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The deeper you go into reading indigenous literature the greater your understanding of the human condition. Such is the case with Indigenous Writers of Taiwan: An Anthology of Stories, Essays and Poems. In these contemporary and compelling pieces we see beyond skin color, religion, and geographic location by placing Taiwan at the center of…
One of the most profound depictions of memory in literature is immortalized in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. The Madeleine Moment, as it is often called, exists in Proust’s seven-volume novel, where the narrator is swamped by memories when he dunks a madeleine, a sort of cake, into tea. Proust’s magnum opus is…
My name is Daniel Peña, I’m a writer, and there are other Daniel Peñas messin’ up my Google results. It’s annoying and I’m against it. To ground us, let me tell you who they are: One Daniel Peña is an incredible twelve year old boy who showed me up by designing a Nike Air Jordan…
Monday, April 6, 1953, J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories is published by Crown. The collection, with its wry and spiritually wounded characters, immediately garners Salinger praise and solidifies his reputation (after 1951’s The Catcher in the Rye) as an important voice in American fiction.
Despite humanity’s ever-expanding realms of knowledge and increasing mastery over planet earth and its inhabitants, there is still so much beyond our grasp, so much of which we’re ignorant. In “The Storm” (Ninth Letter) by Maria Kuznetsova, a young narrator Sashie must reckon with a world that is becoming more and more difficult to control, much…
Believe it or not, for better or worse, March marked the thirteenth anniversary of Iraq’s American invasion. Maybe you saw it on your newsfeed. Most likely you didn’t. But as far as remembrances go, the output was business as usual—we got the obligatory flag-waving on the local stations, the quick clips of silhouettes at attention…
The author of The Geography of Genius: A Search for the World’s Most Creative Places, from Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley says our ideas about creativity underestimate the importance of place. But how did creative clusters arise in such varied cultures: Renaissance Florence, The Song Dynasty, Edinburgh during the Scottish Enlightenment, Vienna at the times of Mozart and Freud? Was it just dumb luck? Something in the water?
In Havana, the collective taxis near the capitol line up on the street that juts out from the Hotel Inglaterra, around the corner from its big patio café with its striped awning and wicker chairs, across from the Parque Central, down a small alley that leads off into the confusion of Centro Habana. There’s sometimes…
At the Contemporary Museum of Art in Montreal, Ragnar Kjartansson’s “The Visitors” plays on nine screens in a dark theater. Each screen features a single musician set to the backdrop of a room in a chateau, which is in disrepair: one woman in a pale lace dress plays cello with a French door open to…
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