For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] Kibogo by French-Rwandan writer Scholastique Mukasonga, translated by Mark Polizzotti, recreates mid-20th-century Rwanda, at the time a Belgian colony. The novel begins during the Second World War, some 13 years after Musinga, the Rwandan king, was deposed for his refusal to convert to Catholicism. In the subsequent years, Rwandans were willingly or forcibly converted, … Read more
[ad_1] Elissa Bassist, a writer known best for her poignant essays on rape culture and as an editor for The Rumpus’s Funny Women column, has taken a new direction in her debut memoir, Hysterical. A play on words, Hysterical follows the author’s search for a diagnosis of a mysterious illness that befalls her after the … Read more
[ad_1] The eight stories in Ling Ma’s collection Bliss Montage are linked, not only because their protagonists tend to be Chinese-American women on the brink of autonomy, or because they drift in the same sea of anomie and escapist fantasy. Rather, on a deeper level, these stories are bound by a subconscious connective tissue. Characters … Read more
[ad_1] American Book Award-winning author Sandra Cisneros has had a decades-long career publishing both prose and poems, and is perhaps most well known for her first book, The House on Mango Street, a novel told in vignettes. She often mixes Spanish and English, putting to words the in-betweenness of her dual U.S.-Mexico citizenship. Woman Without … Read more
[ad_1] A.M. Homes has always been the salty bag of snacks I can’t resist even if it makes me feel a bit queasy. I say this, as an unabashed and hopelessly devoted binger. What hooked me early on was her unvarnished fearlessness, her startlingly refreshing honesty, her willingness to unsettle the reader. Her wit and … Read more
[ad_1] In the protean landscape of contemporary fiction, the historical novel is among those having something of a moment. Given the literary world’s apparently endless quest for ever-marketable books placed within ever-tightening niches, this is on the whole not overly surprising. With access to real worlds that feel alien and actual characters lending themselves easily … Read more
[ad_1] I first came across Gwendoline Riley’s work via Andy Miller’s glowing recommendation on his podcast Backlisted, in which he praises My Phantoms, her latest novel, as “a page-turning discomfort read.” And it is uncomfortable. It’s also darkly funny and incisive. But perhaps the word that best describes it is cold. Over the course of … Read more
[ad_1] Chen Chen traverses a wide ground in Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency, past and present, personal and universal, and does so with irreverence to the conventions of didactic poetry and the white western canon. In these past fraught years of Trumpism, the COVID-19 pandemic, and upticks in Asian American violence, Chen approaches … Read more
[ad_1] Mostly written during the last several years, the poems in Normal Distance, Elisa Gabbert’s highly-anticipated new collection, speak to the disjunctive nature of our times. Yet the juxtaposition of the philosophical and quotidian, often playfully rendered, belies the dexterity involved in crafting these striking poems. Also a well-regarded critic and essayist, Gabbert’s charming, inquisitive mind … Read more
[ad_1] In her insightful and ambitious debut novel, Habilis, Alyssa Quinn takes us on a destabilizing journey through the experiences of several beings by means of a single, muddled existence, illustrating the connectedness of all life and challenging the notion of a discoverable, and inherently meaningful, point of human origin. Through techniques and analyses both … Read more