For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] Salomea Künstler, known as Mamie and all of eleven, has just arrived in California with her parents and grandfather when Cathleen Schine’s Künstlers in Paradise begins. An orange tree grows in the garden of their new home in Santa Monica, and in the “odd, shining fog” of their first morning, they ate oranges, “as … Read more
[ad_1] “Obsessions are a way of knowing a person,” Erin Langner writes, and obsession is certainly a central subject in her debut essay collection, the Zone 3 Press Nonfiction Book Award-winner Souvenirs from Paradise. In its pages, Langner explores how her relentless “object appreciation” and preternatural curiosity have led her back to the Las Vegas … Read more
[ad_1] In the 1970s, Love Canal, an otherwise peaceful neighborhood in Niagara Falls, New York, was afflicted by environmental oddities resembling Biblical plagues. Thick, viscous scum roiled on the surface of local streams. Rocks in the local playground would occasionally burst into flames. A noxious stench invaded basements and kitchens, seeped into clothes, and burned … Read more
[ad_1] Hanya Yanagihara is not merely a maximalist; she is more specifically a writer of extremity. In internet terms, her novels are a lot: long, serious, and interested in the psychology of horrible people, or of un-horrible people trapped in horrible situations. They attempt to be less stylistically or conceptually dense than emotionally dense. A … Read more