For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] At the very beginning of Balsam Karam’s novel The Singularity (translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel), a pregnant woman stands witness as a woman lets herself fall off a cliff in her sightline, disappearing silently into the ocean. From there, time unspools forward and backwards, giving the reader insight into both past and … Read more
[ad_1] Jinwoo Chong’s debut novel Flux bends time and identity equally as three characters take turns sharing the narrative spotlight in a story that explores trauma, regret, Americanness and dealing with everything in between. Bo, who is eight years old, suffers the tragic loss of his mother and finds solace in a detective show. Brandon, … Read more
[ad_1] The review is late. I’m stalling. Every attempt is a false start, a throat clearing. I stare out the window, nuzzle the dog, dispel a crust of sleep from his eye. Soon, my children will leave home and I’ll have no one to over-parent but the dog. Already I’m bereft. I get up to … Read more
[ad_1] When disaster strikes, we’re confronted with our own mortality, however close we are to the loss. The pandemic, for one, uprooted and interrogated our sense of normalcy—what our daily lives meant to us, our relationships, our age, our sense of time. We realized that the structures we’d always depended on were quicksand. That whatever … Read more
[ad_1] In her insightful and ambitious debut novel, Habilis, Alyssa Quinn takes us on a destabilizing journey through the experiences of several beings by means of a single, muddled existence, illustrating the connectedness of all life and challenging the notion of a discoverable, and inherently meaningful, point of human origin. Through techniques and analyses both … Read more
[ad_1] Like many, I’ve been eagerly anticipating Ocean Vuong’s Time Is a Mother, his second collection of poems following the success of Night Sky with Exit Wounds and his debut novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. But whether it’s a sign of our temporally unrooted times or my increasingly scattered mind, I found myself considering … Read more
[ad_1] Writing a book for mainstream publication is always an act of time travel. Given the gap between when a book is “finished” and when it actually appears in bookstores and libraries, the world in which you write the book is never quite the same world the book will be released into. As you write, … Read more
[ad_1] In a climate of planetary crises and collapses of democracy, Aruni Kashyap’s There is No Good Time for Bad News talks about renewed prospects and survival after violence. The poems in this collection are about a landscape that has much catching up to do compared to its nation’s momentum of progression. In “Alpha Ursae … Read more
[ad_1] House of Hollow by Krystal Sutherland is the talk of the (bookish) town, and here are just a few reasons we invite you to hop on the House of Hollow hype train! 1. THE PLOT TWIST via GIPHY No spoilers, but…you’re not ready. 2. The writing will give you chills. via GIPHY “She was … Read more
[ad_1] Karin Tidbeck is one of those writers whose work is delightfully hard to pin down to a genre—their work includes fantasy and science fiction, but slips between genres to new and stranger places. In their new novel, The Memory Theater, Tidbeck has crafted a kind of modern folktale. Inventive, surreal, at times violent, the … Read more