BLACK HISTORY MONTH The Monthly Digest: March 2017 In February LARB marked Black History Month with a number of articles on African-American culture, ranging from interviews with the brilliant filmmakers behind recent features on James Baldwin and Maya Angelou, to reviews of a memoir by South African-born comedian Trevor Noah and a book on the
I Will Defend to the Death Your Right to Vote for Trump
The standard line from the “war on terror” is that Islam is inherently hostile to modernity, and any instance where the former meets the latter will end in violence. Voltaire and Rousseau were two faces of the same coin, and as this new form of currency conquered a different market every season, consumers were presented
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Tired of Cyberbullying and Fake Rebels? There’s Yassin Adnan’s ‘Hot Maroc’
The titular “Hot Maroc” is the name of a webzine founded by the protagonist, Rahhal, with a couple of friends after university. She works as translator and journalist and is currently enrolled in a MA program in Editorial and Literary Translation from Arabic. She was also an exchange-student at INALCO in Paris and a Banipal
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Skip the Words, Read the Pictures
Unlike Visari, I don’t want to know about the lives of the great artists. Art is not math. Sorel’s new book, Mary Astor’s Purple Diary, is an odd miscellanea inspired by the author’s lifelong enthusiasm for a particular film star and a long-forgotten court case over custody of Mary Astor’s only daughter. Would Sorel but
The Color of Art: On Rowan Hisayo Buchanan’s Debut
Though Yuki and Odile skipped school often, Yuki still attended art classes on Fridays because “[l]ight and shadow required no translation, and while drawing she forgot herself in the whisper of charcoal on paper.” As a girl who is always both visible and invisible — being Japanese and small and female means she is by
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In ‘The Drone Eats with Me,’ Reader Between Surveillor and Surveilled
Another main character in the narrative is the faceless drone operator, scrutinizing every detail he can see from his faraway terminal. While under the bombs, Abu Saif meticulously records, where he can, details of war: the names and ages of those dead, the buildings destroyed. At the time, I was unable to come up with
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Patty Yumi Cottrell on Living in Los Angeles, The Best Way to Shape One’s Grief into an Object, and 7-Eleven Pastries That Look Like Vomit
That nauseating image has stayed with me for years. The rhythm of Bernhard’s sentences is something I want to study for the rest of my life. I think that’s really nice, that everyone can be a writer. I asked her to stop or to use some paragraph breaks, because while I enjoyed being in contact
To Feel the World’s Pain and Its Beauty
I draw upon a recurrent image of the woman with a shaven head. Art has the power to bring about new values, but not instantly. Art today is the site of a trust that comes after the death of trust. Why should this be any different to psychoanalytical and critical interventions? Ettinger, a visual artist,
The Whole Point About War: On Lara Pawson’s “This Is the Place to Be”
Pawson articulates profound misgivings about the inherently exploitative nature of war journalism. There’s quite a history of people like me — white Europeans — wanting to build revolutions in Angola and other parts of the world. Well, I wouldn’t want to swear on it.” She invokes what cognitive scientists call “the binding problem” — the
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Women and Arabic Literature: News from Cairo and Casablanca
The report catalogued 3,304 new publications in 2016, including 497 academic journals (it excluded textbooks, manuals and publications in the hard sciences). “Serious” literature is, in most languages, a male-dominated business. 11 – 16 — put its focus on women writers, with 30 of the 50 writers identifying as women. There are some exceptions, such
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A New Year Round Robin from Myanmar 2017
Around the same time, the much-loathed “overnight guest registration law” was debated in the parliament and abolished in September. Jet Ni shall not dwell again on Father’s suicide five years ago following the seizure of our farmland. The Ministry of Industry will mass-produce and sell Mother Suu tables to boost the country’s income. The Myanmar
Business Feminism
They remind us, too, that these are the locations where oppression gets reproduced: the workplace, the legal system, the government. Pagano and Meredith told the two older white women they should read and display more writing by people of color in the store, read about the Civil Rights movement, and do antiracist work with other
The Fall of Feminism: Jessa Crispin’s “Why I Am Not A Feminist”
To a haughty, point-blank refusal even to listen to any man who may have a response to her work. Power feels good. We see their confidence, their certainty as surplus […] Once an oppressor’s power starts to slip, it is very easy to switch places and adopt the same behavior. Privilege is not all that
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Sunday Submissions: Paid Opportunity for Writers from Seven ‘Banned’ Countries
Advertisements Share this:TwitterFacebookEmailPrintLinkedInRedditGoogleTumblrPinterestPocketLike this:Like Loading…‹ 10th Anniversary Readings For Al-Mutanabbi StreetCategories: #LIISSSY, submissions Spread the word! More specifically, they’re seeking unpublished literary fiction, literary nonfiction, and poetry from the seven countries on Trump’s “banned “list “that have been created in response to Trump’s travel ban, or can be interpreted as such.” The deadline is March
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The Accusatory Monologist: A Review of Mauro Javier Cardenas’s Novel “The Revolutionaries Try Again”
A 20-page chapter is composed of a single-sentence monologue, while two others are entirely in Spanish; an interview with an emigrant reads like a pieced-together audio montage; songs, chants, and curses, both in English and Spanish, pepper the text, which uses such minimal or nontraditional uses of punctuation as to make Cormac McCarthy, or even
Uncle Carl Helps Illuminate Two New Irish YA Novels
¤ Cheryl Maddalena is a psychologist, engineer, and performance poet. “It must be easier for you to imagine building someone new who meets your every need,” her best friend Ruby quips, “rather than make a compromise and try to see the world from my perspective, even once.” Jung was not overly optimistic about the relationship
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Inner Soundtracks and Apparitions: Joe Bonomo’s Selected Work
Though Bonomo uses his brother’s fear for his own amusement, in some way he empathizes with the younger boy’s extreme reaction. Especially early in the collection, he writes about music as transcendence, as ecstasy, a sort of private spiritual experience that taught him how to be in the world while not being bound to the
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Friday Finds: ‘The Man Who Hates Sneezing,’ a Story from Syria
And it was cool, actually, because when we got there and I pointed the house out to him—that was the first time he’d been there with me—he said “Hey, this is my buddy’s parents’ place!” So I said “What are you talking about? M–DASH, a publication of Autumn Hill Books, has put up
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10th Anniversary Readings For Al-Mutanabbi Street
In Steamboat Springs, Colorado On March 5th – The Artist/Activist Janet Bradley Will Coordinate A Reading 7. In Santa Fe, New Mexico on March 31st – A public performance of a musical piece, Words in the Wind (for al-Mutanabbi Street) composed by the musician/composer/academic/activist Melanie Monsour. This reading will be in French, Arabic, and English
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From Parody to Hyperreality in Ang Lee’s “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk”
“If a bullet’s going to get you, it’s already been fired.” The novel conjures the capacious American affinity for violence and pleasure, realness and fantasy, the paradoxical romance with hierarchy and the promise of its toppling. More than just a narrative, Fountain’s story is a wry and parodic send-up of cheap patriotism, self-congratulatory nationalism, and
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