For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] In the early pages of Oksana Vasyakina’s Wound, the narrator finds herself tucked into a small car with distant acquaintances in a small town outside Volgograd, on her way to pick up her mother’s ashes, where she cannot help but overhear her companions’ conversation: “The cousin said that Western propaganda had gotten really shameless. … Read more
[ad_1] “And now,” writes George Prochnik in his new memoir, I Dream with Open Eyes, “I have left America because the country became alien to me, or because I believe that somewhere out there in the great beyond I might still find a place that sings home?” On that subtle “or” hangs an inquiry. After … Read more
[ad_1] Open Water, the debut novel by Caleb Azumah Nelson, begins when a barber notices the unnamed protagonist exchanging gazes in the mirror with a woman getting her hair cut. The barber says: “You two are in something. I don’t know what it is, but you guys are in something. Some people call it a … Read more
[ad_1] “For me, ghosts are never the spirits of strangers. They are the people I love most dearly,” confesses the narrator of one of the stories in Elvira Navarro’s collection Rabbit Island. Translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney, these stories often cross the line between delusion and reality, constructs that in Navarro’s hands prove … Read more