For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] In her debut collection examining the myriad identities of modern Asian and Asian-American women, Cleo Qian does not shy away from both the real and surreal aspects of longing. Indeed, longing is the most palpable feeling of Let’s Go Let’s Go Let’s Go, and Qian embodies this feeling in all its dimensions. Whether the … Read more
[ad_1] A novel Kate Zambreno reads during the first year of the pandemic opens with a description of an apartment walled by windows on all sides. The novel’s protagonist has recently separated from her husband, and she takes this sun-struck apartment for her three-year-old-daughter. Zambreno, a Guggenheim fellow, professor of writing at Columbia University, and … Read more
[ad_1] No book has influenced how I approach book reviews more than Craft in the Real World by Matthew Salesses. The book challenges the lens many readers use, one shaped by white, Western values, and is a call not only to make space for diverse storytelling, but to evaluate it on its own terms. And, … Read more
[ad_1] Each of the seven stories in Samanta Schweblin’s collection Seven Empty Houses engages with the subject of significant absence in ways that are distinct, while fitting easily beneath the same thematic umbrella. Characters search for missing people, objects, and pieces of themselves. Certain losses documented in these stories can never be recouped, yet each … Read more
[ad_1] “Most literature, like life, is about how to have less and how to have more,” says Deborah Levy in Real Estate, the third volume of her “living autobiography” of her life as a writer and woman. In this latest chronicle, Levy wonders what it might mean to have more as she turns 60 and … Read more
[ad_1] “For me, ghosts are never the spirits of strangers. They are the people I love most dearly,” confesses the narrator of one of the stories in Elvira Navarro’s collection Rabbit Island. Translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney, these stories often cross the line between delusion and reality, constructs that in Navarro’s hands prove … Read more
[ad_1] “You can be a mother and a poet.” So writes Kate Baer in “Moon Song,” part of her first poetry collection, What Kind of Woman. She effortlessly spans parenting, friendship, love, and how women perceive and are perceived, with stunning imagery. Poems like “Female Candidate” hit home, upending the current moment to examine it. … Read more
[ad_1] Sometimes the separation between the lived experiences of neighbors can be just as profound as if they grew up on different planets. Privilege, opportunity, and access can be shifted by the smallest geographic space, a city street, or a country’s border. Few understand this truth better than the protagonist of Micaiah Johnson’s debut novel, … Read more