For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] For years, I’ve read Kristine Langley Mahler’s essays and have come to expect inventive structures, sentences that are taut and on-target, and a meticulous attention to detail. These signatures are no doubt present in her debut essay collection, Curing Season: Artifacts, which explores and catalogs four years of the author’s adolescence spent in suburban … Read more
[ad_1] When Fatimah Asghar pictures her father alive, she imagines him ordering a pizza. “At the pizza shop he eyes pepperoni. . . . he orders a slice with no sauce,” a young Asghar observes. Asghar, a Chicago-based poet, writer, and artist, is the child of two Pakistani-Muslim refugees, both of whom died by the … Read more
[ad_1] When we select a book from the shelf and open its pristine pages, we might believe the process of producing that book was smooth, even dreamy. We might imagine the author sat down, and the words arrived to her perfectly formed, the characters coherent, the plot sure-footed. Sara Lippmann would likely disagree with you. … Read more
[ad_1] Short story author and novelist Elizabeth McCracken has just published a book, The Hero of This Story, in which the main character is Natalie Jacobson McCracken, educator, writer, and former editor-in-chief of Boston University alumni magazine, Bostonia. Elizabeth herself is the narrator of this novel. And, also, the daughter of Natalie. In the novel. … Read more
[ad_1] It’s Not Nothing is the kind of novel that you can’t help but to savor. Every sentence, every turn of phrase is liable to catch you off guard—knock you off center—crack you up or kill you. In it, protagonist Rosemary Candwell shuffles in and out of bars, hourly jobs, and institutions, trying to grasp … Read more
[ad_1] In its long and popular history with writing, the term “craft” and its associates—“toolbox,” “workshop,” “mechanics”—have always looked somewhat incongruous. Rather than bring the poet to mind, they evoke the technician or the engineer, paring back emotional intimacy in favor of writing’s nuts and bolts. Think of Kurt Vonnegut charting plot on a blackboard … Read more
[ad_1] In this heartfelt and bracing debut, Ramona Reeves renders the complex lives of the people of Mobile, Alabama, in all their pursuits and struggles. It Falls Gently All Around and Other Stories presents a memorable account of a community through the intimate lens of their relationships, addictions, longings, and fears. Reeves excellently sets the … Read more
[ad_1] Before coming to America in search of a safer life as a transgender woman of color, renowned activist, performer, and now writer, Cecilia Gentili grew up in the small city of Galvez, Argentina, as the daughter of an Italian father and Argentinian mother. Faltas: Letters to Everyone in My Hometown Who Isn’t My Rapist, … Read more
[ad_1] Marcie Rendon’s mystery novels simultaneously inform and entertain readers, presenting current Native American issues through her heroine’s efforts to solve crimes perpetrated against society’s more vulnerable members in the early 1970s. When the Cash Blackburn series’ third volume opens, a body surfaces in the Red River Valley’s meltwater; the spring floodwaters on this North … Read more
[ad_1] How well can we ever know the people we love? Are there limits to healthy affection? Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya makes literal in her fiction the questions we might be afraid to ask. With her debut novelette, Helen House, these questions take a sinister turn. The story’s narrator and her girlfriend, Amber, share an intense … Read more