For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] Anita Kopacz’s debut novel Shallow Waters is a vibrant reimagining of Yemaya, an Orisha (deity) from the Yoruba religion, and her place in American history. The story of Yemaya was passed down through oral tradition, brought to the “New World” by enslaved Africans as early as the 16th century. In Shallow Waters, Yemaya exists … Read more
[ad_1] It’s been several years since Calling a Wolf a Wolf shot into the literary consciousness, and since its tremendous success, the award-winning poet Kaveh Akbar has also made a measurable impact as an educator, the current Poetry Editor of The Nation, and a remarkably generous poetry supporter. His sophomore collection, Pilgrim Bell, enters into … Read more
[ad_1] In her most recent book The President and the Frog, Carolina De Robertis helps us to see the world as strange as it is, again. We are taken into the home of the former president of an unnamed Latin American country, where he has invited journalists to discuss his legacy and democracy’s present hard … Read more
[ad_1] The drought is getting worse. Rice farmers in the San Joaquin Valley are resorting to selling their water as an economic alternative to poor crop yields. Wildfires tear through the brush, destroying homes and displacing countless human and non-human residents. Mile-high fire clouds—what scientists call “pyrocumulonimbus”—gather in the sky and hurtle bolts of lightning … Read more
[ad_1] Brian Evenson’s new collection of short stories, The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell, is set in a not-so-distant future where the environment has unsurprisingly degraded even further than what we face now, as well as in fantasy worlds entirely unlike our own. No matter the setting, there is an ever-present sense that things are … Read more
[ad_1] Pulitzer Prize winner and former U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove returns after twelve years with an exquisite new poetry collection, Playlist for the Apocalypse. Her poems magnify the marginalized individual, simultaneously illuminating national and global failed attempts at democracy. As always, her words are raw, poignant, and accessible. The opening segment, “After Egypt,” came … Read more
[ad_1] With a Megan Abbott book, you have a good idea what you’re going to get. Ever since 2012’s Dare Me, Abbott has carved out a niche writing about women and girls in high-pressure environments, pushing back against restrictions and limitations until tempers boil over. Dare Me and You Will Know Me rendered high school … Read more
[ad_1] In the summer of 2007, a short story by a young Korean-American writer named David Hoon Kim appeared in the pages of The New Yorker. It was Kim’s first published work of fiction. This auspicious beginning is normally the stuff of literary legend, about as straight-line a course for a book deal as a … Read more
[ad_1] We have made it to what they call the “dog days” of summer, when temperatures typically reach their enervating—though it’s a little hard to believe it can get much hotter. For those of us still in school, a return to the classroom, whether virtually or in person, looms on the horizon. Vacations are starting … Read more
[ad_1] A common refrain in the teaching of the craft of writing, to whatever extent that can in fact be done, is that one’s form and content, story and structure, should each be sculpted with the other in mind, a sort of mechanical drinking bird for the art of fiction, where the pressures of one … Read more