Why All Americans Should Read “Celestial Bodies”

Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharthi won the Man Booker International Prize this year for its beautifully rendered portrayal of a family’s tangled history in the village of al-Awafi in Oman. The novel was the first book translated from Arabic to win the prize, and more surprisingly, it was the first novel by an Omani woman […] The post Why All Americans Should Read “Celestial Bodies” appeared first on Electric Literature. Continue reading at 'Electric Literature'

[ Electric Literature | 2019-11-26 11:59:00 UTC ]

Other news stories related to: "Why All Americans Should Read “Celestial Bodies”"


Being An Intellectual Won’t Pay the Bills

In Christine Smallwood’s debut novel The Life of the Mind, protagonist Dorothy escapes the stifled environment of an academic conference for one she finds even more depressing: the slot machines. There, she runs into her former dissertation advisor, Judith, a woman who caused her significant... Continue reading at Electric Literature

[ Electric Literature | 2021-05-06 11:00:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this


Review: Rachel Cusk trades in a blank-slate narrator for a tall drink of vinegar

"Second Place," Rachel Cusk's first novel after the radical, brilliant "Outline" trilogy, follows a forceful woman who's had enough of difficult men. Continue reading at Los Angeles Times

[ Los Angeles Times | 2021-04-28 14:00:33 UTC ]
More news stories like this


8 Historical Fiction Novels About War-Torn Love

Every love story is built with inherently high stakes. After all, a heart can be the ultimate prize, and courtship a most dangerous risk. And love, as we all know, won’t stop for much. Our hearts pay no attention to timing or impediments, and logic falls by the wayside as we feel the anguish of... Continue reading at Electric Literature

[ Electric Literature | 2021-04-28 11:00:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this


Cover reveal: Wole Soyinka’s Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth.

Literary Hub is pleased to reveal the US cover for Wole Soyinka’s new novel, Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth, which will be published on September 28 by Pantheon Books. This will be Soyinka’s first novel to be published in 48 years, and also the first since he won the... Continue reading at Literrary Hub

[ Literrary Hub | 2021-04-23 13:30:34 UTC ]
More news stories like this


Why Writing a Memoir is Like Making Kimchi

In Crying in H Mart, Michelle Zauner—also known as the indie-pop musician Japanese Breakfast—writes of her mother’s battle with terminal cancer and the caretaking process. The mother-daughter relationship is the beating pulse of this memoir, presented in all of its uncomfortable complexities.... Continue reading at Electric Literature

[ Electric Literature | 2021-04-22 11:00:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this


7 Memoirs About Unraveling Family Secrets

There are as many different kinds of memoirs as there are novels, maybe more. The public-figure memoir. The witnessing-history memoir. The survivor’s memoir. The addiction memoir. The let-me-set-the-record-straight memoir. The travel memoir. The memoir about one specific family member. The... Continue reading at Electric Literature

[ Electric Literature | 2021-04-09 11:00:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this


A Potion Made of Stolen Gold to Achieve the Indian American Dream

Sanjena Sathian’s debut novel Gold Diggers is set in the Indian American suburbs of Atlanta—a world of competitive debate and spelling bees, of racing to get into the most prestigious academic summer camps, of Miss Teen India pageants—all roads leading to the promised land of America’s most... Continue reading at Electric Literature

[ Electric Literature | 2021-04-09 11:00:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this


I Work in a Bookstore. Why Am I Still Shelving “Mein Kampf”?

When Dr. Seuss Enterprises announced it would no longer be publishing six of Dr. Seuss’s books which have aged problematically, the bookstore I work at in Scranton, Pennsylvania had a flurry of very concerned customers. People were coming up with stacks of his books along with an... Continue reading at Electric Literature

[ Electric Literature | 2021-04-07 11:00:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this


Lolita, Fashion Icon

From LOLITA IN THE AFTERLIFE, edited by Jenny Minton Quigley. Reprinted by permission of Vintage Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Essay copyright © 2021 by Robin Givhan. Compilation copyright © 2021 by Jenny Minton Quigley. The... Continue reading at Electric Literature

[ Electric Literature | 2021-03-17 11:00:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this


Canceling My Book Deal Was the Best Career Move I’ve Ever Made

I started querying agents for my memoir, Negative Space, in 2012, after two years of writing and revising. I got a few rounds of passes, including several friendly rejections in which agents said they just didn’t “know how to sell” my book. I heard this refrain enough times that I started... Continue reading at Electric Literature

[ Electric Literature | 2021-03-11 12:00:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this


Joy Williams’ first novel in 20 years is coming this fall.

