For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] When the Mexica emperor Moctezuma sent his emissaries to report on the Spanish conquistadors under Hernán Cortés in 1519, neither side understood what the other was saying. It was only through a chain of translations between a Franciscan friar named Aguilar who spoke some Mayan and a young Nahuatl woman given to Cortés as … Read more
[ad_1] In Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights, historian Dylan Penningroth points to the journey towards civil rights for Black Americans beginning “in the fields and cabins of slaves.” Here, in the thick of Antebellum slavery, slaves crafted a knowledge of the law through acts such as accumulation and claims of … Read more
[ad_1] I first met Dr. Amy Brady in real life at a literary reading in Brooklyn. We knew each other through the Chicago Review of Books, where she served as Editor-in-Chief and I wrote book reviews. Since then, she has moved to New Haven and now works as the Executive Director of Orion Magazine and … Read more
[ad_1] I am not so audacious as to claim there’s a single quality that weaves together all of us who love literature—readers, writers, booksellers, publishers, librarians, to name just a few. But whatever list of qualities we may come up with to describe everyone under the umbrella of books, high on that list would be … Read more
[ad_1] Melinda Moustakis’ fiction is an expert tutorial in braiding a story’s environment with its characters’ paths, as much as it is an unveiling of how that braid is not a braid at all but an inseparability, place inextricable from human life. In her debut collection, Bear Down, Bear North, which won the Flannery O’Connor … Read more
[ad_1] In the protean landscape of contemporary fiction, the historical novel is among those having something of a moment. Given the literary world’s apparently endless quest for ever-marketable books placed within ever-tightening niches, this is on the whole not overly surprising. With access to real worlds that feel alien and actual characters lending themselves easily … Read more
[ad_1] Tell somebody that you’re trans and the egg-hunt begins. The acquaintance that popped in for brunch tries to decipher you, to catalog evidence that indicates transformation. The proof of change could be anywhere though, most noticeably, hiding under your lip or reverberating in your voice, but there are less discernible spots too, things they … Read more
[ad_1] Yemeni American poet and translator Threa Almontaser won the 2020 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets for her brilliant debut poetry collection, The Wild Fox of Yemen. Her poems touch on young rebellion, the thin veil of protection a language grants you, and how history is often stored in the body. … Read more
[ad_1] 2020 was a year full of reckonings. For the publishing industry, it meant coming face to face with its continued failures to address a lack of diversity in their companies, and in their slates of authors. According to an Opinion column published in the New York Times entitled “Just How White is the Book … Read more