For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] Jamil Jan Kochai was sitting with his parents, aunts, uncles, and cousins on the second story of his aunt’s home in Logar, Afghanistan, sipping tea and taking in the evening breeze around sunset, when his phone buzzed, and he saw that he was tagged in a tweet by the National Book Foundation. But before … Read more
[ad_1] If an aspiring storyteller were to pick up Haruki Murakami’s Novelist as a Vocation, translated by Philip Gabriel & Ted Goossen, expecting a step-by-step guide to putting a novel together, they may well be disappointed. However, what Murakami’s memoir does offer is certainly of equal value. It is one novelist looking back over his … Read more
[ad_1] One version of the American dream is based on the idea of owning a piece of the land. That dream seems harder to achieve every year for most Americans priced out of home ownership. Colorado’s San Luis Valley promises an exception. Cheap land can be yours in five acre plots at an affordable price. … Read more
[ad_1] Lines suggest beginnings and endings, possibilities and limits, differences and connections. Lines can be made by humans. Hand-drawn borders on maps mark one sovereign’s subjects from another’s, their consequences cascading down generations in languages spoken and traditions shared. Lines can be made by nonhumans, too. The horizon stretches across the sea. Waves reach up … Read more
[ad_1] When an occupation has ended, what do we have left? Traces of Boots on Tongue: And Other Stories addresses the question in micro and macro forms, within the narratives of the story, and in a broader sense of time and place. Set in the early years of independent India, this short story collection delves … Read more
[ad_1] Welcome to the hero’s story. The hero suffers, the hero overcomes. The hero is plucky, quirky, strong against all odds. The hero is in almost every book you’ve picked up and put down again. Many times, the hero is one narrator that tells you the story from beginning to end. Contrary to this norm, … Read more
[ad_1] The idea of the multiverse—an infinite array of alternate worlds that differ from ours, minutely or dramatically—has exploded into popular consciousness in the last decade or so. It’s a concept that has been frequently explored by physicists, philosophers, and science fiction for quite some time, and now features prominently in large multimedia franchises such … Read more
[ad_1] The posthumous publication of a beloved author can be a dicey proposition. Unless the writer managed to finish the manuscript before she passed, the resulting book is often a work of assemblage and hearsay, incomplete and speculative by nature and thus rarely conventionally satisfying. And if it’s a book that was hidden away in … Read more
[ad_1] Near the beginning of the novel, a man comes across dead bodies that have been dead for a while. He knows there’s more to the scene than he can see. And for seeing what he sees, he will be pursued by a force he does not understand. The novel is The Passenger, Cormac McCarthy’s … Read more
[ad_1] As a queer ex-Catholic from New England now living in the Midwest, reading Jeanna Kadlec’s memoir, Heretic, felt like staring at a reversed image. She’s a lesbian ex-Evangelical Christian that moved from the Midwest to Boston, and her debut explores the ways Evangelicalism–especially white American Evangelicalism–shaped her early life, sense of self, and ultimately … Read more