Tag
Grief
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“Parallel Tracks”: Sophie Ratcliffe on Academia, Memoirs, and Motherhood
“I used to want to experience everything. I don’t anymore.”
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A Tapestry of Black Lives
James Baldwin’s legacy looms powerfully in this current moment. This may be all the more true for black writers. Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, one of the contributors to Jesmyn Ward’s timely new anthology …
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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 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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Building Up the Alphabet Again
I am reading an interview with Mahasweta Devi from 2002.1 At 75, having won renown for her fiction about the lives of peripheral peoples, she is full of delight at her continued discoveries: “I do what I want to, go wherever I want to, write down whatever I like.” She travels and pokes around, she collects…
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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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Shakespeare in 2016
Over the last four centuries, we’ve reinvented Shakespeare to suit our purposes, much as Shakespeare borrowed from his past to do the same.1 2016 commemorates the four hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. It’s also a year forged in the aftermath of ISIS attacks in Brussels and Paris, Richard Dear’s attack on a Planned Parenthood center…
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Transplant Melodrama
Maylis de Kerangal’s Réparer les vivants, beautifully translated into English by Sam Taylor and published as The Heart, has been something of a publishing sensation in France, and beyond. I am reading it at a café by a small lake in a South Indian town, where I have just been talking to a transplant surgeon…
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Show Me Where It Hurts: Part 2
In this second part of my survey of the growing field of graphic medicine, I review four recent nonfiction books about health, illness, recovery and loss. These books vary in many respects—in their visual styles and narrative approaches, but especially in the ways in which the educational and the personal are engaged. However, what they…
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China at World’s End
In a galaxy far away, but close enough, an intelligent alien civilization finally realizes that its planet orbits around three suns instead of one. They face the classic three-body problem of physics: like the movement of any three objects in space held by each other’s gravitational pull, the movements of these suns defy prediction. Sometimes…
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Unstill Life
English nature writing has never been all that natural. While their American counterparts tend to imagine natural landscapes as “the last remaining place where civilization … has not fully infected the earth,” English nature writers have more often embraced a pastoral sense of human continuity with a landscape that has been modified and cultivated for…
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Walking with the Unconsoled
What can we expect imaginative writing to do in the face of unalleviated grief? If one of fiction’s strengths remains its expression of irreducibly singular minds, what role then might it play in unbinding the grieving individual from self-isolation? In the slender and unclassifiable narrative Falling Out of Time, David Grossman tackles these entwined questions by connecting one…
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Blue Peter: On Peter Gizzi
Brice Marden used beeswax to kill the reflective luster of his triptych color panels. Ad Reinhardt leeched the gloss out of his chromatic blacks. Jasper Johns accreted his white flags with matte paper and cotton. Such works defend the big Nothing of minimalist experimentation with the eloquence of rich monochromes that are apparently porous, surfaces…
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How the 9/11 Museum Gets Us
There was little choice. From the earliest conceptions of what would be done at Ground Zero, there would be one. A museum. And now here it is, the National September 11 Memorial Museum, which opened to the general public on May 21. Part of the necessity to “do something,” it was not easy to figure…
