For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] In the early pages of Oksana Vasyakina’s Wound, the narrator finds herself tucked into a small car with distant acquaintances in a small town outside Volgograd, on her way to pick up her mother’s ashes, where she cannot help but overhear her companions’ conversation: “The cousin said that Western propaganda had gotten really shameless. … Read more
[ad_1] I vividly remember a moment when someone in one of my writing workshops described my writing as “blue collar” because I was writing about my father’s work as a Chicago firefighter. Until then, I had always viewed my upbringing as comfortably middle class. My parents worked incredibly hard and sacrificed often in order to … Read more
[ad_1] Mary Jo Bang’s acclaimed translation of Dante Alighieri’s Inferno starts with this unforgettable verse: “Stopped mid-motion in the middle / Of what we call our life, I looked up and saw no sky—Only / a dense cage of leaf, tree, and twig. I was lost.” As I am “mid-motion in the middle” of my … Read more
[ad_1] I’d promised myself I would take a break from contributing for a few months, but broke that promise when I saw Etaf Rum’s Evil Eye on the list of September releases. I couldn’t resist the opportunity to talk to Etaf again, as we’d had such a great conversation in 2019 about her debut novel, … Read more
[ad_1] Grief is a powerful emotion. It demands and deserves respect. We may fight it, repress it, or swim against it, but in the end, denying grief only prolongs the pain that must eventually come. For the poet and novelist Brendan Shay Basham, that reckoning transpires in the body. While the mind may try to … Read more
[ad_1] In the summer of 2017, when she was feeling particularly overloaded, Anna Funder returned to the work of George Orwell, a writer she had “always loved.” She hoped that by reading his analyses of “the tyrannies, the ‘smelly little orthodoxies’ of his time” she would be able “to liberate myself” and in particular to … Read more
[ad_1] Once you see how the publishing sausage is made—how few books make it all the way through the gauntlet, and that at times it seems there is no rhyme or reason to why certain books succeed and others don’t—you can become disillusioned and quit, or become even more persistent in your efforts. The hard … Read more
[ad_1] There’s a certain serenity implicit on a “quiet street.” A quiet street is calm, peaceful; perhaps even a bit dull in its lack of activity. Such an atmosphere seems an appropriate place from which to reflect on past experience, as Nick McDonell does in his memoiristic exploration of the one percent, Quiet Street: On … Read more
[ad_1] In the Lobby of the Dream Hotel is like a Lifetime movie run amok. Author Genevieve Plunkett’s anti-heroine Portia is a thirtysomething aspiring guitarist who struggles with bipolar disorder. Though the story is apparently set in the present day, Portia tries to fulfill a 1950s-housewife role while simultaneously playing in a punk rock band. … Read more
[ad_1] Don Paterson is one of the most decorated and influential poets writing in the UK today. He is also an accomplished guitarist who founded and toured with a jazz ensemble throughout the 90s. Early in his new memoir Toy Fights, which covers the first twenty years of his life, Paterson explains that he quit … Read more