For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] “I dreamed of writing love letters to the homies,” José Olivarez tells the reader in the author’s note to Promises of Gold, his multilayered and much-anticipated second collection of poetry, which can be read in English and in Spanish translation. Seeing a bilingual edition of contemporary poetry from a major American publisher is rare, … Read more
[ad_1] D Doon Arbus’s debut novel, The Caretaker, feels both firmly grounded and strangely out of time. It’s textured, densely, with brick and cloth, with an overabundance of artifactual detritus, furtively character-driven, and yet one could easily forget what century it’s from. Arbus embraces a slightly awkward distance from her subjects, enough to leave the … Read more
[ad_1] Dizz Tate’s Brutes is a dark coming-of-age story that follows a gang of ruthless 13-year-old girls as their latest obsession, an older girl named Sammy, disappears from their Florida town of Falls Landing. Having tracked her every move and watched her sneak out to meet with a boy by the lake, the girls witness … Read more
[ad_1] There is something uniquely intimate about getting to know someone through their voice. To hear a person without seeing them allows our imaginations to flourish. We form an identikit based on an accent or a specific intonation, or how they mispronounce a certain word. We pay attention to how they express themselves and tell … Read more
[ad_1] The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century by Olga Ravn, translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken, is a meditation on living, conveyed fragmentally, through a series of numbered statements given by workers—some of whom are human while others are humanoid artificial intelligence—on a space vessel called the Six Thousand Ship. While … Read more
[ad_1] While Gayle Brandeis was writing her best-known book, The Art of Misdiagnosis, she attended a retreat at St. Mary’s Art Center in Virginia City, Nevada. Settling into her Victoriana room for the weekend, she prepared to transcribe her mother’s documentary, the last artwork her mother produced before hanging herself. Brandeis didn’t believe in the … Read more
[ad_1] How many of us appreciate the miracle that is our breath? Appreciate our bodies—our whole bodies, including our curves, our folds, our very flesh? What do breath, the body, and our feelings about both, have to do with writing anyway? If you were to ask Gayle Brandeis what breath and the body have to … Read more
[ad_1] In September 2022 in Iran, Jina Mahsa Amini was arrested for wearing her hijab incorrectly; that is, the fabric did not cover her head completely. Three days later, she died while in police custody from severe head trauma, which the Iranian government denies. Her head, the object that caused her arrest, was beaten, the … Read more
[ad_1] When disaster strikes, we’re confronted with our own mortality, however close we are to the loss. The pandemic, for one, uprooted and interrogated our sense of normalcy—what our daily lives meant to us, our relationships, our age, our sense of time. We realized that the structures we’d always depended on were quicksand. That whatever … Read more
[ad_1] February is here, which means love is in the air and a whole host of new books are on the horizon! There’s so much to look forward to this month, including a number of exciting memoirs, debuts, and at least seven books from Chicago authors. Add that the days are slowly beginning to get … Read more