Detachment in Fiction from Fleur Jaeggy and Jean Genet
Fleur Jaeggy’s fiction works, two short novels and two short story collections, are marked with a quiet violence and a very particular brand of detachment.
fiction
Female Eroticism in The Wallcreeper and The Argonauts
What’s missing in the literary world, especially when it comes to women, is a dialogue around anal sex.
Love in the Time of Tear Gas: THE NIX’s Wild Literary Style Crashes Epically Against Its Vision of Our Diminishing Culture
The most distinctive trait of novels like The Nix is the ensemble, and the guiding principle is a recognizably American one: the bigger, the better.
Novel May Peeve Feminists and Destroy the Garden of Eden
Could a novel simultaneously peeve feminists and slash our image of the Garden of Eden? You might think so when you read Eve out of Her Ruins, a novel by Mauritian author Ananda Devi. The short and gorgeous book empowers women in a way that might infuriate feminists.
Review: PACHINKO by Min Jin Lee
Pachinko is as much a story about money and prejudice as it about colonialism, war and globalization. Lee explores how politics effect the family unit, but more profoundly and perhaps perniciously, individuals’ sense of identity and self-worth that underpin their decisions.
Laurence Sterne’s Beating Hearts
Though it’s less travel writing and more personal memoir, Laurence Sterne’s A SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY THROUGH FRANCE AND ITALY contains one of the most authentic, challenging descriptions of why one might journey from their home in the first place.
This is Normal: Reading Evil in the Everyday
On Twitter, people keep saying this “isn’t normal.” In this story, the villain is an exception to the rule of normalcy. Maybe, I thought, that story is easier to tell than the real one.
The Learning Curve: Fact, Fiction, and What I’ve Learned
This ability to slip in and out and between voices has been crucial for my style of work. I’ve always been involved in multiple projects at a time, and while I typically finish translating one book before moving on to the next, there are always edits coming back from authors, or small rush jobs to fit in, and as in life, nothing is neat and clean and separate.
Writing Fiction from Life
Some writers that I know are at times so unsure of whether a story is theirs to tell that they will shelve a project for years at a time, waiting for some kind of permission to be granted, or for forgiveness, or for a death. But sometimes those things come in the wrong order.