In Vulture, book critic Christian Lorentzen suggests we dispense with terms like “postmodern” and “postwar” when discussing novels, and instead analyze them relative to the presidential administrations under which they were released. What will we mean when someday we refer to Obama Lit? I think we’ll be discussing novels about authenticity, or about “problems of […]
Quotes
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
A New Era of Unreality: Stop Making Sense, or How to Write in the Age of Trump
In the Village Voice, Aleksandar Hemon explores the “unreality” of a Trump presidency, likening this era of American history to the start of the war in Bosnia in 1992, and calling for new literature that doesn’t shy away from the conflicts and destruction ahead.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Between Their Arab Past and American Present
Lauren Alwan narrates her family’s migration from Syria to California to explore how people’s evolving identities help gain them a foothold in America and create unintentional tensions across generations.
Posted inProfiles & Interviews, Quote Posts, Quotes
Paul Auster: ‘I Feel Utterly Astonished That We Could Have Come to This’
In a candid interview at the Guardian, author Paul Auster — who turns 70 next month — discusses his breadth of work over the decades, American life and politics in the age of Trump, and his new novel, 4321, which he refers to as the biggest book of his life.
Posted inBlog Post, Quotes, Unapologetic Women
Why We March: ‘A Love of Self and Each Other,’ an ‘Act of Survival’
Women’s Marches around the world brought out more than one million protesters.
Posted inNonfiction, Quote Posts, Quotes
‘Then Again, Maybe They’re Just Birds’: One Farmer’s Bald-Eagle Problem
What happens when your chickens are killed by predators protected by law? At The New York Times Magazine, Wyatt Williams reports on the farming hardships posed by bald eagles and what one family farm in Bluffon, Georgia, is trying to do about it.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
This Is Rape
T Kira Madden tells the story of her rape, confusion, and redemption to show us what rape culture really looks like in this country.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Scientific Language of Cooking
Have dinner with Harold McGee, the academic-turned-cookbook author who paved the way for Alton Brown and a whole generation of culinary scientists.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
What Happens When a Tribe Cuts Ties with 306 of Its Own Members
In more than 30 years of membership, Annie’s descendants became interwoven in the life of the tribe. They married other Nooksacks and had kids; those kids had kids. But once the disenrollment process began, people chose sides. “It was just like a light switch,” Elizabeth Oshiro, one of the 306, told me. People she knew […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes, Unapologetic Women
‘Continue Panicking’: Samantha Bee’s Interview with Journalist Masha Gessen
“Really it’s the nuclear holocaust I’m worried about.” One of my essay selections for Longreads Best of 2016 was by Masha Gessen, the Russian-American journalist and author of 2016’s The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin, whose “Autocracy: Rules for Survival” in the New York Review of Books revealed in stark […]