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I’m training early for the very real bizarro world of 2017 by reading César Aira. The Argentinian writer is one of the more prolific contemporary writers in contemporary Latin American letters with over eighty titles to his name.
For the past six months, I’ve been living in Prague—a small but fierce city in Central Europe where despite the cumulative oppressions of Nazi occupation and decades of isolation and communist rule, residents still maintain a well-developed sense of irony. Monitoring the (Anglophone) news from the self-exile of Prague imbues the headlines, it seems, with more gravity.
In The Girl On The Train, which recently hit paperback and movie theaters, the narrative reliability of Rachel, the book’s protagonist, becomes a question from the very first chapter. On the first evening of the book, we find her drinking canned gin and tonics on the subway on her way home.
This year, as we’ve seen, as we continue to see, is a dumpster fire. This is certainly not the first time you’ve read an end of the year article or blog post that begins with this now familiar lament.
There’s nothing quite like a new baby for creating an obsession with all things sleep-related. My second daughter was born on December 6th, and in our dark bedroom at night, my brain is full of the same whirring calculations I remember from my older daughter’s first few weeks.
Emma Cline’s debut novel, The Girls, is an unabashedly feminist novel that freely acknowledges the presence of patriarchal forces in our society.
Many of us will need to cope with, resist, or try to understand (or all of the above) Trump in 2017. So, below are 12 books—one per month—that can help with those unexpected projects.
Recently I joke tweeted “What The Nutcracker’s Battle With the Rat King Taught Us About Trump Resistance,” as if I were writing that piece. I’m not. Last week, I traveled to Boston to watch my sister perform in her nineteenth year of Nutcracker, and the next day we sat in the Massachusetts State House, watching the state’s electors vote for Hillary Clinton. It seemed that Hoffmann’s tale had nothing to with 2016, and that issued a challenge.
Thousands of years before genetic research, MRIs, CAT scans and X-rays, we had theater. Not as entertainment, but as technology. That’s the claim of Bryan Doerries’ Outside the Wire, a theater company that brings charged readings of ancient Greek plays to communities who’ve experienced trauma.
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