Every writer has obsessions. These range from overarching themes, like the exploration of Jewish identity that characterizes many a Philip Roth novel, to extremely, sometimes bizarrely, specific motifs. Where some would criticize this repetition as a dearth of original ideas, such lifelong attempts to work through fixations can be productive.
The first time Westover heard about the Holocaust, she was seventeen years old and in her first semester of college. Sitting in a lecture, she sees the unfamiliar word under an image in her textbook. “I don’t know this word,” she tells her professor. “What does it mean?”
The works of Daisy Johnson and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie demand a close look at the inherent sense of intimacy within the second-person perspective, forcing us to consider how we read the body in this mode of storytelling.
If Hawkins’s workers struggle with their materials or the limits of their strength and stamina, Chang reveals a different antagonist through the figure of the boss, firing workers at will and propping up the corporation.
As a writer and botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer weaves lyric storytelling with science, gleaned from both Western institutions and the indigenous wisdom of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation to which she belongs.
Over the course of the fragmented, deeply imagistic book (which Kang has described as a narrative poem), whiteness expands beyond solid objects into concepts and sensations, its every iteration part of an adjacent world in which her sister is not dead and it is she, instead, who is absent.
When I worked as a waitress to make money for college, I kept thinking about the tin can where the family of Betty Smith’s novel put “half of any money they got from anywhere.” One crisis after another forces them to empty the can. I knew a similar frustration.
Kunzru’s novel offers a chance to revel in the hubris of white boys. As such, it is a revenge story.
Literature that reflected the queer experience seem a shared resource, and a public one for those who knew how to look for it. But books can act as more than a mirror—aren’t they also a window?
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