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In the age of Donald Trump, of Brexit, of a refugee crisis that is a key force governing international decisions — nations, demarcations of identity, loyalty, apparent belonging are the lifeblood of political discourse. And I despise it. I want to reject it on a visceral level.
“That for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts. There is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking.” I’ve always bristled at Nietsche’s many remarks on language. Here’s another: “All words are prejudices.”
A funny thing happened to me this summer: I got trapped in the Sexual Revolution.
“Sometimes you just gotta show people,” writes Chuck Reese, founder and editor of The Bitter Southerner, an online magazine of writing, photography and music from and about the South. Reese, like many natives, grew tired of the clichés about the South as a region of yahoos.
Australian Aboriginal novelist Alexis Wright’s latest offering, The Swan Book, brings us a dystopian satire with touches of magical realism. The futuristic tale takes place in Australia after climate change has ruined the world.
A writer is first – perhaps foremost – a reader. Why, then, is it rare to find our characters reading? It’s not that we don’t find books given a special place in fiction. Writers love writing about books.
Women long dead become reanimated in Ladies Night at the Dreamland. We sit beside blood-splattered lovers in 19th century Tennessee, sway on a steamer across Italy with a fatally ill women, hear ghosts knock at the command of two New York sisters at the dawn of spiritualism.
I’m currently about five months pregnant with our second child, and I’m finding this state no less strange the second time around. It’s plenty of other things too—miraculous, exciting, fascinating, wonderful—and I’m very grateful for it; but in describing the actual daily, bodily experience, that’s the word that first comes to mind for me, strange.
Last month I found myself in the gardening section of a German supermarket where, on sale, I came across Mexican-themed cacti. Tiny, impossibly hairy things with googly eyes and black moustaches and pastel colored sombreros made of clay. Typical German kitsch. “That looks like my uncle Mario,” I thought. That moustache. Those manic eyes like,…
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