For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] “My house holds sound / like the sea inside a shell,” writes Lesley Harrison in the poem “Convergence.” And this is the sense one has while reading Kitchen Music, a poetry collection filled with as much sea and wind as a house on the coast of an island. Conversing with a variety of artists … Read more
[ad_1] In the central pages of The Leaving Season, Kelly McMasters decides to leave her marriage. Together with her husband, a painter, she had moved from New York City to rural Pennsylvania to enjoy a slower pace of life, start a family, and later open a bookshop. The decision to leave upends it all. In … Read more
[ad_1] Full disclosure first: I worked with Jen St. Jude at Chicago Review of Books for a number of years. Like many of the creative professionals here, I knew they were at work on a book though I didn’t know many of the details. Reading If Tomorrow Doesn’t Come first offers the pleasure of seeing … Read more
[ad_1] “One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain.” If there’s any book pulsing with this truth, spoken by Bob Marley about the power of music, it is Jacqueline Crooks’s Fire Rush—a book which one can expect to be astonished by from its musicality, fierce passion, and powerful originality. When … Read more
[ad_1] Joe Milan Jr.’s debut novel, The All-American, follows Bucky Yi as he comes of age through some of the most harrowing events a teenager can witness: the poverty of his hometown, the near death of his only male role model, deportation, conscription into a foreign military, and the violence and madness resulting from isolation, … Read more
[ad_1] In Elizabeth McKenzie’s rollicking new novel Dog of the North, a woman named Penny is contacted by a man named Burt Lampey, who claims to be her grandmother Dr. Pincer’s accountant. When Burt asks Penny to help him evacuate her grandmother from her home in Santa Barbara, Penny agrees to— she’s recently suffered a … Read more
[ad_1] Maggie Smith’s new memoir You Could Make This Place Beautiful starts with a postcard written by Smith’s husband to another woman. The postcard marks the beginning of the end for Smith’s marriage, when she “lost the narrative” and “stopped knowing how to tell herself the story of her life.” Smith brings us along as … Read more
[ad_1] At times, trying to pick up basketball in my thirties feels like a fool’s errand. My body is past its days of fast learning, so it takes time for things to stick, and with no coaching my fundamentals are trash. But it has its perks too. For example, one day playing a game with … Read more
[ad_1] Laura Spence-Ash’s debut novel, Beyond That, the Sea, spans thirty years, two continents, and eight points of view, but it never loses focus, momentum, or its loving attention to detail. As German bombs fall over London in 1940, Millie and Reginald Thompson make the difficult choice to send their eleven-year-old daughter, Bea, to America … Read more
[ad_1] Open Catherine Lacey’s Biography of X and you will find a fictional book called Biography of X—though its writer, CM Lucca, admits early on that the title is a lie. Lucca’s wife, X, a multidisciplinary artist with a career full of controversy, has died and an unauthorized biography has been published. Lucca is determined … Read more