For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] As a cisgender white male, I am least interested in what cisgender white males have to say. Too often, too many suck the oxygen out of discourse leaving no space for others to speak and reducing everything down to another version of mansplaining. Their work seems to be in service of shaping the world … Read more
[ad_1] Elinor Cleghorn’s Unwell Women: Misdiagnosis and Myth in a Man-Made World is an intriguing exploration of the history of women’s health, specifically how women are perceived as individuals and members of a larger healthcare system. The theme, across countries and time periods, is centered on disbelief. The female body, long-held in a place of … Read more
[ad_1] The final story of Nana Nkweti’s debut short story collection, “Kinks,” bears the book title in a telling passage: “No matter how many boardroom doors Jennifer walked through, sometimes she felt her steps falter—in the Ghanaian beauty shop, at Awing tribal meetings, she felt like a counterfeit African, felt the unworthiness of the maid’s … Read more
[ad_1] Stories of family trauma, parent-child relationships, and sibling relationships are not new in literature. Compelling examples go as far back as the Bible. Unfortunately, writing about family trauma has also often been negatively characterized as confessional, as if certain life experiences are either too embarrassing or otherwise unworthy for literary exploration. The Brothers Silver, … Read more
[ad_1] For all the ink shed—in reviews, interviews, and criticism—about the trials and tribulations of navigating the literary world on the level of the individual novel, comparatively little space is provided to career-wide discussions. While this is understandable given the enormous challenge that writing and publishing just one book presents to the writer (not to … Read more
[ad_1] There’s always a certain sense of disbelief that comes with the arrival of June: have we really gotten halfway through the year already? Many of us might be finding that harder to believe than usual with all the strange and singular challenges 2021 has already brought us. But the good news is there’s no … Read more
[ad_1] Zakiya Dalila Harris’ debut novel, The Other Black Girl, is set in the predominantly white and fiercely competitive world of publishing. Nella Rogers is Wagner Books’ only Black employee, so she’s thrilled when another Black woman, Hazel, is hired. Initially, the women bond, but soon everything shifts, and Nella finds herself at the bottom … Read more
[ad_1] In an early chapter from Karen Tucker’s debut novel Bewilderness, the narrator, Irene, and her friend Luce come upon a stash of opioids. “I peered down at the jumbled blue tablets,” Irene tells us. “They really did look about as harmless as breath mints, and yet even I knew I was at the edge … Read more
[ad_1] From the earliest pages of English poet Sam Riviere’s debut novel, Dead Souls, the reader is catapulted into an extended internal monologue satirizing the follies of the literary world, particularly its poets. And there’s no winding up to the action: from its beginning, the novel’s pace is manic and relentless, evincing the unnamed narrator’s … Read more
[ad_1] Trauma likes to stick around. It likes to burrow its way under our skin and nestle there, getting comfortable without your knowing—or maybe you do know, maybe you can feel it setting its claws into you and taking hold. Either way, the trauma is there to stay, not rearing its head or making itself … Read more