I grew up in Connecticut. More often than not, when I mention this to new acquaintances there’s a presumption that my childhood consisted of languid days on the golf course and tennis matches at the local country club—a presumption that the word “Connecticut” is shorthand for rich and privileged. When I see that knowing look […]
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 […]
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.
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.
Forbes is a master of creating high tension and drama in the simplest of movements and actions.
After three years of diligent work, Mario Alberto Zambrano’s first novel, Lotería, provides readers with a new literary experience.
These are challenging times for those committed to literary realism.
Als challenges not just conventional views of literature but the very approach.
Other people’s dust didn’t normally bother Kenny, but when Etienne unplugged the hipsters’ television set and gathered the cord to wind into a neat coil, the gray, rat-shaped clump that rode atop the snaking cord had an oiliness, something organic about it that made him flinch.
In July, seven months to the day after her brother’s death, they arrive in Merzouga, Morocco, gateway to the dune sea of Erg Chebbi. The trip is meant to be a healing interlude, a brief escape; by immersing her in this place of exotic sights and sounds, he has hoped to give her a short respite from her grief.