Author Basma Abdel Aziz was recently featured in a New York Times piece about Middle Eastern authors who are writing dystopian fiction. Aziz is a psychiatrist who counsels torture victims, and it seems that both her profession and her experience of the Arab Spring have informed her storytelling. Aziz has been compared to both Orwell and Kafka for reasons that will be obvious to readers of The Queue. This novel features an unnamed Middle Eastern city that has experienced political turmoil and rioting and is now ruled […]
Recommended Reading
I think a lot of the books I choose to read I choose because they look important and/or like they’re going to be good for me and/or because I ought to. Books by Doris Lessing and Gloria Steinem come to mind by way of example of this. And I usually end up enjoying these books and feeling glad that I read them. Still, they might not be the kind of books that I would recommend to everybody I know. Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi is a […]
Passion, Obsession and Napoleon
Somewhere between the swamp and the mountains. Somewhere between fear and sex. Somewhere between God and the Devil passion is and the way there is sudden and the way back is worse. Set during the Napoleonic Wars, Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion is a novel about passions, obsessions, and madness. Using her characters, history, and geography, Winterson examines how passion develops among “lukewarm people” and how it can bleed over into debilitating obsession and the loss of self. Some can find their way back from it, […]
The Journey is the Destination
This book has one of the coolest covers I have seen in a long time, and I’m happy to say that the book lives up to its cover. I was drawn to this novel after reading a review that compared it to the Odyssey. This is the story of 17-year-old Blue Riley and her arduous, perilous quest to find her older sister, missing for two years. It is also the story of Blue discovering the truth about the past and finding her voice (literally). The […]
Listening to Autism
My husband and I have two sons who have both been diagnosed on the autism spectrum. Our first diagnosis came about 12 years ago this summer, and I can tell you that like all the other autism parents I know, we immersed ourselves in information once we got the diagnosis. It can be overwhelming — there are books on diets, behavior modification, medications, personal stories, not to mention the vast realms of info (much of it crap) on the Internet. I cannot claim to have […]
A Southern Gothic Treasure
Over the Plain Houses, Julia Franks’ debut novel, is a beautifully written tragedy about a dying love, the struggle between faith and doubt, and encroaching modernity. I believe it can be classified as “Southern Gothic.” Set in rural North Carolina 1939, the story includes many characteristics linked to that genre: decay, violence, the force and romance of nature, a thin line drawn between villains and victims, and even a hint of the supernatural. It is truly a haunting novel. This is the story of Irenie […]
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