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] What do we ask of art? How, indeed, can we know what it is? On this, the philosophers tend to disagree. At some level, we know it when we see it, as the Supreme Court once said about some other hard-to-define thing. In the twenty-first century, it is probably the most politic to say … Read more
[ad_1] Chicago was a tinderbox. In 1871, the city was packed with wood-frame houses, wooden sidewalks, and hay-filled barns, nestled alongside lumber processing mills, paper factories, wood-frame churches, and saloons. Thirty-four years since its municipal incorporation, Chicago was now home to over 300,000 people, roughly half of them immigrants who journeyed to the city seeking … Read more
[ad_1] Though a fairly slender book, and a compelling read, Lavie Tidhar’s The Circumference of the World is difficult to summarize—a stream of stories and events flowing into each other like a Möbius strip. Delia Welegtabit, a mathematician, reflects on her island childhood in Vanuatu and hires a rare book dealer to track down her … 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