For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] Being a teenage girl is hard. Especially on Long Island during the summer of 1999. No one knows this better than Forsyth Harmon. Author of the illustrated novel Justine, Harmon digs deep into the lives of two high school friends, Ali and Justine, using their multi-layered relationship to explore all the complexities and confusion … Read more
[ad_1] Releasing a debut novel is always a fraught endeavor, and in a pandemic, it’s even more so. But the luckiest debut novelists see buzz building for their books well in advance of publication. Right now, that buzz belongs to Sarah Penner and her inventive, compelling historical novel, The Lost Apothecary. It’s been named among … Read more
[ad_1] When recalled over morning coffee, intense, meaningful dreams dissolve into confused fragments that escape language and leave even a sympathetic listener out in the cold. But what if a dream could be pinned down with all of its illogically tantalizing details, its particular atmosphere, primal details, shifting scenes, to arrive, finally, at some essential … Read more
[ad_1] Daniel Borzutzky’s newest collection of poetry, Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018, examines specific violence in America, explicit within the global economic order. This collection, like his 2016 National Book Award-winning The Performance of Being Human, and Lake Michigan, examines a psychogeography of movement. There’s Pittsburgh, Chile, the American Middle West. Bodies … Read more
[ad_1] An I-Novel by Minae Mizumura is an immigrant story turned on its head. In traditional tales, a foreign-born young person arrives on American shores unable to speak the language but grows up to become a great success. An I-Novel, instead, is about two Japanese sisters in America who long to go “home.” But what … Read more
[ad_1] The self-help book never goes out of style because we always want more. The billion dollar market continues to grow each year, but the gist remains the same: make money, save time, be present, find joy. They promise that we all have the potential to self-actualize in the career of our dreams. But what … Read more
[ad_1] Karin Tidbeck is one of those writers whose work is delightfully hard to pin down to a genre—their work includes fantasy and science fiction, but slips between genres to new and stranger places. In their new novel, The Memory Theater, Tidbeck has crafted a kind of modern folktale. Inventive, surreal, at times violent, the … Read more
[ad_1] Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts is one of the most buzzed-about debuts of this year. The premise is intriguing: On the eve of Trump’s inauguration, a blogger finds out that her boyfriend is secretly a conspiracy theorist. She decides to dump him rather than confront him right away. The secret knowledge that Felix, her boyfriend, … Read more
[ad_1] Priyanka Champaneri’s enthralling debut novel, The City of Good Death, winner of the 2018 Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, is a heart-warming read about a city where people come to die in peace and the beauty of being alive, enhanced by the unapologetic presence of death in the lives of its characters. … Read more
[ad_1] It’s an unexpected delight to be able to review previously-unseen work by the late Roberto Bolaño 18 years after his death. Bolaño—the Chilean poet-novelist perhaps most known for his books The Savage Detectives and the already-posthumously published 2666, both translated into English by Natasha Wimmer—left an abundant back catalog of poetry and prose after … Read more