For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] Montana is often called “Big Sky Country,” but you wouldn’t necessarily know it from the people inhabiting Deirdre McNamer’s Aviary. Set in an elderly housing facility called Pheasant Run, the novel is a tender and evocative portrait of life in its late stages, when confinement might be physical but the memory can still roam … Read more
[ad_1] The title of Gina Frangello’s debut memoir, Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason, can be read as an imperative: to destroy with the body a space created, inhabited, and processed by the self. This idea invites a certain scrutiny: why would anyone be moved to create such a rupture … Read more
[ad_1] In January 2013, J. Nicole Jones penned the essay “Why’s everyone so down on memoir?” In this piece, she examines the criteria for why writers perceive memoir as beneath the novel form. Within her investigation she grapples with Lorrie Moore’s claims that the faultiness of memory shows how memoir cannot convey the deeper meaning … Read more
[ad_1] With renewed interest across the country in Black-owned bookstores and booksellers—like Chicago’s own Semicolon Bookstore & Gallery—now is an important time to remember that Bronzeville was an epicenter of Black bookselling in the 1940s. Remembered mostly for its theaters, taverns, jazz clubs, and other venues of commerce, Bronzeville was a thriving Black Metropolis in … Read more
[ad_1] By looking beyond the surface clues to deeper and more unsettling realities, the detective story lends itself well to horror, even cosmic horror. There are no elder gods or supernatural terrors lurking in Hummingbird Salamander, Jeff VanderMeer’s newest novel, but I found myself reading with that kind of dread. A grippingly-paced and paranoid eco-thriller, … Read more
[ad_1] The surrealist painter Leonora Carrington is enjoying a renaissance of late, with renewed interest in both her visual art and literary work. The last few years have seen the publication of The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington (Dorothy Press), the memoir Down Below (New York Review Books), and, just this January, Carrington’s masterpiece The … Read more
[ad_1] My first introduction to Helen Oyeyemi’s work was her story collection What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, and I found it curious and unlike anything else I had read up to that point. Her following two novels Boy, Snow, Bird and Gingerbread are similar in their fantasticism, but it’s her newest novel Peaces … Read more
[ad_1] When World War II comes to an end in Siegfried Lenz’s The German Lesson, our young narrator, Siggi, is looking through a microscope at some fish eggs. His biology teacher has forced his class to learn about fish reproduction, even as anti-aircraft guns fire just off the North Sea coast. Siggi is disappointed in … Read more
[ad_1] Since her connection with American and European surrealist groups of the 1960s (Arsenal, Phases) Rikki Ducornet has deployed tactics familiar to the historical avant-garde, including an emphasis on gnosticism, cosmology, diablerie, bestiary, eroticism, and revolution, to produce an astounding body of work, cogent and ethical in its beauty and spirit. Ducornet’s early novels form … Read more
[ad_1] I was first introduced to Kirstin Valdez Quade’s writing in a graduate workshop, when the professor led a discussion on the short story “Nemecia,” from her debut collection Night at the Fiestas. Since then, I return to this story whenever I reach the distinct point of writer’s block where I need to remind myself … Read more