Understanding Team Mom in The Joy Luck Club
Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club is more than a book about mothers and daughters, although it’s easy to choose sides while reading the generational 1989 novel.
Reading
In Frances Mayes’ Book, Another Starring Role for Food
Last month, I wrote about the starring role food plays in Peter Mayle’s memoir, A Year in Provence. Frances Mayes’ Under the Tuscan Sun: At Home in Italy has been called the Italian equivalent of Mayle’s book. Mayes is a poet, so it is natural that her prose charms readers with evocative detail and lyrical language.
Home Is a Complicated Thing
In Jhumpa Lahiri’s stories, immigrants live in a world defined by language, its possibilities, its dead-ends. The legal and political aspects of immigration don’t appear to be the biggest cause of trouble for the characters. Language, however, that first branch of culture, is another matter: characters must continuously code-switch, juggle, negotiate, conceal, and readjust.
Going to Battle: Sojourner Truth and the United States Immigration Ban
When news of the executive order on immigration broke last week, I was looking at a photograph of Sojourner Truth. The picture had been open on my desk for days—an object of an essay I’m writing—and its content struck a particular and heartrending chord.
Cartoons & Archetypes: How They Work and What to Know
I learned about character development not by studying it, but by understanding the nature of cartoons. I spent years sculpting superheroes and cartoon characters for DC Comics, Nickelodeon, Pixar, and others. Although the perception is changing, the art world considers cartooning of all kinds to be a distant, lesser cousin to the fine arts, painting…
The Not-So-Lost Generation: Books About Modern Paris
If Paris is a moveable feast, then let’s feast on it with more recent works of fiction and nonfiction that describe Paris as it is today, without ignoring the city’s multifaceted history.
A Radical Legacy: 90 Years of John Berger
With several unforeseen upheavals in global politics over the last year, John Berger’s approach to art and literature as implicitly political seems more relevant than ever. Throughout his extensive oeuvre, Berger posited aesthetics as a radical vehicle for social change, and embraced the role of storytelling and criticism, of poetry and the visual arts.
Thirst Trap: Desperation in Kaveh Akbar’s PORTRAIT OF THE ALCOHOLIC
I carried Kaveh Akbar’s Portrait of the Alcoholic around for weeks before reading it. I do this from time to time when I know a text is going to challenge me beyond the ways in which poetry is always challenging; I like to prepare for a confrontation.
Literary Television: Dawson’s Creek and Emily Dickinson’s Master Letters
As bookish ’90s teenage role models go, Joey Potter of Dawson’s Creek never quite reached the “girl-power” heights of Rory Gilmore, Willow Rosenberg, or Daria.