Tag
Trauma
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Mute Compulsion
The trauma plot and the slut-shaming dossier are actually parallel formations, reveals “The Guest.”
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“Tell Real Stories”: Shawn Utsey on Racism and Psychotherapy
“Liberation begins in the mind… Black folks have never been given the opportunity to define our own reality.”
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Women Who Write About Their Feelings and Lives
Two recent memoirs by women who grew up in “sexually liberated” 1970s artistic Australia present a sobering picture: of predatory and violent men whose …
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Female Futures, Future Females
In the midst of an intergalactic war between Earth and an empire of cyborg machines, a mother desperately uploads the consciousness of her dead daughter …
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How the “Omega Male” Becomes a Psychopath
Among the many prurient pleasures offered by contemporary literature are thrillers hawking creative mistreatments of women. The subgenre’s prime was the …
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Harry Potter’s Scar, or Book Recs from a Columbine Grad
I graduated from Columbine in 1999; I was a senior at the time of the shooting, 19 years ago today …
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The Book That Made Me: Belong
As a literature student, I’d wanted words to fix me. But it was images that pieced me back together …
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The Model-Minority Bubble
Perhaps the most famous shopping trip in American literature can be found in Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel White Noise. Wounded by a colleague’s unflattering assessment of his appearance, Jack Gladney turns to impulse buying as a form of self-help. “The more money I spent, the less important it seemed. I was bigger than these sums,”…
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Code-Switching: An Interview with James Hannaham
Might a stand-up comedian discuss slavery in America with considerable doses of humor? Happens all the time. A contemporary novelist? Not so much. It is the rare writer who is willing to approach the topic without the requisite gravitas. In James Hannaham’s Delicious Foods, a harrowing tale of slave labor in the contemporary United States,…
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Louise Erdrich’s Hard Facts
Early on in Louise Erdrich’s most recent novel, LaRose, the priest on the reservation articulates a worldview that encapsulates an enduring theme of this novelist’s work: “some people would try their best but the worst would still happen.” Many writers would mine this observation for tragedy, but Erdrich instead turns to healing. In book after…
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“The Sandman” @200
In 1816, only four years after the Brothers Grimm brought out a collection of fairy tales carefully selected and edited for the use of children, E. T. A. Hoffmann published his “Nutcracker and Mouse King.” To the extent that Hoffmann’s fairy tale introduced rather weird, even scary elements, his story departed significantly from what the…
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The Mundane And Extraordinary Aspects Of Black Women’s History: An Interview With Kali Nicole Gross
This article was originally published by The African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS), and is reprinted here with permission. This month I interviewed Kali Nicole Gross about her new book, Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso (Oxford University Press, 2016). Dr. Gross is Professor of African American Studies at Wesleyan University. Her research concentrates on black women’s experiences in the…
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The Afterlife of Agent Orange
“All wars are fought twice,” writes Viet Thanh Nguyen in Nothing Ever Dies, “the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.” Even decades after the first war ends, the second war can be just as brutal. For now the victors would get to rule over more than just territory: they would get…
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Tales of the Interwar
Today, the once-provocative suggestion that we live in an age of interminable warfare has become a truism. The claim often takes the form of an observation about the post-9/11 syndrome that drives an endless War on Terror. Alternatively, it can become a description of our era as yet another chapter in the history of the…
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Disability Narratives
Ask most people living with a disability to name their least favorite question and “what happened to you?” will be high on the list. “Wanting to educate yourself about disability and learn more is great, but there’s a time and a place,” writes Erin Tatum in Everyday Feminism magazine. “You should have enough sensibility and…
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Live Through This
I used to refer to my dark times as the IWTDs, when the mental refrain I want to die so dominated my thoughts that I took to writing the acronym in the margins of books I was reading. It was a huge improvement when I began scribbling STFA—stay the fuck alive—in my books instead. One…
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Sex, Violence, and “The Vegetarian”
The verdict is in. Han Kang’s The Vegetarian has not only received glowing praise from British and American literary supplements; it has become the first Korean novel to be shortlisted for a Booker Prize. One reviewer found it “glorious,” a “ferocious, magnificently death-affirming novel,” another a “bracing, visceral, system-shocking addition to the Anglophone reader’s diet.”1 Speaking…
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Orange Alert
In our post-9/11 era, the phrase “national security” has become all too familiar. A simple Google search yields over 361,000,000 results, ranging from the National Security Council homepage to op-eds and extensive media coverage on the controversies surrounding NSA surveillance and, more recently, the inflammatory rhetoric of Republican presidential candidates. Since the Second World War,…
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Making “Room”: An Interview with Novelist and Screenwriter Emma Donoghue
Emma Donoghue’s 2010 novel Room is the story of a 5-year-old boy who lives in a single room with his mother and has never seen the outside world. Donoghue recently adapted her novel into a screenplay, and the resulting film, starring Brie Larson, has been sweeping up accolades. It’s nominated for four Academy Awards on…
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Life After Wartime
Fisher House looks like any other suburban American home: a well-manicured lawn; a kitchen stocked with Girl Scout cookies, Maseca, and ice cream; a living room with a flat-screen TV and children’s toys; a barbeque out back. But for the wounded soldiers at Fisher House, ordinary life is painstakingly reconstructed but never really achieved. In…
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Can Child Soldiers Be Saved?
Everybody loves stories about child soldiers, it seems, as long as redemption is involved. A memoir about Sierra Leone’s civil war, for example, is not exactly the feel-good stuff you’d expect to see at a Starbucks counter. But in 2007 Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, one of the first…
