For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] Martin Ritt’s 1976 film The Front delivers a vivid re-creation of the 1950s Red Scare in which many of Hollywood’s most talented writers, actors, and directors found themselves blacklisted and prevented from working in the film and TV industry because of past or present Communist associations and their refusal to name names. In the … Read more
[ad_1] Though a fairly slender book, and a compelling read, Lavie Tidhar’s The Circumference of the World is difficult to summarize—a stream of stories and events flowing into each other like a Möbius strip. Delia Welegtabit, a mathematician, reflects on her island childhood in Vanuatu and hires a rare book dealer to track down her … Read more
[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] I vividly remember a moment when someone in one of my writing workshops described my writing as “blue collar” because I was writing about my father’s work as a Chicago firefighter. Until then, I had always viewed my upbringing as comfortably middle class. My parents worked incredibly hard and sacrificed often in order to … Read more
[ad_1] Working-class literature is a bit of an oddity. Do we mean it’s any type of literature written by an author with a working-class background? Is it literature written about the working class? I believe it is both to some extent. For me, working-class literature is at its best when it doesn’t use members of … Read more
[ad_1] Influences are strange things. They’re active, sought out, even entreated. But they’re also elusive, enigmatic, disguised. In art, in life, in social media, influences are all the rage, personified as nouns and stacked in neat Wikipedia sidebars. The bizarre nature of language, the way in which it follows patterns and shape-shifts into a facsimile … Read more
[ad_1] Mary Jo Bang’s acclaimed translation of Dante Alighieri’s Inferno starts with this unforgettable verse: “Stopped mid-motion in the middle / Of what we call our life, I looked up and saw no sky—Only / a dense cage of leaf, tree, and twig. I was lost.” As I am “mid-motion in the middle” of my … 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] I’d promised myself I would take a break from contributing for a few months, but broke that promise when I saw Etaf Rum’s Evil Eye on the list of September releases. I couldn’t resist the opportunity to talk to Etaf again, as we’d had such a great conversation in 2019 about her debut novel, … Read more
[ad_1] Grief is a powerful emotion. It demands and deserves respect. We may fight it, repress it, or swim against it, but in the end, denying grief only prolongs the pain that must eventually come. For the poet and novelist Brendan Shay Basham, that reckoning transpires in the body. While the mind may try to … Read more