For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] The experience of reading, like any intimately subjective experience, is a challenge to fathom, perhaps as tricky for us as it was for Augustine, staring in wonder at his Milanese mentor Ambrose seeming to read without speaking the text aloud. What actually occurs in a reading mind? What goes on in that spooky, liminal … Read more
[ad_1] A former industrial boomtown, sinking into dingy oblivion. A web of extended immigrant families, drifting apart as individual fortunes rise and fall. The prodigal son, home from the big city. No, this isn’t a novel set in the Rust Belt, however much its plotline speaks to the lived experiences of many Midwesterners. Late Summer … Read more
[ad_1] While events in the past year have left some hoping for a “return to normal” in the coming months, others must continue to cope with a very different day-to-day life, including those affected by the consequential uptick of mental health crises. So how do we collectively and individually begin to confront the reality of … Read more
[ad_1] Among the great and hidden challenges of past tense, first-person narration—and one that, while seemingly omnipresent in contemporary fiction, is seldom discussed—is fixing the temporal distance between the act of the narrating and the fictive events themselves. It is a concern that asks, essentially, how far away in time is the protagonist from herself … Read more
[ad_1] Are the temperatures rising where you are, dear reader? If you’re like those of us at the CHIRB without regular access to air conditioning, maybe you’ve begun to seek refuge at afternoon matinees or the local public pool. Unfortunately books can’t offer such instant cooling gratification, but they more than make up for that … Read more
[ad_1] “We really do live in a pulp empire,” says Dr. Paul S. Hirsch. A chance discovery in an unlabelled box of federal documents led him to unearth a vast government plot to weaponize comic books. While this sounds like a pulp comic plot itself, Dr. Hirsch has produced Pulp Empire, a nonfiction work that … Read more
[ad_1] In her memoir Leaving Breezy Street, Brenda Myers-Powell propels readers through the story of her remarkable life with raw energy and gripping, charismatic storytelling. A survivor of molestation, prostitution, abuse, and addiction, Myers-Powell offers a deeply honest, deeply moving look at the years of physical and emotional violence that she suffered, and the mechanisms … Read more
[ad_1] If I could only have one book on my coffee table, it would be Chet’la Sebree’s Field Study, winner of the 2020 James Laughlin Award. Field Study skillfully synthesizes writing genres and resists general categorization, upending the conventions of poetry, memoir, and autoethnography with the author admitting that “some of the characters here are … Read more
[ad_1] Set about 200 years in the future, Neil Sharpson’s When the Sparrow Falls is narrated by Nikolai Andreivich South, a low-ranking state security bureaucrat in the Caspian Republic. Earth has been transformed by the emergence of super-powerful artificial intelligences and technology allowing people to transfer their consciousness to the digital realm. The Caspian Republic … Read more
[ad_1] The U.S. release of Vertigo & Ghost—already the winner of the 2019 Forward and Roehampton Prizes in the United Kingdom—should gain Fiona Benson a much-deserved wider audience. Her poetry is in turn thrilling, dizzying, devastating, lyrical, distinctive, and this is a bombshell of a collection. The first section uses classical mythology as a structural … Read more