Music Articles (Lyrics)
I prefer to give my energy to building a body of work, rather than collecting a series of such moments. In Mermaids in the Moonlight, a mother from the diaspora takes her child to Batticaloa for the first time, and they listen to the mysterious underwater sounds in the lagoon. When did you come
Continue reading Of Home, History, and Mermaids: A Conversation with Sharanya Manivannan
You can find her writing here and follow her on Twitter @smswrites. It’s an uneven but enjoyable anthology. At best, Joan would probably find my mom’s collaged birthday card to be silly; at worst, deeply weird. She also famously kept her distance from the burgeoning feminist movement, regarding it with a combination of distaste and disinterest. If being warm
WOMEN’S HISTORY ON THE RADIO HOUR Women’s History on the Radio Hour In honor of Women’s History Month, the LARB Radio Hour team brings you a selection of episodes from the past few years that highlight the stories of women who have shaped our world through writing, art, film, philosophy, and activism. The Formation of
One way to do so is to highlight the ever-expanding, ever more diverse body of work available to anglophone readers in translation, and to salute the gifted, driven creative artists behind that work. In this monthly feature, I will gather 10 reviews, essays, and interviews that deal with work in translation. Not every review of
Even when we create “for the people,” we can end up speaking past our own — even when no one is out there at all. In addition, anti-racist reporting has proven what many already knew. Here’s my Woke Asian response. I can’t help but think that all this posting is not about raising awareness. This
Continue reading Why Violence Goes Viral: A Thread in Six Parts
Maybe this is because “his time” is so confused, so indeterminate; our historical categories prefer to compute it as three or four times, at minimum two. The complications of metanarrative and metafiction follow: is Marshlands (the narrator’s book), the same text as Marshlands (the book we are reading)? The chapter opens with a bit of
Continue reading Not Not Realism: On André Gide’s “Marshlands”
I feel like I personally can get closer to the truth through fabulism or surrealism or speculative fiction — whatever you want to call it — because I can dig deeper into the uncomfortable or the ugly or uncanny. We then immediately shift to Megan Weiler, a new mom who has just given birth to
Continue reading Whispering Hush: A Conversation with Julia Fine
And as a onetime student of physics, I have often been so regaled. Such drab and hasty composition is particularly conspicuous when Wilczek describes his own accomplishments, which he goes out of his way to do. He is so blithe to the possible ends of physics, and such a purist, that he claims physics merely
Continue reading The Gospel According to Frank: A Nobel Laureate’s Naïveté
These ritualized narrative celebrations also help participants recall, understand, and endure past and present anguish. […] To the Mexican it consists in being the fruit of a violation” — as in rape. The United States’s death narrative is a plot line of racist violence that is easily, purposely forgotten by mainstream America. Encircling a planter
Continue reading Pandemic Death Narratives of Mexico and the United States
At night, lights shining out of kitchen windows and barroom doors reflect on the dark ocean. Banner image: “Imari Bay and Fukushima Island from train near Haze Station 2” by そらみみ is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. The consulting firm McKinsey & Company put out Reimagining Japan: A Quest for a Future That Works, a
Continue reading The Dialectics of March 11: A Decade After the Japan Tsunami
He certainly wasn’t the first writer to promote that dubious doctrine, but it was with the Beats that the often-perilous line between art and life was crossed most willfully. In the late 1940s — decades before the conveyor belt of consumer youth culture had been firmly laid in place — bohemia was a strange, shadowy,
The ghost of the Spanish Empire still hovers over the spot that was an outpost of New Spain until 1821. She encouraged women to think of their futures, their voices. I’ll find out if her husband served his country by reporting on South American politics in a way that beat back communism, laying the seeds
Only through the lens of this dilemma, according to Ai, can one evaluate Chinese lockdown diaries, including Fang Fang’s. Her WeChat account would be entirely shut down on March 25. Ai’s lockdown diary is a smorgasbord of literary and visual forms, from the standard chronicle accompanied by photos — of her tagging along volunteer groups delivering
Continue reading Ai Xiaoming and the Quarantine Counter-Diary
The narrator, N, leaves his laboratory job to investigate the circumstances of his estranged father’s death, which is clouded in uncertainties of history, identity, and reality. Sara shares how she approached writing such a challenging and rewarding work. Contrasting Interiors: Christine Smallwood’s “Life of the Mind” and Sara Davis’s “Scapegoat” By LARB AV – March 12, 2021
(Knowing that they’ve been punished with multimillion-dollar fines in some cases isn’t much consolation.) Some have used interactive dolls to effectively subject young children to surveillance. I’ll take his word for that, but I wouldn’t bet that a fiendish lightbulb didn’t eventually go off in Mark Zuckerberg’s head after he had amassed trillions of user
Peterson offers a guide with some helpful advice that, like the rules of kashrut, also declares a lot of life to be out of bounds. And because those who defend them sometimes do so without an honest reckoning with their shortcomings. This is a startlingly benign view of power. One of Peterson’s subchapters is titled
The key role of tradition — both ancient and modern — is invoked by Matt Sedillo, literary director of the dA Center for the Arts in Pomona. After a five-year court battle, Judge Wallace Tashima ruled the ban unconstitutional in 2017. When Socorro, a “Good Daughter,” tries to decide if she should yield to her
They were first uttered in a political context in the inaugural address of iconic Irish president Mary Robinson, whose election of 1990 certainly felt like a “great sea-change” of modernity, liberalism, and peace in a country hitherto benighted by postcolonial melancholia, conservative and Catholic reaction, and never-ending conflict. The poem begins: Human beings suffer, They
Continue reading Revenge Against Revenge: Biden’s Revenge Politics and “The Cure at Troy”
A truly global civilization would be a grandly, uncontrollably fertile chaos, and it is a far more elevating object of political and cultural longing than either the sterile, banalizing spectacle of neoliberal market globalism or the degenerate mythology of blood and soil nationalism (or “national conservatism,” or the “new integralism,” or whatever else it calls
You are not their family, their tribe. Once in her wheelchair, she took her time, pausing at her desk to move papers around. “This will do,” she says. Offer up a prayer of thanks to the nursing home and its long-awaited empty bed. Hope to preserve dignity, yours and hers, when making your escape. “I’ll
Continue reading How to Tell Your Mother She Can’t Go Home Again