For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] Single word titles always have a shot at perfection, but they are trickier than they seem. They can easily be obvious, boring, or simply irrelevant. Brood, in title alone, assumes its place among the seraphim, taking on a trio of meanings: active wallowing in unhappy thoughts, a mother doing a mother’s job, and a … Read more
[ad_1] Is there a more back-handed compliment than to be called a “woman before her time”? There’s something self-congratulatory in the appellation, how it’s both dismissive of an artist’s work in the moment while anticipating a better future for them that might never arrive. Yet it’s a description that seems to be trotted back out … Read more
[ad_1] Lee Weiner was one of the infamous Chicago 7, whose trial became a cause celebre for the left during the manic year of 1968. Weiner was also the only one of the group who actually hailed from Chicago, and whose public profile was smaller than his comrades Tom Hayden and Abbie Hoffman. His memoir … Read more
[ad_1] Kazuo Ishiguro is an author at the top of his craft. But rather than rest on his laurels, the knighted, Booker Award winning, and Nobel laureate author is back with Klara and the Sun, his first new work since winning the Nobel Prize in literature in 2017, and his first novel since 2015’s The … Read more
[ad_1] Writing about writing and telling stories about stories — these kinds of narratives can feel circularly post-modern. But, as it turns out, they are actually quite conventional and ancient. Homer’s The Odyssey, the vaunted paterfamilias of storytelling in the West, is an epic whose hero’s primary genius is not as a warrior or leader, … Read more
[ad_1] It’s easy to feel like you really know a character after reading a confessional novel. But like people, characters evolve too. In a great novel, they react and change with their conditions. Such is the case in The Committed, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s thrilling sequel to his Pulitzer Prize winning debut novel, The Sympathizer. When … Read more
[ad_1] Courtney Zoffness has a way with beginnings. Consider the opening sentence of her essay, “Boy in Blue”: “Most mornings, my four-year-old arrests me.” Or the instructions at the start of “Holy Body” on how to prepare your body for a mikveh, which involves not just washing every limb and hair but emptying both your … Read more
[ad_1] Being a teenage girl is hard. Especially on Long Island during the summer of 1999. No one knows this better than Forsyth Harmon. Author of the illustrated novel Justine, Harmon digs deep into the lives of two high school friends, Ali and Justine, using their multi-layered relationship to explore all the complexities and confusion … Read more
[ad_1] Releasing a debut novel is always a fraught endeavor, and in a pandemic, it’s even more so. But the luckiest debut novelists see buzz building for their books well in advance of publication. Right now, that buzz belongs to Sarah Penner and her inventive, compelling historical novel, The Lost Apothecary. It’s been named among … Read more
[ad_1] When recalled over morning coffee, intense, meaningful dreams dissolve into confused fragments that escape language and leave even a sympathetic listener out in the cold. But what if a dream could be pinned down with all of its illogically tantalizing details, its particular atmosphere, primal details, shifting scenes, to arrive, finally, at some essential … Read more