For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] When I started reading GennaRose Nethercott’s short story collection Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart: and Other Stories, I was struck by the evocative description that these stories were about “the abomination that resides within us all.” Nethercott’s characters yearn for something missing in their lives, often love—but also a purpose, an answer, or … Read more
[ad_1] When I started reading GennaRose Nethercott’s short story collection Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart: and Other Stories, I was struck by the evocative description that these stories were about “the abomination that resides within us all.” Nethercott’s characters yearn for something missing in their lives, often love—but also a purpose, an answer, or … Read more
[ad_1] On the way home from work, Dunia Ahmed is attacked and nearly flung to her death onto New York City subway tracks. When strangers manage to rescue her, the man who would have been her murderer ends his own life instead. The mystery of why someone Dunia had never met wanted her dead takes … Read more
[ad_1] Very early in my spiritual education, I was taught by my elders to be cautious about making claims. One reason for this caution—particularly when it comes to making claims about oneself—is that claims are often rooted in the ego. They betray the fact that so much of what we claim about ourselves can be … Read more
[ad_1] You never can tell where life will take you. When I met Beth Uznis Johnson at an MFA alumni event for Queens University of Charlotte, she lived in Michigan, and I lived in Chicago. Who’d have guessed that a decade later, she’d live a few blocks from me, and we’d meet for Monday writing … Read more
[ad_1] Ani Gjika’s An Unruled Body follows the author from the turbulent final years of Albanian communism through an era of transition and on to a somewhat fated path to Boston—as a matter of fact, it is her “grandmother’s faith that gets [her] family to the U.S.” In this memoir, the passage from girlhood to … Read more
[ad_1] Sadie and Alice have been best friends since high school and now live on opposite ends of California. When budding actress Alice comes back to the Bay Area to perform in a basement-theater production of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, she expects reliable Sadie to attend opening night. But her friend has special plans of … Read more
[ad_1] The thing about longing is that it could take any form, really. Though vastly different on the surface, everything from going on walks or reading poems, to forged marriages for the sake of securing permanent legal residence, skipping meals, or crossing borders can be powered by an ineffable call towards something, someone, that emanates … Read more
[ad_1] When she moved to Toronto—not far from the windy, desolate plains where she grew up—Dawn thought she had escaped the traumas of her past. And yet, when her life doesn’t go as she hoped it would in the big city, she finds herself driving back to the small town of her childhood—where her mother … Read more
[ad_1] Have You Been Long Enough at Table, a debut poetry collection by Leslie Sainz, bubbles over with poetic range. There are sonnets and prose poems and ghazals and a narrator grappling with her Cuban American identity and family history of immigration and displacement. The poems bring the reader to the table covered in ancestral … Read more