Passage of Tears

“There is a painting by Paul Klee called Angelus Novus. It shows an angel who seems about to move away from something he stares at. His eyes are wide, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look. His face is turned toward the past. Where a chain […]

The Devil’s Workshop

How do we memorialize twentieth century atrocities? And who decides what, why, and how we remember?  As James Young, a professor of English and Judaic Studies whose scholarly work has focused on memorials to atrocities, writes in The Texture of Memory (Yale University Press, 1993), “Memory is never shaped in a vacuum; the motives are […]

Without a Net

Trapeze artists and animals. Freaks and clowns. Crowds, high-wires and swallowed swords. In the same way listeners raised on digital music still recognize a scratched-record sound in a radio ad, the images in Ana Maria Shua’s Without a Net evoke a circus whether or not we have been to one.

On Sal Mal Lane

In this era saturated with polarization: political, religious and economic, where opposing forces take sides through every available media mouthpiece, Ru Freeman’s second novel On Sal Mal Lane is a soothing balm from the daily assault of divisiveness.