For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] The eeriness and isolation of uncolonized, hostile worlds make S.A. Barnes’s sophomore novel, Ghost Station, feel claustrophobic. Yet it also remains a work about community and personhood that centers on self-knowledge and self-chosen identity. These opposing thematic threads reflect the motivating force of the story personified in Ophelia Bray, the black sheep of an … Read more
[ad_1] Ghost Pains is author Jessi Jezewska Stevens’ third book and first story collection. Propulsive, reflective, and at times sharply comic, Stevens’ short fiction is characterized by her precise, original prose and striking moments of observation and insight. The protagonists of her stories, equal parts aloof and earnest, at times resemble the leads in her … Read more
[ad_1] I first met Fatin Abbas in 7th grade French class—September 1993, New York City. Although we were both new to the school, our places of origin were 6,000 miles apart. At the time I didn’t know what had brought her to the United States from Sudan, that her family had fled political persecution following … Read more
[ad_1] In Lulu Wang’s film The Farewell—the story of Billi, a young Chinese-American woman who returns to China after several years to spend time with her dying grandmother, who remains ignorant of her own condition—there is a scene between Billi and her uncle in which he explains the difference in their perspectives. Billi believes the … Read more
[ad_1] Lisa Taddeo has fostered a reputation for understanding women’s sexual prowess. In Taddeo’s breakout nonfiction book Three Women, she embedded herself in the lives of three disparate people to explore how their sexual experiences impacted them and their ongoing relationship with sex. The protagonist of her debut novel Animal has endured sexual trauma. Her … Read more
[ad_1] In the summer of 2007, a short story by a young Korean-American writer named David Hoon Kim appeared in the pages of The New Yorker. It was Kim’s first published work of fiction. This auspicious beginning is normally the stuff of literary legend, about as straight-line a course for a book deal as a … Read more
[ad_1] The U.S. release of Vertigo & Ghost—already the winner of the 2019 Forward and Roehampton Prizes in the United Kingdom—should gain Fiona Benson a much-deserved wider audience. Her poetry is in turn thrilling, dizzying, devastating, lyrical, distinctive, and this is a bombshell of a collection. The first section uses classical mythology as a structural … Read more
[ad_1] Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat is a genre-bending autofictional book about one woman’s “crush”—on a poem written three centuries ago. In the narrator’s first encounter with the “Caoineadh Airt Ui Laoghaire,” written by the eighteenth-century Irish noblewoman Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill after her husband was murdered, and while she was pregnant … Read more
[ad_1] I. It was called “Boy In The Shadows,” and it scared me, sure, but only enough to fascinate me, not enough to keep me awake at night. At eleven, I wanted to be mystified and amazed, maybe a little unsettled, but not actually terrified. The summer before, a campfire story about a blood-soaked slumber … Read more