For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] In an early chapter from Karen Tucker’s debut novel Bewilderness, the narrator, Irene, and her friend Luce come upon a stash of opioids. “I peered down at the jumbled blue tablets,” Irene tells us. “They really did look about as harmless as breath mints, and yet even I knew I was at the edge … Read more
[ad_1] Myths about romantic and familial love run rampant in our heteronormative, patriarchal culture. As children, we’re trained to believe that romantic love is the most noble love of all, that breakups are failures, and that being a mother is the purest way to love a child. Queer and trans communities have been pushing back … Read more
[ad_1] Science fiction has a longstanding interest — a sub-genre, even — in using technology and far-future settings to think about gender. Classic feminist SF from the 1970s on, like Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, imagined worlds with gender roles reversed, complicated, or erased; almost all far-future, post-scarcity works, like Iain … Read more
[ad_1] At ten years old, Brian Broome tried to take lessons from his friend Corey on how to be “cooler”: “…Black boys had to show through our behavior that we were undeniably, incontrovertibly the most male. The toughest. We sat on either end of his bed and I got lost in his pretty brown eyes … Read more
[ad_1] Last March, tweets urging writers to refrain from writing about the pandemic were so common they became as tiresome as the phenomenon they hoped to head off. No one wants to read your quarantine fiction, they insisted. No one living through hard times wanted to read a book about those same hard times, and … Read more
[ad_1] The world is dying and it is all humanity’s fault—an on the nose observation, but one that encapsulates Octavia Cade’s novella, The Impossible Resurrection of Grief. We meet marine biologist Ruby in a near-future Australia, immersed in her study of jellyfish while dealing with the fallout of a colleague and friend drowning in the … Read more
[ad_1] Susan Orlean is known for making her readers care about people and things they may not have otherwise noticed. On the short list: German Shepherds, libraries, luxury condos, a 10-year old boy named Colin Duffy, and, of course, orchids. Coming up on the 20th anniversary of the film “Adaptation,” itself an adaptation of her … Read more
[ad_1] Yelena Moskovich’s third novel A Door Behind a Door is a phantasmagoria about immigration, death, and queer desire with a plot that defies easy description. It centers on a young immigrant in Milwaukee named Olga. When Olga was a baby back in the Soviet Union, a boy in her apartment building stabbed an old … Read more
[ad_1] May 17 holds a particular significance for the LGBTQ+ community, as it commemorates the World Health Organization’s decision to declassify homosexuality as a mental disorder. It’s the day that rejects discrimination against lesbians, gays, bisexuals, bi-curious, queer, transgender, intersex, and all those who have diversified sexual orientation. It empowers the LGBTQ+ community and motivates … Read more
[ad_1] I first read Natalia Ginzburg’s memoir Lessico Famigliare—Family Lexicon—for a college Italian class. Though that book is in a language I no longer understand as fluidly as I wish I could, it has accompanied me across all my moves since. This re-issue of Voices in the Evening, also translated by D.M. Low and recently … Read more