For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] Sarahland, the debut story collection from Sam Cohen, links disparate stories through a unique framework: each story features a character named Sarah. This architecture allows Cohen to explore a variety of topics from heartbreak to youthful self-discovery. The stories stand alone, but by linking them with Sarahs, the collection manifests something more complex. There … Read more
[ad_1] Online and in an assortment of counter-cultural convergences, a movement to cultivate, research and celebrate fungi, the most unknown of kingdoms, grows every day. All the while pharmaceutical companies, ambitious marketers and other profit-seekers watch and wait for the right moment to strike. In Search of Mycotopia: Citizen Science, Fungi Fanatics, and the Untapped … Read more
[ad_1] In her final, incomplete work, The Life of the Mind, Hannah Arendt sought to consider how thinking—an action so obvious its exploration appeared unnecessary—links vita activa, the active life, with vita contemplativa, the contemplative mind. Drawing on the intellectual history of ideas, Arendt posited that thinking creates neither morality nor understanding itself; but, instead, … Read more
[ad_1] Single word titles always have a shot at perfection, but they are trickier than they seem. They can easily be obvious, boring, or simply irrelevant. Brood, in title alone, assumes its place among the seraphim, taking on a trio of meanings: active wallowing in unhappy thoughts, a mother doing a mother’s job, and a … Read more
[ad_1] Is there a more back-handed compliment than to be called a “woman before her time”? There’s something self-congratulatory in the appellation, how it’s both dismissive of an artist’s work in the moment while anticipating a better future for them that might never arrive. Yet it’s a description that seems to be trotted back out … Read more
[ad_1] Lee Weiner was one of the infamous Chicago 7, whose trial became a cause celebre for the left during the manic year of 1968. Weiner was also the only one of the group who actually hailed from Chicago, and whose public profile was smaller than his comrades Tom Hayden and Abbie Hoffman. His memoir … Read more
[ad_1] Kazuo Ishiguro is an author at the top of his craft. But rather than rest on his laurels, the knighted, Booker Award winning, and Nobel laureate author is back with Klara and the Sun, his first new work since winning the Nobel Prize in literature in 2017, and his first novel since 2015’s The … Read more
[ad_1] Writing about writing and telling stories about stories — these kinds of narratives can feel circularly post-modern. But, as it turns out, they are actually quite conventional and ancient. Homer’s The Odyssey, the vaunted paterfamilias of storytelling in the West, is an epic whose hero’s primary genius is not as a warrior or leader, … Read more
[ad_1] It’s easy to feel like you really know a character after reading a confessional novel. But like people, characters evolve too. In a great novel, they react and change with their conditions. Such is the case in The Committed, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s thrilling sequel to his Pulitzer Prize winning debut novel, The Sympathizer. When … Read more
[ad_1] Courtney Zoffness has a way with beginnings. Consider the opening sentence of her essay, “Boy in Blue”: “Most mornings, my four-year-old arrests me.” Or the instructions at the start of “Holy Body” on how to prepare your body for a mikveh, which involves not just washing every limb and hair but emptying both your … Read more