Literature

Joan Didion is synonymous with provocative, ahead-of- her-time writing.

Purdy, like some of the internal agitators who are used for
“green baiting”, do not fully understand or appreciate that Nature was given to them.

Simply put, even if punks had an acute awareness of “the poverty of artists’ lives”( to adapt a phrase from Situationism), they were lacking in a forceful historical understanding on which to base their reading of the present.

In the greater context of Spy and the mythic stature of its author, this is
an existential plea—can we, with the stories we tell, give some order to the chaos of even
a single life?

Birds of Wonder, the debut novel by Cynthia Robinson, opens with Detective Jes Ashton’s early morning scramble, in the front seat of her car, for dry shampoo, a toothbrush, and her uniform pants, after an assignation with a one-night-stand whose name she can’t remember.

Lynn Crawford has what might be considered a quirky, oddball approach, which makes it seem  the author is swimming far from the mainstream. However, at second glance, it turns out this approach leads straight to an unsurpassed understanding of American reality.

An astronaut launches into space on a solo mission: to penetrate a mysterious purple cloud (Chopra) that has mysteriously arrived in our part of the universe and is casting a strange purple pall over Earth’s night skies.

Ta-Nehisi Coates’ We Were Eight Years in Power, a book about Barack Obama’s presidency and the tenacity of white supremacy, has captured the attention of many of us.

Steve Biko, in an article titled “Black Consciousness and the Quest for a True Humanity” that was published in the newsletter of the South African Student Association, spoke of the economic origins of his country’s racial caste system

Guess and Check is not an ordinary memoir; instead, it is a creative look at the life of a biracial boy—later seen as a young man—who adjusts with difficulty to lessons learned from the behavior of his parents and the people around him.

Mid June, 2015, The Fellow Travellers Series published a wonderful and wonderfully queer novel equally as queer in its style and offerings as its title: Two Augusts in a Row in a Row.

  Despair has replaced hope in America. Which doesn’t mean activists are sackcloth-and-ashing it, but those who work for equity are discouraged. “American dream”?

Weike Wang’s breakthrough 2017 novel Chemistry is centered on a female protagonist who has dedicated her life, up until now, to science.

’ll never be able to know anybody else’s thoughts and shit, so I assume that everybody is thinking about things just as deeply as me in their own way. Who am I to say you shouldn’t believe this?

If we were to accept the notion that the individual body is a microcosm of the world, and a person’s disease and illness can be mirrored in the ruin of the broader world, then we would have no trouble believing that somehow, each of us struggles between the proclivity for self-destruction and the perpetual hope for healing and survival.

What of a land where people’s lives are thwarted at every turn, where prospects are determined by party status, where movements are restricted by permits, orders, and decrees, where “justice” is meted out mercilessly, and against which there is no recourse.

With the almost dystopian world of dating and love explored by Lacey, I was reminded not only of science fiction but of the dating world right now in the twenty-first century.

Meet Mary. She’s in extreme bodily pain, with neither explanation nor prognosis. She’s got one friend, who is about to leave her life forever.

The son of a Polish-American father and Chinese immigrant mother, Thaddeus Rutkowski, along with his brother and sister, grew up in rural Central Pennsylvania.

America, wrote Ishmael Reed in his 1972 novel Mumbo Jumbo, is “mercurial, restless, violent ... the travelling salesman who can sell the world a Brooklyn Bridge every day, can put anything over on you”.

In an arena of fans and critics primed for the often-bloody sport of declamation, it takes much nerve to attempt to tell the definitive story of a major literary figure.

I turn fifty this year—a distinction I share with The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the famed Summer of Love… and the Six Day War that brought victory to the state of Israel and began the occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights that continues down to this day.

Things to Do when You’re Goth in the Country, opts for a much wider canvas, centering (with one interesting exception) on a broader range of Midwest types, from young lesbians dropping acid in St. Louis to a set of church matrons discussing church business to a jailed, addled druggie musing on blood in the sky.

I first became aware that I was losing my eyesight when I was in Nicaragua, helping to celebrate the Sandinistas.

Inspired by literary journalism made famous by Capote’s In Cold Blood, this award-winning book project is entitled “Little Murderers: Character Studies of Ten Children That Kill”. 

Unsung heroes have become a common theme for African-American literature and movies in the modern age. The Help, Hidden Figures and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks focus on the black struggle and unsung women who helped changed the world.