For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] In Burning Roses, S. L. Huang treats a fairy tale as merely the prologue to the rest of a life. We meet Little Red Riding Hood, Rosa, as an older woman already looking back on her life. The famous encounter with the wolf at her grandmother’s house is long behind her—far from the guiltless … Read more
[ad_1] It’s easy to become caught up in the conventions of realist literary fiction as representative of fiction itself. After all, it’s a reign that has stretched from Balzac to the present day, and the modern strain of American cinematic fiction only reinforces this understanding. But the expanse of work situated in and against realism … Read more
[ad_1] In his new book, This Isn’t Happening: Radiohead’s “Kid A” and the Beginning of the 21st Century, a story centered on the Radiohead album Kid A, music critic Steven Hyden—without meaning to—asks the “Where were you when…” question regarding the album’s release: “I know I bought Kid A the day it came out, as … Read more
[ad_1] Inhospitable attitudes towards women in a gendered-Hollywood; a melancholic Oscar Levant; the allure of cinema in black and white— these are just a few of the thought-provoking aspects in Chicago essayist David Lazar’s new book Celeste Holm Syndrome: On Character Actors from the Golden Age of Hollywood. A writer of three previous books of … Read more
[ad_1] An extraordinary, often mesmerizing engagement with the nature of identity and other existential trappings, The Math Campers, Dan Chiasson’s new collection of poetry, is a meta-kaleidoscope of literature and literary influence. A geometric swirl of the many faces of the author’s family and friends (particularly his teenage sons), it is colored and blended by … Read more
[ad_1] In My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending our Hearts and Bodies, author Resmaa Menakem challenges us to think of white supremacy as “white-body supremacy” because “every white-skinned body, no matter who inhabits it — and no matter what they think, believe, do, or say — automatically benefits from it.” In … Read more
[ad_1] Sixteen years after the publication of her breakout novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, Susanna Clarke’s second novel has arrived. The new novel, Piranesi, bears a family resemblance to its predecessor, sharing its unique creative vision and a detailed approach to the fantastic. Though these features appear in a very different time and place, … Read more
[ad_1] We have all, at some point in our lives, awoken to find that something we used to believe is a lie. The world used to look one way, but now you can see right through it, the cracks and the fissures. A part of you is fractured, your self is changed, disconnected, and it … Read more
[ad_1] Like a murmuration of starlings, Toni Jensen’s new book Carry changes its shape constantly and effortlessly. Its subtitle is A Memoir of Survival on Stolen Land, but this book is more than a memoir. It is also a revealing lexicon, a sharp analysis, a well-sourced argument, and a damning indictment. Its form changes even … Read more
[ad_1] Inequality may be as old as human society, but never has it been this extreme, quantifiable and remediable. We’ve seen everyone from the Pope to Bernie Sanders to Thomas Piketty break it down. In meme-speak, guillotine GIFs have been proliferating on Twitter since 2016. But COVID-19 has made the message irrefutable. The fallout from … Read more