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In the summer of 1991, I was twenty-two and voraciously read works I was too young to fully absorb. I couldn’t possibly have understood what true regret of a lost love was after a life had already been half-lived.
In the Japan of Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko, hard-working Korean people are barred from decent jobs, safe housing, and access to protection from crime, forcing characters down non-ideal paths. Lee’s message seems to be that such paths can become honorable.
We might consider that, in twenty-first century America, we continue to live in the shadows of King Philip’s War. Both DeLucia and Brooks have given us important new frameworks through which to explore the wider nature of those shadows.
For many people, this was a year of severing toxic relationships. What does it mean to love someone who refuses to communicate? To love a person who hurts you? Lori Ostlund’s Flannery O’Connor award-winning collection The Bigness of the World takes a look at communication (and miscommunication) in numerous ways.
Contemporary literature has me thinking that the apocalypse isn’t about to happen to us. Instead, it’s been happening for a very, very long time. At least, this is what I read in Ruth Ozeki’s fiction.
As a writer, I’ve been thinking about the importance of our trauma—the needle-pushing trauma of the #MeToo movement, of the interrogation of “post-truth,” of the existential crisis necessary for confronting something like climate change, or the stories beyond the body counts of the drug war in Mexico.
Joan Didion’s unique worldview—that laser-sharp analysis of everything from the California coastline to Doors frontman Jim Morrison to her own personal grief and loss—might have been formed the day she failed to make Phi Beta Kappa at the University of California at Berkeley.
Among the many paradoxes of life in the tech-obsessed 21st century is the fact that we sometimes find ourselves yearning for an outdated simplicity precisely because we’re so tied to innovations in entertainment and social media that constantly hold our attention.
What illuminates Acevedo’s writing is how she weaves historical fact into a story that feels prescient in the contemporary cultural conversation.
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