For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] Are the temperatures rising where you are, dear reader? If you’re like those of us at the CHIRB without regular access to air conditioning, maybe you’ve begun to seek refuge at afternoon matinees or the local public pool. Unfortunately books can’t offer such instant cooling gratification, but they more than make up for that … Read more
[ad_1] “We really do live in a pulp empire,” says Dr. Paul S. Hirsch. A chance discovery in an unlabelled box of federal documents led him to unearth a vast government plot to weaponize comic books. While this sounds like a pulp comic plot itself, Dr. Hirsch has produced Pulp Empire, a nonfiction work that … Read more
[ad_1] In her memoir Leaving Breezy Street, Brenda Myers-Powell propels readers through the story of her remarkable life with raw energy and gripping, charismatic storytelling. A survivor of molestation, prostitution, abuse, and addiction, Myers-Powell offers a deeply honest, deeply moving look at the years of physical and emotional violence that she suffered, and the mechanisms … Read more
[ad_1] If I could only have one book on my coffee table, it would be Chet’la Sebree’s Field Study, winner of the 2020 James Laughlin Award. Field Study skillfully synthesizes writing genres and resists general categorization, upending the conventions of poetry, memoir, and autoethnography with the author admitting that “some of the characters here are … Read more
[ad_1] Set about 200 years in the future, Neil Sharpson’s When the Sparrow Falls is narrated by Nikolai Andreivich South, a low-ranking state security bureaucrat in the Caspian Republic. Earth has been transformed by the emergence of super-powerful artificial intelligences and technology allowing people to transfer their consciousness to the digital realm. The Caspian Republic … Read more
[ad_1] The U.S. release of Vertigo & Ghost—already the winner of the 2019 Forward and Roehampton Prizes in the United Kingdom—should gain Fiona Benson a much-deserved wider audience. Her poetry is in turn thrilling, dizzying, devastating, lyrical, distinctive, and this is a bombshell of a collection. The first section uses classical mythology as a structural … Read more
[ad_1] Men and women often have an unequal share of power in their relationships. In the debut story collection, Objects of Desire, Clare Sestanovich explores the relationships men and women share, and examines the power dynamics between them. The men primarily escape without consequence while the women bear the emotional and literal burdens the characters … Read more
[ad_1] Fantasy worlds with magical power systems often include the idea of inherited magical ability, with magic handed down from one generation to the next or manifesting in a particular “chosen one” invested with special importance. But is that a good way to hand down power? What if those inheriting the power don’t want it? … Read more
[ad_1] After bursting onto the literary scene with last year’s Real Life, Brandon Taylor is back with another book—this time a collection of stories called Filthy Animals. Filthy Animals sees Taylor revisit many of the same themes that he first tackled in Real Life, with many characters being scientists or mathematicians, both since-reformed and unrepentant, … Read more
[ad_1] Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat is a genre-bending autofictional book about one woman’s “crush”—on a poem written three centuries ago. In the narrator’s first encounter with the “Caoineadh Airt Ui Laoghaire,” written by the eighteenth-century Irish noblewoman Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill after her husband was murdered, and while she was pregnant … Read more