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] From the earliest pages of English poet Sam Riviere’s debut novel, Dead Souls, the reader is catapulted into an extended internal monologue satirizing the follies of the literary world, particularly its poets. And there’s no winding up to the action: from its beginning, the novel’s pace is manic and relentless, evincing the unnamed narrator’s … Read more
[ad_1] Trauma likes to stick around. It likes to burrow its way under our skin and nestle there, getting comfortable without your knowing—or maybe you do know, maybe you can feel it setting its claws into you and taking hold. Either way, the trauma is there to stay, not rearing its head or making itself … 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] When I first met Keiler Roberts, I wasn’t aware of her work. Harboring feelings of untapped potential due to my art-major mother, it was a simple desire to learn how to draw that brought me into Professor Roberts’ classroom. But soon thereafter, I remedied that ignorance, and learned that the wry wit and earnestness … Read more
[ad_1] “Sitting down to write a letter, with an addressee and signatory, is an intimate experience,” editors Christopher K. Ho and Daisy Nam write in the introduction of Best! Letters from Asian Americans in the arts. The pretext is deceptively simple: Ho, a visual artist, and Nam, a curator, invited Asian Americans, loosely defined, working … 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