Search Results for: lat

Noam Chomsky, José Saramago, Eduardo Galeano, Gore Vidal, Arundhati Roy, Russell Banks, Thomas Keneally, Toni Morrison, and ten other writers have signed a petition against the current war in the Middle East.

The latest chapter of the conflict between Israel and Palestine began when Israeli forces abducted two civilians, a doctor and his brother, from Gaza. An incident scarcely reported anywhere, except in the Turkish press. The following day the Palestinians took an Israeli soldier prisoner–and proposed a negotiated exchange against prisoners taken by the Israelis–there are approximately 10,000 in Israeli jails.

That this “kidnapping” was considered an outrage, whereas the illegal military occupation of the West Bank and the systematic appropriation of its natural resources–most particularly that of water–by the Israeli Defense (!) Forces is considered a regrettable but realistic fact of life, is typical of the double standards repeatedly employed by the West in face of what has befallen the Palestinians, on the land allotted to them by international agreements, during the last seventy years.

Read the rest here.

Jess Row (The Train to Lo-Wu) examines the rather recent and rather disturbing tendency to approach gender roles from a decidedly traditional outlook (Caitlin Flanagan, Harvey Mansfied, et al.). Row wonders why these anachronistic tomes haven’t been met with other books, books that celebrate “contemporary relationships and gender roles without panic, dread, or shame.” So he turns to Iron John, by Robert Bly.

There’s a great interview with Stephen Dixon on Failbetter. Here’s an excerpt, in which Dixon discusses genre boundaries:

Both I. and End of I. read like collections of interrelated stories, but McSweeney’s released them as novels. Was this a marketing decision? How do you view them? Does the genre distinction matter to you?

The genre distinction doesn’t matter to me much. To me, an interrelated collection of stories about the same character or characters can also be called a novel. You get a full life in these collections, which you also do in a novel, and other similarities. In 1979, Harper & Row published my work Quite Contrary. I insisted it was an interrelated collection of stories; they, maybe for marketing reasons, said it was a novel. God knows why I was so insistent on calling it an interrelated etc. etc… They added the subtitle The Mary and Newt Story as a compromise. I wish I’d gone along with their suggestion about calling it a novel, because I now see that’s what it is.

The interview is freely available online.

Yesterday, I linked to an essay in the SF Chronicle by Ilan Stavans, in which he criticized the Library of America for not including Latinos in its two-volume anthology on civil rights. Earlier today, I received this email from Carol Polsgrove, who served on the advisory board for Reporting Civil Rights:

The reason Library of America’s two volume anthology Reporting Civil Rights did not include Latinos was that this volume was devoted explicitly, as the dust jacket says, to “the struggle of African-Americans for freedom and equal rights.” Let’s hope the Library of America takes Ilan Stavans’ criticism to heart, however, and publishes future volumes that expand our too limited view of American history.

Dr. Polsgrove is also a professor of journalism at Indiana University.