from our own that they have their own geography, magic, culture, conventions, and language. Others sketch the outlines of … Read more