She recognizes that she was at the time “blind” to this injustice. When writing about the Israeli inequality she began to notice, she fails, however, to mention the Palestinians or any non-Jews, focusing instead only on intra-Jewish inequality. The Israel-Palestine peace process is now effectively over, and Israel’s politics are now dominated by the right
“There Are No Angels — Only Heavy Islands”: On Claire Meuschke’s “Upend”
Meuschke’s responses to this immigration document unfold throughout the text, erasing and repurposing its language and symbols. The speaker does not reveal until the long essay “Mechanical Bull” toward the end of the collection that her father worked as a house painter in the Bay Area during the 1970s. The fan deck, which is designed
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River Phoenix: A Poem
MAY 30, 2020 LIKE SO MANY NONPROFITS AND LITERARY COMMUNITIES, MANY OF LARB’S FUNDRAISING SOURCES HAVE BEEN UPENDED. IN ORDER TO CONTINUE PROVIDING FREE COVERAGE OF THE BEST IN WRITING AND THOUGHT, WE ARE RELYING ON YOUR SUPPORT NOW MORE THAN EVER. ¤ River Phoenix In my own private Idaho I’m in bed with River
‘Their Beauty is Absolute’
(2) ’Tis God’s good vines our world entwines o’erlapping sunned & ashen lines [yet all be wines.] In the latter, last line is optional – I was more excited to use a wine-descriptor (velvety? User Taras Press brought to mind similarities between Imru’ ul-Qays’ steed and that other rockstar of floating and stinging, Muhammad Ali,
Etel Adnan’s ‘Time’ Wins Best Translated Book Award
This year’s novel prize went to Daša Drndić’s EEG, translated by Celia Hawkesworth. Of Time, the jury said, in a prepared statement: Members of this year’s poetry jury were: Nancy Naomi Carlson (poet and translator), Patricia Lockwood (poet), Aditi Machado (poet and translator), Laura Marris (writer and translator), Brandon Shimoda
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A Winner Over Time: An Interview with Martin Reiner
What do you think Blatný’s legacy in Czech culture is today? As Reiner’s work shows, however, the complexities of Blatný’s life and art are both more complicated and more fascinating. Regardless of what I wish, everyone will take from the book exactly what fits most closely to their vision of the world, to their experience
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The Art of Persuasion: On Gilberto Perez’s “The Eloquent Screen: A Rhetoric of Film”
By claiming to define a “rhetoric of film,” Perez ostensibly takes the other path, attempting to define film as a rhetorical object. In short, every rhetorical object, from a billboard to an inaugural address, must be judged according to where the rhetor found their ideas, how the ideas are organized, the ways in which the
Selena Gomez and the Perils of Confessional Pop
As polymathic musician David Byrne outlines in his book How Music Works, pop music always reacts to the technological and commercial pressures of its day. The “topline” of “Lose You to Love Me” — its lyrics and melody — were written by Gomez with the duo Julia Michaels and Justin Tranter. ¤ At first listen,
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Friday Finds: Samah Selim on Translation into and out of Arabic
Friday Finds: Samah Selim on Translation into and out of Arabic Recently, on Asymptote, Rebecca Ruth Gould talked to translator, writer, and scholar Samah Selim about translating nonfiction, about critical apparatuses, and the Cairo-based translator collective, Turjoman: Of Turjoman, Selim said: We wanted to think about how to change this landscape:
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Mental Math for a Token: On Calculating My Worth
Being a token is as much about getting access to the rooms and spaces I’ve been systematically left out of as it is about giving a bunch of other non-marginalized people the opportunity to confirm or negate the biases they have about tokens like me, and how I arrived in that same space. But let
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“Never Have I Ever”…Seen Myself on TV
However, the episode leaves some space to see the celebration as both cultural pride as well as stifling elitism, with people throwing around ivy league schools and luxury car brands — typical Hindu Brahmin territory. It is Devi, the character who feels the most “not Indian,” that is the only one to even make a
Wanting to Turn Back Time: On Aimee Liu’s “Glorious Boy”
Claire is ahead of her time in many of her observations. She is also prone to self-judgment and self-analysis, recognizing she’d gone to the Andaman Islands “mistaking youthful ambition as a virtue,” realizing that “ambition is worthless unless it’s rooted in human understanding.” She wonders why she thought herself qualified to undertake to communicate with
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Beshara Doumani, Brown University’s First Mahmoud Darwish Chair
Beshara Doumani, Brown University’s First Mahmoud Darwish Chair Earlier this week, Brown University announced a new faculty chair in Palestinian Studies, named for Mahmoud Darwish. Doumani also has a literary essay titled “A Song from Haifa” in Seeking Palestine: New Palestinian Writing on Exile and Home, edited by Raja Shehadeh, which opens with
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Art in an Emergency: Talking to Olivia Laing and Lucy Ives
Then, Lucy Ives joins the hosts to discuss the legacy of the artist, architect and writer Madeline Gins, whose work was recently collected into a comprehensive reader titled The Saddest Thing is That I Have Had to Use Words. The three discuss the role of art in dark times, Olivia’s environmental activist youth and what
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The Footmen of Liberalism
MAY 27, 2020 PICTURE YOURSELF, if you can, settling into business class on a transatlantic flight. A jostling group of ambitious characters emerges. Zevin writes that “one cover showed a nameless Indian girl clutching a blanket, her glistening eyes raised in accusation, under the title ‘The Real Losers from Seattle.’ Five billion poor people in
“All It Takes Is Inexhaustible Patience, Limitless Time, and a Warped Mind”: A Conversation with Adrienne Raphel
Basically if you email any constructor you love, they will probably help you, or will point you toward a person who has bandwidth to help! Also, Will Shortz and his crew at the Times put together an “emergency puzzle mania” for May, a band-aid but a nice bonus gift. And I’m also interested in the
Zones of Possibility: Science Fiction and the Coronavirus
For the first time in a long time, the future actually feels open, up for grabs. “The essence of the cozy catastrophe,” says Aldiss, “is that the hero should have a pretty good time of it (a girl, free suites at the Savoy, automobiles for the taking) while everyone else is dying off.” While Ish
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Join Four Online Events in PalREAD’s ‘Re-locating the Map’ Series
Jun 23, 2020 | 02:00 PM – 03:30 PM Re-locating the Map: War & Palestinian Literature: After 2000 with Bashir Abu-Manneh Palestinian literature scholar Bashir Abu-Manneh, currently at Kent University, is author of The Palestinian Novel: From 1948 to the Present (2016) and Fiction of the New Statesman, 1913-1939 (2011). Jun 30, 2020 | 02:00
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Sitting at His Feet: On J. M. Coetzee’s “The Death of Jesus”
There are some very obvious conclusions to draw here. It is the humanity, in The Death of Jesus, that makes it poignant, known but unknowable, and extraordinary. ¤ Will Forrester is a writer and critic based in London. M. But this is all tongue-in-cheek; one virtue of older Coetzee is his urge to be amusing.
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Freud: A Star Is Born
Indeed, the second episode of the Netflix show recreates, nearly shot-for-shot, the opening sequence of John Huston’s Freud: The Secret Passion (1962), in which Montgomery Clift played Freud and which is easily the best filmed version of Freud’s life. In order to prove her paralytic symptoms are genuine — if of non-organic origin — Freud