Tag
Memory
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Jazmine Ulloa on “El Paso: Five Families and One Hundred Years of Blood, Migration, Race, and Memory”
“We tend to see El Paso as this very narrow space that divides Mexico and the United States, but it’s this much richer region where ideas and goods and people are constantly flowing back and forth.”
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Stumbling Over a Violent Past
When Jennifer Teege was 38, she discovered a book in Hamburg’s central library that dramatically transformed her self-conception and her life: I Have to Love My Father, Don’t I? The book concerned the daughter of a prominent, infamous Nazi. That woman, Teege realized with shock, was her own mother, Monika. In that moment, Teege went…
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Comics versus Franquismo
In the late 1960s, dictator Francisco Franco slowly opened Spain to tourism while continuing to obliterate public memory of the retributions meted out after the Civil War (1936–9). I spent those years studying in Madrid, living for two semesters with a Spanish family. My professors were among the most distinguished of those who hadn’t sought…
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Modiano’s Memoryscapes
Patrick Modiano’s reputation as a writer of wartime Paris was sealed in 2014 by the Nobel Prize, which recognized him “for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies …”
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The Body Always Remembers
In a recent article in the Atlantic, Leslie Jamison discusses the memoirist’s responsibility to investigate the events of his or her past on the page rather than merely confess to them.1 She writes, “This notion of investigation offers an alternative to confession … To put the ‘I’ to work this way invites a different intimacy—not…
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Love and Death in Indian Country
At its core, David Treuer’s latest novel is a tale of unrequited love and random violence. The stuff of melodrama, to be sure, but in Treuer’s skillful, multi-vocal telling, neither love nor death appears sensational or simple. Treuer, an Ojibwa writer from northern Minnesota, is the author of three other novels, a controversial work of…
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My Heart Laid Bare in Lagos
In the 1850s the French symbolist poet Charles Baudelaire began expanding the scope of his vision to include details of life previously banished from the work of well-educated and well-heeled European artists. Like Teju Cole today, Baudelaire focused his poetic gaze on seemingly random incidents of urban life, but in a manner that braided those…
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Weekend Reading: Memory Lane
One day we won’t be covered in snow. But not just yet, it seems. While we wait, here’s your weekend reading. NBC’s Brian Williams has found himself in hot water over his account of being shot at while flying in a helicopter in Iraq in 2003, which, apparently, never happened. That, in turn, has brought…
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Kim Thúy: A Way with Words
Over the past five years, Kim Thúy has become one of the best known and most celebrated francophone writers of the Vietnamese diaspora. Born in 1968, Thúy fled Vietnam by boat at the age of 10. After four months in a Malaysian refugee camp, she and her family immigrated to Quebec, where Thúy came to…
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This is What I Mean When I Tell My Dad He’s Alright
Mattie Wechsler’s essay won the 2014 Katherine Fullerton Gerould Award Prize at Bryn Mawr College. When I was growing up, my father kept a pronunciation dictionary of the English language by his seat at the table. This way, if there were ever a dispute during dinner about how to pronounce a word correctly, he could…
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Dream Girls
Hilton Als’s White Girls is a disorienting book. If traditional biography aspires to capture the person behind the scrim of myth, Als prefers to linger on the scrim itself—the fantasy, the persona, the aura of celebrity—the fiction. His essay on Truman Capote focuses on the writer’s public image, beginning with the famous book-jacket photo of…
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The Restless Storyteller: An Interview With Laura Bolaños Cadena
Historia Semanal de Amor y Pasión (Weekly Story of Love and Passion) is one of those pocket-size Mexican comic books you may have read or seen—they’re called historietas. The covers are illustrated in eye-popping colors, and the drama inside is high and often fast. One of the most twisty and gripping issues I’ve read contained…
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Déjà Vécu
Kate Atkinson has had an intriguing literary career. After winning popular and critical success with her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum (1995), and a Whitbread Prize, she spent most of the 2000s publishing mystery novels centered on a Scottish private investigator, Jackson Brodie. Even putting the genre distinction aside, it’s hard to…
