Tag
Politics
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Arendt Speaks of Oases
Arendt sees the oasis as a way to save our self-understanding from the psychological cry of adjustment as well as the totalitarian demand for conformity.
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Spain’s Unending War
The best seller El lector de Julio Verne (The Reader of Jules Verne) by Spanish author Almudena Grandes is the second novel in a planned series of six, Episodios de una guerra interminable (Episodes of an Unending War), a large-scale narrative project that will aim to convey the devastating trajectory of the first twenty-five years…
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Scientific Semitism: Exceptional or Exemplary?
For at least 1,500 years, the Jewish people have defined themselves through genealogical practices: according to Jewish law, a person is Jewish simply because he or she is born of a Jewish mother. If there is one belief that defines Judaism and the Jewish people, it is belief in the existence of Jewish collectivity, genealogically…
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The Epistolary Terrorist
Alex Gilvarry’s debut novel, From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant, opens with an announcement that what follows is not a novel at all: Editor’s Note: With the exception of footnote annotations, the author’s acknowledgments, the editor’s afterward, and a supplemental article included with permission, all material herein has been reprinted verbatim from the confession…
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Dress-Up Games with Russian History
In 2002, the Kremlin-affiliated youth group Moving Together staged a public protest on Moscow’s Theater Square at which they threw the works of several prominent Russian postmodernist authors into an outsized papier-mâché toilet. In particular, they accused Vladimir Sorokin, who had achieved great acclaim in the preceding decade for his rather dense brand of conceptualist…
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Comics Journalism, Comics Activism
It has been a good fifteen years now since our cultural gatekeepers collectively patted themselves on the back for having discovered that comics were “not just for kids anymore,” and in that time several remarkable achievements in the form have found their way into the critical spotlight. But for every Persepolis and Fun Home that…
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Lives at the Urban Margins
“Every great city,” wrote Friedrich Engels, in The Condition of the Working Class in England, “has one or more slums, where the working-class is crowded together. True, poverty often dwells in hidden alleys close to the palaces of the rich; but, in general, a separate territory has been assigned to it, where, removed from the…
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Virtual Roundtable on Amy Waldman’sThe Submission
Last fall Public Books sponsored a lively roundtable discussion of Amy Waldman’s widely praised novel The Submission (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), which considers what might have happened if the winner of an anonymous architectural design competition for a Ground Zero memorial had been an American Muslim. The novel poses questions about our obligations as…
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Realism with Benefits: Of Zombies and Commuters
What’s ordinary these days in fiction (at least Anglo-American fiction) is the lives and loves of two or three school chums, what happens to them as they wander out into the post-school world, what secrets emerge and how their relationships get rearranged. You’ve seen this pattern recently (think The Sense of an Ending), maybe more…
