For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] I proudly call myself a fan of Old Hollywood, but until this year I had never seen a Rita Hayworth movie. I’d seen her famous pinup image for LIFE magazine, known vaguely of her as a 1940s “love goddess,” and watched clips of her in Gilda, but I’d never actually viewed any of her … Read more
[ad_1] For all the antagonizing, ruminating, and even moralizing that comes with defining the parameters of literary fiction, perhaps the one point of (near-) universal agreement debators enjoy is over the notion that such a book should be in some way realistic, should faithfully reflect life and those who live it. How this is to … Read more
[ad_1] I’ve heard people claim that they wish that they were religious in the fundamentalist mode, because it would be so much easier. Easier, they mean, because while the non-believer is a grown-up person who understands that God—like Santa; or like notions of fairness and romance—is dead, the believer still trusts with childish naivety in … Read more
[ad_1] Sasha Fletcher is a poet who has catapulted himself onto the fiction scene with his first novel, Be Here to Love Me at the End of the World. An unpolished description of the text could be the following: an absurdist, historical fiction love story set in the near future. Sam and Eleanor are an … Read more
[ad_1] I discovered the seminal punk band Angry Samoans when I was 14, thanks to the lurid cover of their second and best-known album “Back From Samoa.” The songs were idiotic, with titles like “Tuna Taco” and “My Old Man’s a Fatso,” but they winked knowingly at the listener. There is wisdom in madness, they … Read more
[ad_1] Gabriel Krauze wastes not a single word getting to the action in his debut. Where many novelists hold their readers’ hands in the opening pages, slowly introducing them to the narrator, the world, and the characters that inhabit it, Who They Was instead pushes them face first and mid-sentence: “And jump out the whip … Read more
[ad_1] “Two deaths you cannot have and one you cannot avoid.” So goes a Russian saying Mikhail Iossel remembers in his excellent new collection Love Like Water, Love Like Fire. Funny thing about Iossel’s stories of Soviet life, though: they are filled with men and women living second lives, drunks who avoided death (to their … Read more
[ad_1] In her final, incomplete work, The Life of the Mind, Hannah Arendt sought to consider how thinking—an action so obvious its exploration appeared unnecessary—links vita activa, the active life, with vita contemplativa, the contemplative mind. Drawing on the intellectual history of ideas, Arendt posited that thinking creates neither morality nor understanding itself; but, instead, … Read more
[ad_1] Lauded Argentine journalist and author of Things We Lost in the Fire, Mariana Enríquez again delivers intrigue and brutality in her latest story collection, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell. Stories of spirits and disappearances collectively address the mystery of loss through narratives that are as gripping … Read more
[ad_1] I’ve always thought of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History as the grandmother’s attic of the entire country: a snug space packed with antique items of erstwhile importance, objects no longer in direct use, but stowed away for current and future generations to contemplate. Some of the holdings enjoy more eminence than others. … Read more