For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] Margo Steines knows something about pain. At seventeen, while growing up in New York City, she became a dominatrix, her first-ever job. She was a sex worker for a decade, later running her own S/M dungeon—kicking, punching, and otherwise assaulting consenting, paying adult males for a living. She developed a romantic—albeit increasingly tumultuous and … Read more
[ad_1] “I feel the most ridiculous thing is certainty,” the writer Yiyun Li once told Alexandra Kleeman in a profile for The New York Times. Li’s latest short story collection, Wednesday’s Child, shows once again how strongly she holds this. The collection’s eleven stories, written over the course of fourteen years, cover familiar ground for … Read more
[ad_1] Margot Highsmith is 30,000 feet in the air, crammed into the airplane bathroom dabbing at a bloody lip she hadn’t realized was bleeding. Behind in New York: family despair and romantic anguish that might actually just be humiliation. (Sometimes it’s hard to disentangle the two.) But outside of Bozeman, Montana is an empty house … Read more
[ad_1] Chen Chen traverses a wide ground in Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency, past and present, personal and universal, and does so with irreverence to the conventions of didactic poetry and the white western canon. In these past fraught years of Trumpism, the COVID-19 pandemic, and upticks in Asian American violence, Chen approaches … Read more
[ad_1] Alaska is a place of extremes: geography, isolation, weather—even daylight. These extremes sit at the center of Leigh Newman’s new story collection Nobody Gets Out Alive, as the collection probes the limitations and impact of the unique environment. Alaska serves as a common thread linking the narratives and defines the collection. Newman’s 2013 memoir … Read more
[ad_1] Selected by Randall Mann as the winner of the 2020-21 Jake Adam York Poetry Prize, Brian Tierney’s debut collection, Rise and Float, is nothing short of exquisite. Laid bare in these pages is a map of holes that reveal pain and death, as the question of whether or not to continue on in the … Read more
[ad_1] Award-winning Ecuadorian writer Mónica Ojeda makes her English debut with Jawbone, a hair-raising novel about the horrors of adolescence. Ojeda has published short stories, poems, and novels. Jawbone is her third novel, originally published in Spanish in 2018. Sarah Booker, who renders Ojeda’s dense, tightly woven prose into a stunning new English translation, reflects … Read more
[ad_1] Science fiction dystopias are often deployed as a means of examining politics, ideology, or technology, but for Izumi Suzuki, the medium serves an intimate exploration of anxiety, pain, and sadness. The translated stories collected in Terminal Boredom depend on science fiction dystopias, but focus on characters who are broken and seeking their own personal … Read more