For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] When headlines are filled with war, bigotry, pandemic, climate change, and other everyday violences, it can be hard to feel grounded. Poetry that faces these world-ending times head on can be a salve. Some of these collections directly address the times we’re living through while others will leave you with a sense of comfort … Read more
[ad_1] I think Shayla Lawson is a literary genius, so their new book, How to Live Free in a Dangerous World, was among my top most anticipated 2024 titles. Shayla is not only whip-smart—agonizingly careful with each word and comma, so every sentence they write packs a punch—but they’re also masterful at making connections. They … Read more
[ad_1] A weary resilience worker should know better than anyone: no one is safe when the world is always ending… The nail gun was busted so I was up on the roof with an actual hammer. It wasn’t bad: a minor storm had come in overnight and swept the heat away. The morning was … Read more
[ad_1] Even the terminal dryness of bone hides inside our skin plainly, like dust on a mirror. This can guide us forward or not guide us at all. — Kaveh Akbar, “Portrait of the Alcoholic Three Weeks Sober” In 2017, I started taking notes for a novel I longed to write about a father and … Read more
[ad_1] When I was in middle school, I was haunted by the Boomtown Rats’ song “I Don’t Like Mondays.” A local radio station in Atlanta played the song every Monday morning, and it would remind me of dreary weeks at school and what I thought was my sad, inevitable march toward adulthood. The song features … Read more
[ad_1] “I hid my queerness for years,” Daniel Allen Cox writes in I Felt the End Before It Came: Memoirs of a Queer Ex-Jehovah’s Witness, his memoir-in-essays about coming of age within two conflicting identities: “I knew there was something wrong with me because the books and magazines told me so.” In these reading materials, … Read more
[ad_1] Climate change has been the focal point of environmental concerns with the threat of rising seas, flooding, droughts, and food shortages attributed to it. Apocalyptic outcomes are on the horizon, and so many speculative narratives in recent years have projected end-of-world scenarios tied to the calamity. Sarah K. Jackson’s debut novel, Not Alone, finds … Read more
[ad_1] When the waters rose, the people who stayed on the River learned they weathered the storms best together, but what happens when one of their own becomes curious about the Land? Back before I wrestled the River for Sheckie and won, they called us the three troubles. Sheckie was a cobbler of … Read more
[ad_1] A friend explains that the world is divided into paragraph and sentence writers. A paragraph writer is like a brick mason, working with consistent materials and focused on maintaining a clean line as a wall unfolds. Building a stone wall, a sentence writer in contrast begins with a pile of rocks—clots of material formed … Read more
[ad_1] Lines suggest beginnings and endings, possibilities and limits, differences and connections. Lines can be made by humans. Hand-drawn borders on maps mark one sovereign’s subjects from another’s, their consequences cascading down generations in languages spoken and traditions shared. Lines can be made by nonhumans, too. The horizon stretches across the sea. Waves reach up … Read more