While we don’t know what the state of the our pandemic society will be come September, we can at least be sure that we’ll all be getting a little Joy Williams, as a treat. Specifically, a new novel—her fifth, and her first since 2000’s The Quick and the Dead, which was a runner-up for the […] Continue reading at Literrary Hub

[ Literrary Hub | 2021-03-03 21:01:23 UTC ]
More news stories like this


In Kazuo Ishiguro’s ‘Klara and the Sun,’ a robot tries to make sense of humanity

Ishiguro’s first novel since winning the Nobel Prize in 2017 is a delicate, haunting story, steeped in sorrow and hope. Continue reading at The Washington Post

[ The Washington Post | 2021-03-02 16:46:21 UTC ]
More news stories like this


We Can’t Believe Survivors’ Stories If We Never Hear Them

When we started sheltering in place at the beginning of the pandemic, in a burst of energy and optimism I haven’t experienced since, I started a social distance book club. I selected Lara Williams’s debut novel Supper Club, which I’d recently read, because I thought a book that centered on women... Continue reading at Electric Literature

[ Electric Literature | 2021-03-02 12:00:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this


“Justine” Is a Coming-of-Age Novel for the Tamogotchi Set

Perhaps it’s not surprising that even the prose in illustrator Forsyth Harmon’s debut novel Justine is deeply imagistic. Reading this short, powerful story feels like wandering through a museum exhibit about teenage girlhood on Long Island in the summer of 1999. Narrator Ali and her friends feed... Continue reading at Electric Literature

[ Electric Literature | 2021-03-02 12:00:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this


Olga Tokarczuk's 'magnum opus' finally gets English release – after seven years of translation

The Books of Jacob, praised by the Nobel prize judges and winner of Poland’s prestigious Nike award, will be published in the UK in NovemberThe magnum opus of Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk – a novel that has taken seven years to translate and has brought its author death threats in her native... Continue reading at The Guardian

[ The Guardian | 2021-02-26 15:00:18 UTC ]
More news stories like this


Lauren Oyler’s Narrator Is Unreliable, but So Are All of Us Online

Lauren Oyler’s debut novel brings the reader down a rabbit hole of endless, mindless scrolling, online identities, and conspiracy theories. Fake Accounts follows the journey of a young woman after she discovers that her boyfriend is running an Instagram account spouting dangerous conspiracies... Continue reading at Electric Literature

[ Electric Literature | 2021-02-26 12:00:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this


An Argentinian Underworld Haunted by the Ghosts of the Disappeared

In Daniel Loedel’s haunting debut novel Hades, Argentina, Tomás Orilla returns to Buenos Aires—“a city made for forgetting as much for nostalgia”—ten years after fleeing the military dictatorship whose regime disappeared upwards of 30,000 thousand political opponents, including Isabel Aroztegui,... Continue reading at Electric Literature

[ Electric Literature | 2021-02-25 12:00:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this


Faber bags Caldwell's 'beautifully moving' wartime novel

Faber is to publish Lucy Caldwell's first novel in nearly a decade, These Days. Continue reading at The Bookseller

[ The Bookseller | 2021-02-23 01:30:10 UTC ]
More news stories like this


Open the Portal: A Conversation with Patricia Lockwood

READING PATRICIA LOCKWOOD’S first novel feels a lot like having your brain poisoned by the internet — or at least like having that particular contemporary condition understood. No One Is Talking About This is a searing entry into the rapidly emerging pantheon of digital culture literature, told... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books

[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2021-02-16 16:00:53 UTC ]
More news stories like this


Unseen work by Proust announced as ‘thunderclap’ by French publisher

The Seventy-Five Pages, out next month, contains germinal versions of episodes developed in In Search of Lost Time and opens ‘the primitive Proustian crypt’For everyone who decided to bite the madeleine and read all 3,000-odd pages of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time during lockdown,... Continue reading at The Guardian

[ The Guardian | 2021-02-16 15:21:36 UTC ]
More news stories like this