For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] Tananarive Due is a prolific writer of speculative fiction. Her many accolades include an American Book Award, an NAACP Image Award, a World Fantasy Award, and two nominations for the Stoker Award. She is also a continuing lecturer at UCLA’s Department of African American Studies. Due’s supernatural thriller novel The Reformatory follows 12-year-old Robbie … Read more
[ad_1] It’s an odd thing, about trends. A trend seems to take on a life of its own, morphing and consuming its way through the zeitgeist. How do they begin, why do they die? There’s something of Orwell’s groupthink, removed (usually) of its menace and totalitarian bent, but nonetheless reflective of the base human need … Read more
[ad_1] Satire often depends on specific moments in time and place. The challenge of writing great satire is in transcending those limits. For instance, Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal spoke to a time and place, anchored to a historic period, but rendered irrelevant by Ireland’s economic rise and the period of the Celtic Tiger. Or … Read more
[ad_1] In the first poem of the much-anticipated new collection from poet Ada Limón, The Hurting Kind, Limón wonders: “Why am I not allowed / delight? A stranger writes to request my thoughts / on suffering”. The collection that follows is Limón’s response to the stranger, and an exhortation to the reader: as much about … 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] Your appreciation of Gunnhild Øyehaugh’s Present Tense Machine, translated by Kari Dickson, will be partially predicated on how much you think about multiverses, or déjà vu, or ever have had the indescribable sense of something missing, in yourself, in others. What elevates this novel beyond the admittedly fascinating realm of such scientific ruminations is … Read more
[ad_1] Jonas Eika—author of After the Sun, translated into English by Sherilyn Nicolette Helberg—has managed to do the impossible; or, at least, the very difficult. He’s written a book that both feels bleeding-edge now, and seems like it will still feel bleeding-edge in a decade. Certainly, the complexities of our modern world are no stranger … Read more
[ad_1] Trauma likes to stick around. It likes to burrow its way under our skin and nestle there, getting comfortable without your knowing—or maybe you do know, maybe you can feel it setting its claws into you and taking hold. Either way, the trauma is there to stay, not rearing its head or making itself … Read more
[ad_1] In January 2013, J. Nicole Jones penned the essay “Why’s everyone so down on memoir?” In this piece, she examines the criteria for why writers perceive memoir as beneath the novel form. Within her investigation she grapples with Lorrie Moore’s claims that the faultiness of memory shows how memoir cannot convey the deeper meaning … Read more
[ad_1] Burning Worlds is Amy Brady’s monthly column dedicated to examining how contemporary literature interrogates issues of climate change, in partnership with Yale Climate Connections. Subscribe to her monthly newsletter to get “Burning Worlds” and other writing about art and climate change delivered straight to your inbox. Julie Carrick Dalton’s debut novel, Waiting for the Night Song, hums with … Read more