For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] Selected by Randall Mann as the winner of the 2020-21 Jake Adam York Poetry Prize, Brian Tierney’s debut collection, Rise and Float, is nothing short of exquisite. Laid bare in these pages is a map of holes that reveal pain and death, as the question of whether or not to continue on in the … Read more
[ad_1] After two years of physical and psychic anxiety and what feels like a permanent, unwanted reframing of our bodies in the world and in proximity to others, there’s something especially beautiful and necessary about Richie Hofmann’s A Hundred Lovers. Wandering through this collection is similar to a luxurious meander through one’s favorite museum, with … Read more
[ad_1] Sometimes, when characters are truly iconic, t-shirts are made with their names. There’s one with characters from A Little Life, “Jude & JB & Willem & Malcolm,” because, regardless of what one thinks of Hanya Yanagihara’s novel, these four undeniably come to life over those eight hundred-plus pages. Destiny O. Birdsong’s debut novel, Nobody’s … Read more
[ad_1] As a poet and nonfiction writer, Sarah Manguso is known for her gifts of compression. In 2017’s 300 Arguments—a work consisting of short, aphoristic sections of prose—she writes, “I don’t write long forms because I’m not interested in artificial deceleration. As soon as I see the glimmer of a consequence, I pull the trigger.” … Read more
[ad_1] Award-winning Ecuadorian writer Mónica Ojeda makes her English debut with Jawbone, a hair-raising novel about the horrors of adolescence. Ojeda has published short stories, poems, and novels. Jawbone is her third novel, originally published in Spanish in 2018. Sarah Booker, who renders Ojeda’s dense, tightly woven prose into a stunning new English translation, reflects … Read more
[ad_1] KB’s debut poetry collection How to Identify Yourself With a Wound was selected by Ire’ne Lara Silva as the winner of the 2021 Saguaro Poetry Prize, and contains the kind of words that stay on your mind and in your skin. KB plays with pop culture (“self-portrait as Frank Ocean song about drugs,” “Break … Read more
[ad_1] In a time of isolation and loss, literature keeps us connected. It also helps us to escape our reality; dream a little bigger, hope a little harder. We asked our staff and contributors to send us their most anticipated books for 2022. From experimental short stories to treasured novels in translation: There is much … Read more
[ad_1] For me, as a musician, one mark of a great short story collection is when it operates somewhat like a great symphony: cast in distinct movements, moving through different moods, tonalities and orchestrations, but at some base level—whether heard or simply felt—motivically and thematically cohesive. Manywhere, Morgan Thomas’ expansive and expressive debut collection, is … Read more
[ad_1] In many ways, we are our experiences. We wake up, experience something, react to it, consider it, form thoughts on it, go to sleep, and wake up again. This continuity of thought—memory connecting point to point to point—is one of the ways we as people come to define ourselves, according to John Locke. Novels, … Read more
[ad_1] In Primo Levi: An Identikit, the Italian critic Marco Belpoliti pieces together Primo Levi’s life as a writer, Jewish citizen of Italy, public intellectual, and survivor of Auschwitz. Like an identikit, or composite sketch, the book presents a mosaic image of the author composed of stories of different parts of his life and work. … Read more