For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] What’s your favorite romance trope, and why is it enemies-to-lovers? All jokes aside, there’s a reason why enemies-to-lovers stories consistently rank among romance readers’ favorites—and I’m no different. There’s something about that thin line between love and hate that gets me every time. No matter how many opposites-attract stories I read, I’ll never get … Read more
[ad_1] Writing about writing and telling stories about stories — these kinds of narratives can feel circularly post-modern. But, as it turns out, they are actually quite conventional and ancient. Homer’s The Odyssey, the vaunted paterfamilias of storytelling in the West, is an epic whose hero’s primary genius is not as a warrior or leader, … Read more
[ad_1] If you’re like us and have already binged Bridgerton on Netflix a time or two, you are probably desperate to get your hands on any and all historical romance novels that will remind you of Julia Quinn’s series. We’ve got you covered with some of our all-time favorites below! While we can’t promise that these … Read more
[ad_1] It’s easy to feel like you really know a character after reading a confessional novel. But like people, characters evolve too. In a great novel, they react and change with their conditions. Such is the case in The Committed, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s thrilling sequel to his Pulitzer Prize winning debut novel, The Sympathizer. When … Read more
[ad_1] Courtney Zoffness has a way with beginnings. Consider the opening sentence of her essay, “Boy in Blue”: “Most mornings, my four-year-old arrests me.” Or the instructions at the start of “Holy Body” on how to prepare your body for a mikveh, which involves not just washing every limb and hair but emptying both your … Read more
[ad_1] Being a teenage girl is hard. Especially on Long Island during the summer of 1999. No one knows this better than Forsyth Harmon. Author of the illustrated novel Justine, Harmon digs deep into the lives of two high school friends, Ali and Justine, using their multi-layered relationship to explore all the complexities and confusion … Read more
[ad_1] Releasing a debut novel is always a fraught endeavor, and in a pandemic, it’s even more so. But the luckiest debut novelists see buzz building for their books well in advance of publication. Right now, that buzz belongs to Sarah Penner and her inventive, compelling historical novel, The Lost Apothecary. It’s been named among … Read more
[ad_1] When recalled over morning coffee, intense, meaningful dreams dissolve into confused fragments that escape language and leave even a sympathetic listener out in the cold. But what if a dream could be pinned down with all of its illogically tantalizing details, its particular atmosphere, primal details, shifting scenes, to arrive, finally, at some essential … Read more
[ad_1] Daniel Borzutzky’s newest collection of poetry, Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018, examines specific violence in America, explicit within the global economic order. This collection, like his 2016 National Book Award-winning The Performance of Being Human, and Lake Michigan, examines a psychogeography of movement. There’s Pittsburgh, Chile, the American Middle West. Bodies … Read more
[ad_1] An I-Novel by Minae Mizumura is an immigrant story turned on its head. In traditional tales, a foreign-born young person arrives on American shores unable to speak the language but grows up to become a great success. An I-Novel, instead, is about two Japanese sisters in America who long to go “home.” But what … Read more