For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] In the conversation surrounding Elaine Hsieh Chou’s debut novel Disorientation, I expect to see discussion of her carefully crafted satire, her inclusion and destruction of campus tropes, and the meticulous unpacking of Asian American identity in the lens of violence and fetishism. These should all be discussed, but I hope the conversation also includes … Read more
[ad_1] It’s perhaps an unfortunate aspect of art that the value we perceive in it is at least partially derived from public opinion. Who was the work’s creator, and from what circumstances was it made? In Portrait of an Unknown Lady, the second novel from Maria Gainza that has been translated into English by Thomas … Read more
[ad_1] If you take the Amtrak from Chicago to Springfield, you run smack into time as you enter Illinois’s capital city. The train crawls along bricked roads and Springfield’s history-soaked downtown, the Capitol itself just blocks from the tracks. That journey in time and space is also taken by Ray Long in The House That … Read more
[ad_1] Growing up, historically, has never been easy. Childhood today is punctuated by a number of general threats not limited to climate change, world hunger, lack of access to clean water, refugee crises, police brutality, housing shortages, and a global pandemic. Children have also witnessed devastating events such as multiple mass shootings and bombings, Hong … Read more
[ad_1] It’s a recognizably portentous way to begin a war film: a field of farmers bent over stalks of tomato plants, picking their crop under a blazing sun. Viewers like myself, accustomed to Deer Hunters and Apocalypse Nows, will be primed for these peasants to be mowed down momentarily in a hail of machine gunfire. … Read more
[ad_1] The four essays in Body Work, the new book by Melissa Febos, pull at several underlying power struggles that are inherent in acts of creative writing: vulnerability risks judgment, writing your side of the story privileges your memories and perspective over others in the story, presenting a perspective at odds with hegemonic forces invites … Read more
[ad_1] Translation—the conveyance of ideas, sentences, a story, a feeling, from one language to another—is inherently contradictory: be as exact as possible, or risk failing at the act. But since the transference of meaning is something so subjective, so tied to cultural and social cues, one could argue “exact” is impossible. Translation becomes its own … Read more
[ad_1] In the essays in In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing, Elena Ferrante—perhaps the greatest living novelist—describes her formation as a writer and her views on writing. Although In the Margins may appeal most to Ferrante devotees like me eager to read about the ideas of fiction that led to novels … Read more
[ad_1] Irene Solà is an award-winning Catalan poet, novelist, and visual artist who won the 2020 European Union Prize for Literature for her second novel, When I Sing, Mountains Dance. Translated by Mara Faye Lethem, When I Sing, Mountains Dance depicts the griefs and joys of one human family against the vibrant backdrop of the … Read more
[ad_1] For all the antagonizing, ruminating, and even moralizing that comes with defining the parameters of literary fiction, perhaps the one point of (near-) universal agreement debators enjoy is over the notion that such a book should be in some way realistic, should faithfully reflect life and those who live it. How this is to … Read more