At its heart, The Quiet American is the story of a struggle between extreme cynicism and idealism—the juxtaposition of intentions and actions, the disconnect between the native and the foreigner.
Writing in second person point of view, I found power in a situation in which I’d felt powerless. I was no longer the victim but the witness…
“Black Philosophy #3,” Dodd’s new poem from the first issue of The Shade Journal, poses a series of “if…then…” questioning statements regarding blackness, black boys, death, dead boys, living boys, pretty boys, prettiness, and a manner of interrelating, interlocking, and uncompromising conditions between those terms.
Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 novel Never Let Me Go is both an unsettling allegory of systemic oppression, and an intimate portrait of three young people negotiating an impossible living situation. There’s a lot going on, both on the surface and beneath, and a reader couldn’t be faulted for thinking, “this will never become a movie.” Well, it did.
On October 26, South African author J.M. Coetzee’s novel Waiting for the Barbarians is published. The unnamed narrator, an imperial magistrate stationed in a colonial settlement on the outskirts of the unspecified “Empire,” enjoys the languorous ease of his privileged position.
The writers discussed the many ways in which fiction can respond to fiction. Of particular note was the impetus for using a particular source text—what inspired the response—and the extent to which a retelling can or should stand on its own without an intimate knowledge of the original.
Paul Ruffin had me at the title. It wasn’t the spectacle of the hog-killing I was drawn to so much as the way he undercuts the brutality to focus our attention on the weather. I liked the juxtaposition, the audacity of deflecting our attention from the sensational to the mundane.
I talk to Nathaniel Mackey and musician Suzi Analogue about how to, in Amiri Baraka’s words, find the self, then kill it—and about the role of technology in that process.
This is the eighth installment of a year-long journey through Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia.
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Query XV: The colleges and public establishments, the roads, buildings, &c.
Query XVI: The measures taken with regard to the estates and possessions of the rebels, commonly called Tories
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