For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] Palestinian-American poet, novelist, and clinical psychologist Hala Alyan always has a way of replicating the unreliability of time and delivering one-line monumental truths. Her latest poetry collection, The Moon That Turns You Back, experiments with form and represents the disjointedness of what the in-between looks and feels like. Alyan often writes about diaspora and … Read more
[ad_1] Zuska Kepplová is a Slovak author, editor, and political commentator for the Slovakian daily newspaper SME. In 2011, her book Buchty švabachom was published in her home country, winning the Ján Johanides Prize and becoming shortlisted for the Anasoft Litera Prize, Slovakia’s most prestigious literary prize. Now, twelve years later, Buchty švabachom is available … Read more
[ad_1] Theodore McCombs’s debut collection, Uranians, is a remarkable achievement, a polished and varied set of stories: speculative, queer, and cerebral. The entire set shines on a prose level, from the off-hand description of a climate-ravaged San Francisco with “Hail, thick as eyes” in “Laguna Beach” to the repeated floral metaphors of the title story: … Read more
[ad_1] Writing a book for mainstream publication is always an act of time travel. Given the gap between when a book is “finished” and when it actually appears in bookstores and libraries, the world in which you write the book is never quite the same world the book will be released into. As you write, … Read more
[ad_1] Marlon James’ drive to explore African mythology—beyond boyhood Anansi stories in Jamaica—required a “fact-finding mission to find my own history.” In a New York Times interview, he expresses his desire to create an “electrifying” story: his Dark Star trilogy. Assuming multiple roles—anthropologist, archeologist, historian, skeptic, and scholar of religion—to develop the shapeshifters, vampires, and … Read more