For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] Laura Spence-Ash’s debut novel, Beyond That, the Sea, spans thirty years, two continents, and eight points of view, but it never loses focus, momentum, or its loving attention to detail. As German bombs fall over London in 1940, Millie and Reginald Thompson make the difficult choice to send their eleven-year-old daughter, Bea, to America … Read more
[ad_1] Nathan Ballingrud’s The Strange is set on Mars in the early 20th century—not a scientifically accurate Mars, but one more like Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles or earlier planetary romance, with a breathable atmosphere and signs of earlier civilizations. Colonized by Americans, among others, this is a distinctly frontier-like Mars, with most of the main … Read more
[ad_1] Jinwoo Chong’s debut novel Flux bends time and identity equally as three characters take turns sharing the narrative spotlight in a story that explores trauma, regret, Americanness and dealing with everything in between. Bo, who is eight years old, suffers the tragic loss of his mother and finds solace in a detective show. Brandon, … Read more
[ad_1] You may scoff, but I attribute the day that I watched my first K-pop video as one of the most influential days in my short life. In May 2020, the Minnesota lakes were heating up amidst a raging pandemic. I returned home in March as everything shut down, desperate for stability while people fell … Read more
[ad_1] A friend explains that the world is divided into paragraph and sentence writers. A paragraph writer is like a brick mason, working with consistent materials and focused on maintaining a clean line as a wall unfolds. Building a stone wall, a sentence writer in contrast begins with a pile of rocks—clots of material formed … Read more
[ad_1] Open Catherine Lacey’s Biography of X and you will find a fictional book called Biography of X—though its writer, CM Lucca, admits early on that the title is a lie. Lucca’s wife, X, a multidisciplinary artist with a career full of controversy, has died and an unauthorized biography has been published. Lucca is determined … Read more
[ad_1] By most accounts, one is considered a wild success if he grows up in poverty in a rural village in India and then overcomes the obstacles imposed by those circumstances to become become a surgeon in London, then a senior department leader in a hospital, and then retires in a riverside penthouse—the type of … Read more
[ad_1] Anthologies are simultaneously one of the most important venues for literature and an almost impossible task to create. Readers expect to be enlightened on multiple levels, with each individual entry telling a cohesive story while also working collectively with the other entries to add up to a larger meaning. At the heart of every … Read more
[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] A list of Patricia Smith’s achievements in poetry could take up much of this interview. A poet, playwright, essayist, educator and mentor, she’s deservedly won nearly every accolade and award, including the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement, and earlier this year she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. … Read more