Category: literary life
Mary Anne Mohanraj‘s debut collection, Bodies in Motion, is reviewed over at the SF Chronicle.
[It] becomes noteworthy that a collection containing so many figuratively paralyzed individuals is titled “Bodies in Motion.” Much of this collection is about juxtapositions: characters finding ways of movement in situations that seem hopelessly static. People must compromise, finding pockets of richness amid deprivation of truth, sex, love and self-expression.
The Boston Globe also gave it a positive review.
I suppose it’s fashionable to write books about how much you hate liberals, and to top the list with people like Michael Moore. So Bernard Goldberg’s 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America is nothing new and could have just joined the piles of other books like it. Except Goldberg had to open his big mouth and say things like this:
Moore 20 years ago would have been a fringe character on the left. Now he represents mainstream liberalism…I guess I’m conservative on some issues, but on certain social issues, I’m quite liberal. I don’t care if Adam marries Steve. I have publicly said that I would make racial discrimination not just a civil offense but a criminal offense. But I’m against affirmative action because I don’t see why the children of Diana Ross should get some extra points but the sons of an Anglo-Saxon coal miner from West Virginia don’t get any points.
Because that’s what affirmative action is all about: helping all those rich, privileged black kids get into college.
The summer 2005 issue of Mizna is now available, with contributions by D.H. Melhem, Patricia Sarrafian Ward, and the always hilarious Dean Obeidallah. And the cover art is, once again, outstanding.
Those of you in the Bay area might like to check out Night Train Magazine‘s fifth issue launch at Zebulon’s Lounge in Petaluma on August 2nd. Readers include Bruce Bauman, Jordan Rosenfeld and Susan Henderson. Details here.
Maud Newton‘s latest book review appears in the New York Times. It’s a critique of Josh Emmon’s The Loss of Leon Meed, which she finds “promising but rickety.”
Novelist Edwidge Danticat contributes an Op-Ed piece to the Albany Times Union, in which she compares the U.S. invasion of Haiti in 1915 with that of Iraq. The war that was supposed to bring democracy to the Carribbean island lasted 19 years, though its effects would last many more years. Now, Danticat writes,
Few Americans are aware their country once occupied ours, and for such a long time. This is not surprising, for as one Haitian proverb suggests, while those who give the blows can easily forget, the ones who carry the scar have no choice but to remember.
While it takes American leaders and their armed enforcers just a few hours, days, weeks, months to rewrite another sovereign nation’s history, it takes more than 90 years to overcome the devastations caused by such an operation, to replace the irreplaceable, the dead lost, the spirits quelled, to steer an entire generation out of the shadows of dependency, to meet fellow citizens across carefully constructed divides and become halfway whole again.
Read the entire piece here.