For The Book Obsessed
[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] The enemies-to-lovers trope is my jam. Is there anything more delicious than watching two people dance back and forth over that line between love and hate? That moment of “you annoy me so much oh no suddenly we’re kissing” is one of my favorite things to read—and write. It’s one of the reasons that … Read more
[ad_1] Across his fiction, journalism, and letters, Fyodor Dostoevsky spoke in many voices. He spoke as a radical who would face mock execution and years in prison for plotting against the tsar. He spoke as a Russian Orthodox believer excoriating liberal society for its smallness and lack of faith. He spoke as a prophet carrying … Read more
[ad_1] A series of interviews between a young, clean-cut journalist and an alternative, independent pichal pairi turns into an unexpected romance. But their relationship is tested when the entire world around them shuts down. I met the pichal pairi by the Ravi’s bank at the mouth of a secret tunnel. She was sitting … Read more
[ad_1] A loner on the run is a Western literary genre trope, but Toronto poet and novelist Gil Adamson transforms it wholly in Ridgerunner, the follow-up to her debut novel, The Outlander. While the first book is a character study of nineteen-year-old Mary Boulton, a woman on the run from her brothers-in-law after she murders … Read more
[ad_1] The thing about boy mom books that I love the most is when they thread the needle between the mother’s wonderment at the very idea of raising a member of the boy species, and then an intense commitment to trying to speak “boy.” The books that I’ve chosen here are really about the art … Read more
[ad_1] Greer Macallister’s thrilling historical fiction novel, The Arctic Fury, is a love letter to adventurous women, unlikely friendships, and finding possibilities in a bleak, unforgiving wilderness. Set in the 1850s, a mysterious, wealthy woman hires guide Virginia Reeve to lead an expedition to find her husband lost in the Arctic North. The novel opens … Read more
[ad_1] From the New York Times bestselling author of Frankly in Love comes a young adult romantic comedy about identity and acceptance: Super Fake Love Song! We are so in love with this book, and we think you will be too. Scroll down to read the moment when Sunny (accidentally) became a rockstar. Gray’s door was always open, because … Read more
[ad_1] In the title story of Nicole Krauss’s fifth book and first collection of stories, To Be a Man, the narrative bends and breaks. Written in three sections with subsections, the narration shifts from first person to third, and then back to first. It’s only twenty-five pages. And it is as brilliant in execution as … Read more
[ad_1] Michael Riedel writes his sequel to Razzle Dazzle kicking off where he ended with his well-received history of Broadway. Singular Sensation: The Triumph of Broadway carries on in a similar way as this first book. Both books mention, and seem to be influenced by, William Goldman’s The Season: A Candid Look at Broadway (1969). … Read more