For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] “You can be a mother and a poet.” So writes Kate Baer in “Moon Song,” part of her first poetry collection, What Kind of Woman. She effortlessly spans parenting, friendship, love, and how women perceive and are perceived, with stunning imagery. Poems like “Female Candidate” hit home, upending the current moment to examine it. … Read more
[ad_1] Danielle Evans’s second story collection, The Office Of Historical Corrections, draws on the current zeitgeist with provocative narratives examining race, female friendship, and privilege. The collection concludes with a novella by the same name dealing with both our present obsession with truth and the historical legacy of racism. Women carry this collection, and the … Read more
[ad_1] Michael Riedel writes his sequel to Razzle Dazzle kicking off where he ended with his well-received history of Broadway. Singular Sensation: The Triumph of Broadway carries on in a similar way as this first book. Both books mention, and seem to be influenced by, William Goldman’s The Season: A Candid Look at Broadway (1969). … Read more
[ad_1] Soylent, the nutrient-packed, colorless meal replacement drink, was introduced to the American public in 2014 after a wildly successful crowdfunding campaign proved people just don’t want to waste precious time and energy eating anymore. When Rob Rhinehart, Soylent’s inventor, was working on a technology startup in San Francisco, he started to see buying, cooking … Read more
[ad_1] Whenever I go for a run and cue up a playlist (lately a compendium of tracks I’ve called “What the Fuck Is Happening” that includes pandemic-appropriate songs like “You Make Me Sick” by Satan’s Rats and “So Sick” by Ne-Yo), I experience something that I like to call “dancing in my head.” I’m running, … Read more
[ad_1] Melissa Lucashenko’s novel Too Much Lip tells the story of stolen land and stolen children. Though these crimes are assigned to the past, their violent legacies – poverty, addiction, abuse, discrimination – still plague the Bundjalung Nation, an Aboriginal community whose ancestral homelands lie along the northern coast of New South Wales, Australia. But … Read more
[ad_1] We’ve become wanderers in our own backyards these days. Without my daily commute on the bus and the random interactions with strangers that often come with it, I’ve found myself becoming more curious on my afternoon walks. I like to spot pets peeking their heads through open apartment windows, give a mask-veiled smile out … Read more
[ad_1] When the great Patrick Modiano says he is writing a detective story, rest assured it won’t be a Sherlock-esque exhibition of armchair deductions or Poirot-like psychoanalysis of a criminal. Most likely, there won’t even be a crime. Jean Eyben, the narrator of Modiano’s Invisible Ink, is barely a detective. He really only spent a … Read more
[ad_1] 2020 has been many things—the year of a pandemic, of terrible wildfires, of political stress and strife—but let no one say in the annals of history that it was a year of bad books. It was so difficult to choose only 20 favorites from all the many we’ve loved this year, but we did … Read more
[ad_1] Nikki Giovanni—one of the great poets of any generation—still has much to impart in Make Me Rain, her hybrid autobiography of poems and prose. Given the tumultuous aspects of 2020, the disruptions and dislocations of quotidian and public life, there’s a refreshing discordance in reading Giovanni’s newest and especially personal collection. Throughout the book, … Read more