For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] Lisa Harding’s second novel, Bright Burning Things, follows single mother Sonya Moriarity, as she slides in the abyss of alcohol abuse, enters a recovery program, and attempts to rebuild her life. The emotional center of the novel is Sonya’s love for her son, Tommy, and her internal struggle to be the mother he needs. … Read more
[ad_1] Neel Patel’s Tell Me How to Be opens with both narrators spent: Akash and his mother, Renu, are weary and anxious. Decisions they made years ago have grown burdensome, seemingly inescapable: “No one ever told me that happiness was like a currency: that when it goes, it goes.” This is from Patel’s short story … Read more
[ad_1] Jenny Holzer’s art demands to be seen. For those unfamiliar with her work, Holzer is a neo-conceptual American artist known for delivering ideas through words in public spaces, such as projections on buildings, and benches etched with truisms. But in Alfaguara Prize-winning author Carla Guelfenbein’s new novel, One in Me I Never Loved translated … Read more
[ad_1] An interesting, if somewhat recondite, corner of the great novelistic universe is the study of literary ancestry:where a work comes from, what it grows from, and what grows from it—be it in theme, perspective, narrative, or technique. By studying the descendants and antecedents of a given novel, one can learn much about how the … Read more
[ad_1] It’s always challenging to sum up a short story collection: each story can be as idea-rich as a novel, and good collections show off an author’s range at least as much as they gesture towards recurring themes. Charlie Jane Anders is an inventive writer with a dazzling skill for short stories, and her new … Read more
[ad_1] The Love Makers begins with a two-hundred-page novel by Aifric Campbell, Scarlett and the Gurl. Over the span of a day, on a road trip in the near future, the reader meets two archetypes: a bourgeoise woman named “Scarlett” and a poor woman who calls herself “Gurl,” honouring herself with the universality of gender. … Read more
[ad_1] Tishani Doshi’s fourth volume of poetry, following 2018’s Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods, marks a transition in her exploration of growing and aging as a woman. Where her earlier work focused on the internal and the bodily, A God at the Door reinvents the ancient equation of femininity and the natural world … Read more
[ad_1] It would be remiss to read Lucille Clifton’s Generations: A Memoir, recently reissued by New York Review of Books, without considering the moment in which this book—Clifton’s sole memoir—was first released. Published in 1976, Generations emerged the year before the miniseries “Roots” aired on national television eight consecutive nights in a row, a year … Read more
[ad_1] A newer trend in diaspora writing, which has fast become one of my favorite sub-genres, is that of the disillusioned millennial surrounded by the legacy of prior generations. Beyond the usual response of confusion and determination, our protagonists are apathetic and often unlikeable. Sanjena Sathian, author of Gold Diggers, writes “They—the outside world—hardly know … Read more
[ad_1] The world of You Feel It Just Below the Ribs is all apocalypse and debris, bare shambles coagulating into a familiar dystopian world order. The novel is marked as an “alternate history” of the early twentieth century, except that it doesn’t feel like one. The timelines are certainly murky, the laws are new, the … Read more