For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] Growing up, historically, has never been easy. Childhood today is punctuated by a number of general threats not limited to climate change, world hunger, lack of access to clean water, refugee crises, police brutality, housing shortages, and a global pandemic. Children have also witnessed devastating events such as multiple mass shootings and bombings, Hong … Read more
[ad_1] It’s a recognizably portentous way to begin a war film: a field of farmers bent over stalks of tomato plants, picking their crop under a blazing sun. Viewers like myself, accustomed to Deer Hunters and Apocalypse Nows, will be primed for these peasants to be mowed down momentarily in a hail of machine gunfire. … Read more
[ad_1] The four essays in Body Work, the new book by Melissa Febos, pull at several underlying power struggles that are inherent in acts of creative writing: vulnerability risks judgment, writing your side of the story privileges your memories and perspective over others in the story, presenting a perspective at odds with hegemonic forces invites … Read more
[ad_1] Translation—the conveyance of ideas, sentences, a story, a feeling, from one language to another—is inherently contradictory: be as exact as possible, or risk failing at the act. But since the transference of meaning is something so subjective, so tied to cultural and social cues, one could argue “exact” is impossible. Translation becomes its own … Read more
[ad_1] In the essays in In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing, Elena Ferrante—perhaps the greatest living novelist—describes her formation as a writer and her views on writing. Although In the Margins may appeal most to Ferrante devotees like me eager to read about the ideas of fiction that led to novels … Read more
[ad_1] Irene Solà is an award-winning Catalan poet, novelist, and visual artist who won the 2020 European Union Prize for Literature for her second novel, When I Sing, Mountains Dance. Translated by Mara Faye Lethem, When I Sing, Mountains Dance depicts the griefs and joys of one human family against the vibrant backdrop of the … Read more
[ad_1] For all the antagonizing, ruminating, and even moralizing that comes with defining the parameters of literary fiction, perhaps the one point of (near-) universal agreement debators enjoy is over the notion that such a book should be in some way realistic, should faithfully reflect life and those who live it. How this is to … Read more
[ad_1] In Defense of Witches: The Legacy of the Witch Hunts and Why Women Are Still on Trial, by Mona Chollet, is a revelatory collection of histories and experiences that have been carefully ignored across centuries of time. Even a devoted reader will find it difficult to think of a book besides Chollet’s that does … Read more
[ad_1] Among the array of ignorant comments some Americans make about immigrants is one that anyone is lucky to live here. Setting aside this country’s terrible history (and very flawed present), such reductionist remarks ignore the significant costs of leaving one’s home country. Sindya Bhanoo’s debut story collection, Seeking Fortune Elsewhere, confronts these tolls head-on, … Read more
[ad_1] From the beginning of recorded history, there’s one thing we’re all certain about: one day, this is all going to end. “I am writing this book because we’re all going to die,” says Kerouac, in Visions of Cody, a eulogy in book form to his friend Neal Cassady. But in a sense, all books … Read more