For The Book Obsessed
[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] While Ramadan is most commonly known as the month during which Muslims abstain from eating and drinking from dawn until sunset, it is also a month of increased contemplation and reflection. This month-long spiritual retreat brings with it an opportunity to get a better understanding of one’s self and spiritual state, and to rejuvenate … 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] A decade ago, the success of wizard books and vampire franchises had caused something of a stir in literary New York. Culture writers Lindsay Weber and Amanda Dobbins declared in Vulture that “Mermaids are the New Vampires.” More than one literary agent even went as far as telling me they were seeking out a … 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] In the earliest days of publishing my writing, before I had really figured out who I was as an artist, when I was willing to submit my work far and wide without much consideration, I realized I had a natural inclination to pander toward style and subject matter I thought were more likely to … Read more
[ad_1] We all have a story we tell about our lives. There is a certain power we harness in storytelling that lets us be whoever we want to be. But perhaps the telling becomes most powerful when we can speak truthfully, when we can come to terms with reality. In Laura Adamczyk’s debut novel, Island … 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