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The New York Times was not impressed with Bright Lights, Big City when it first appeared in 1984. “A clever, breezy–and in the end, facile documentary,” was what they said.
Several years back, I read a book that was unlike nearly any other I’d read before in one striking way: nothing particularly bad happened in it. The protagonist experienced minor internal struggles and dilemmas, but basically, everything came up roses. This felt like a major departure from Great Literature as I knew it…
What kinds of stories will emerge that focus on rural or city settings during a Trump presidency? Will the typical themes continue to be cemented or will variations become the norm?
Only in a Japanese RPG can a boy band save the world from the empire and its demonic biotechnological army. In Final Fantasy XV, four male friends use the empire’s language of violence to decolonize the kingdom of darkness. Somewhere, Fanon’s ghost is drinking sake and smoking Peace cigarettes.
Erin Wunker teaches and researches in the fields of Canadian literature and culture. She is chair of the board of Canadian Women in the Literary Arts (CWILA) and co-founder and managing editor of the feminist academic blog Hook & Eye: Fast Feminism, Slow Academe.
Being a lover of food and memoirs, I have a dream of living in a foreign country, especially in Europe, for a year and writing about its food customs.
Sharply written, these intimate and insightful exchanges dispel the myth that perhaps we all, writers or not, have come to believe about our own narratives, our own lives: “The worst story that we can tell ourselves is that we are alone.”
Randa Jarrar, the president of the Radius of Arab American Writers—whose acronym RAWI, means “storyteller” in Arabic—was a teenager in 1996 when the organization first came into being. Now a published novelist, fiction editor of The Normal School, and professor at Fresno State, Jarrar attended early RAWI conferences and met other Arab-American writers whom she had admired from a distance. She is one of her creative community’s many success stories.
It seems a pretty commonplace thing to say that great art results from heartbreak. There are countless examples in painting, music, and literature. Sometimes it’s a series of hardships that inspired an artist. Sometimes a direct line can be drawn back to a single event that brought about a sudden surge in artistic activity.
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