For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] How do we begin to talk about the past four years—or even farther back—where perhaps the most unprecedented thing is the unprecedented need to overuse the word unprecedented? Tell me about it! In The Great Wave, Michiko Kakutani’s latest—a part political, part historical, nonfiction ride of a book—she does just that, taking us on … Read more
[ad_1] It’s a fantasy we’ve all imagined—winning the lottery. Most of us know exactly which debts we’d pay off first, what we’d buy, and who we’d help out if we found ourselves instant millionaires. But we’ve also heard story after story of a winning gone wrong—cautionary tales that highlight humanity’s greed. How money can make … Read more
[ad_1] Chen Chen traverses a wide ground in Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency, past and present, personal and universal, and does so with irreverence to the conventions of didactic poetry and the white western canon. In these past fraught years of Trumpism, the COVID-19 pandemic, and upticks in Asian American violence, Chen approaches … Read more
[ad_1] It’s a tricky thing to infuse a story set in our actual, current world with giant supernatural problems and potentials. Call it “the problem of allegorical interference.” If we’re aware of actual injustices in the world—and their often-thorny causes—then it becomes, at best, weird to blame them on vampires or aliens, to focus on … Read more
[ad_1] In a climate of planetary crises and collapses of democracy, Aruni Kashyap’s There is No Good Time for Bad News talks about renewed prospects and survival after violence. The poems in this collection are about a landscape that has much catching up to do compared to its nation’s momentum of progression. In “Alpha Ursae … Read more
[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] In Patricia Ann McNair’s newest collection Responsible Adults, many of the stories take place in a fictional town called New Hope. One can easily imagine a town with this name exists in the Midwest, and it’s also fitting for the theme: each story teems with an ache toward hope, a moodiness tinged with heartbreaking … Read more