For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] Maggie Smith’s new memoir You Could Make This Place Beautiful starts with a postcard written by Smith’s husband to another woman. The postcard marks the beginning of the end for Smith’s marriage, when she “lost the narrative” and “stopped knowing how to tell herself the story of her life.” Smith brings us along as … Read more
[ad_1] A list of Patricia Smith’s achievements in poetry could take up much of this interview. A poet, playwright, essayist, educator and mentor, she’s deservedly won nearly every accolade and award, including the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement, and earlier this year she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. … Read more
[ad_1] “There’s a way to be playful even in times of really terrible doubt,” posits the narrator of Ali Smith’s new novel Companion Piece. It’s hard to think of an author more playful than Smith, whose work consistently breaks the conventional rules of contemporary fiction as taught in most American MFA programs—with consistently incandescent results. … Read more