The problem has not been finding a place where I belong, which is how a children’s book might tell it, but of finding ways of insisting on belonging nowhere.
-Eula Biss, On Immunity
notes on life and literature
The problem has not been finding a place where I belong, which is how a children’s book might tell it, but of finding ways of insisting on belonging nowhere.
-Eula Biss, On Immunity
Near the start of college, I first came across the work of Virginia Woolf through her greatest novels—Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves—and I instantly knew I’d found an author whose books I would always appreciate.
In Heart Berries, Terese Marie Mailhot recounts her coming of age as a Nlaka’pamux woman in Canada, while questioning what it means to ethically narrate the stories of Native lives.
This year I’ll be participating in Nonfiction November, a month-long challenge to read, write about, and discuss as much nonfiction as possible, with a themed discussion prompt posted at the start of each week.
Continue reading “nonfiction november: your year in nonfiction”
Mini reviews of two memoirs: Jeanette Winterson’s Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? and David Sedaris’s Calypso.
Until recently, I always had avoided audiobooks. While some doubt that listening to books counts as reading, that line of thinking never has appealed to me: I just had no interest in the format, since I associated it with the monotonous books on tape that my childhood library hoarded in its cloistered back room.
Set in a village on the outskirts of Norway, Hanne Ørstavik’s Love tracks the lonesome paths a single mother and her young son take over the course of a single winter’s night.