For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] “If you are squeamish don’t prod the beach rubble” is a line by Sappho* that serves as sound advice for the novels of Marguerite Duras. If you are squeamish, don’t crack the cover. There will be grief, there will be a threat of madness, there will be sensuality mottled with darkness, a family may … Read more
[ad_1] Vladimir Sorokin’s Day of the Oprichnik imagines a near-future dystopia in which a wall separates Russia from the rest of the world and the old Tsarist autocracy has been restored, complete with Ivan the Terrible’s Oprichnina, a sixteenth-century forerunner of the secret police. Sorokin’s novel, which was translated by Jamey Gambrell, envisions a Russian … Read more
[ad_1] From the Latin ambitiō, by way of the Old French, across the Channel and the centuries through the Middle English, and finally to the modern day, comes to our protean patois that pleasant, well-groomed word ambition. To us, it is an unassuming noun, unusually simple, for English, to both pronounce and spell, invoking affirmation … Read more
[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] Success is difficult to define. In the modern American landscape, it’s a term that’s become more or less synonymous with wealth rather than any sort of achievement. In the podcast The Relentless Picnic, the hosts remarked on the seeming absurdity that one could be considered a born-success. Fortunately, that’s not a problem for Nineteen, … 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] In the acknowledgments of the novel Dreaming of You, author Melissa Lozada-Oliva includes the following credit: “Thank you Olivia Gatwood, for being so obsessed with dead girls & dying with me.” At this point in her career, such an expression of gratitude is no surprise; poets Lozada-Oliva and Gatwood’s work have been integrally intertwined … 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