Tag
Biography
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Toward the Next Century of Carmen Martín Gaite
A literary genius who remained in Fascist Franco Spain, she created new, hybrid literary genres, even while fluidly moving from fiction to nonfiction and back.
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All Ireland in a Grave
A hanged man was never more popular. One hundred years ago, the British government executed Roger Casement for his participation in a rebellion in Ireland, the Easter Rising of 1916. This year, schoolchildren and tourists by the thousands have visited Casement’s gravesite in Dublin. It is part of a centennial pilgrimage in honor of the…
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Sex and Socialism
Three recent books tell the stories of four women whose lives both absorbed and propelled the vast, multifaceted socialist movement in Britain from 1870 to 1920: Lizzie Burns, Nellie Dowell, Muriel Lester, and Eleanor Marx. While all of them played roles in the struggle for equality of class, wealth, and opportunity, and all of their…
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Diane Arbus and the Power of Cruel Art
“What you notice about people,” Diane Arbus said, “is the flaw.” Arbus turned flaws into great photographs. During the 1950s and ’60s, she pointed her camera straight across polite social boundaries, at dwarves, nudists, disturbed children, the ugly, the afflicted, the uncertain, the caught-off-guard. What kind of person could work so intensely, for so long,…
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On Frantz Fanon: An Interview With Lewis R. Gordon
This article was originally published by The African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS), and is reprinted here with permission. Lewis R. Gordon is Professor of Philosophy and Africana Studies at UCONN-Storrs; Visiting Professor of Philosophy and Government at the University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica; European Union Visiting Chair in Philosophy at Université Toulouse Jean…
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The Thread
1 Sometime during my senior year of high school, my mother went on a laundry strike. Her goal, as I understood it, was to get my father to pick his underwear up off the bathroom floor, carry them to the hamper, and eventually wash them. She made my brother and I promise not to help…
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Live Through This
I used to refer to my dark times as the IWTDs, when the mental refrain I want to die so dominated my thoughts that I took to writing the acronym in the margins of books I was reading. It was a huge improvement when I began scribbling STFA—stay the fuck alive—in my books instead. One…
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Ghost in the System
It’s fitting that a videogame about novels and their authorship manages to marry two media long thought to be polar opposites. Aaron Reed and Jacob Garbe’s The Ice-Bound Concordance, available for free, for iPad and Windows, on their website, is a story-based game that requires a real printed-and-bound book in order to play. In an age…
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“The People v. O. J. Simpson”: A Reading List
In 1995, viewers across America were transfixed by the the O. J. Simpson trial, with its noirish mixture of L. A. glamour and dead-eyed depravity. This February, over two decades later, the trial is back as historical fiction. The aim of FX’s The People v. O. J. Simpson: American Crime Story, as Nicholas Dames wrote last week…
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“The People v. O. J. Simpson” as Historical Fiction
The location is wrong. The white Bronco is clearly weaving through traffic on the 710 South as it approaches its intersection with the 10, on the eastern border of El Sereno, just by the Cal State LA campus. In June 1994, O. J. Simpson and Al Cowlings would have had no reason to venture that…
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Origin of a Species: The First Indian to Publish a Book in English
This essay was originally published in The Caravan. It was 2002, four years before the Jaipur Literature Festival kicked off in Diggi Palace, when I was picked by the British Council to be a part of a small band of Indian reviewers and authors invited to see what the fuss was over the Edinburgh International…
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Must We Have Lives?
“Hermione Lee was very kind,” Penelope Fitzgerald once wrote of the woman who would later become her biographer. “Although she clearly thinks I am hopeless about feminism, and says this is the generation gap.” This anecdote appears nearly four hundred pages into Lee’s recent biography of Fitzgerald, nestled in a cluster of quotations meant to…
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Queen Victoria’s Power
“Victoria was routinely praised for embodying the qualities of the ideal constitutional monarch. But what constituted this ideal behavior?”
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Democracy’s Candide
The atrocity last month at the Paris office of Charlie Hebdo reminds us that a free press is as basic in France as it is in the United States. This is one of the freedoms Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, the Marquis de Lafayette, urged his countrymen to adopt in the early days of…
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Harlem Flights
After all this time, we still have Harlem on our minds. Close to a century after the first waves of mass migration from the American South into uptown Manhattan, movements to, from, and around Harlem continue to stir scholarly inquiry. We tend to think of these journeys in large-scale terms: African Americans searching for better…
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The Salinger Riddle
“You wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it,” says Holden Caulfield of books that “really knock [him] out.” This is one of the most quoted lines from one of the most famous American novels of the…
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In the Yellowstone Valley, a Beet Farmer with an Artist’s Soul
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. Montana Avenue in Billings is a startlingly urban raft on the vast, grassy sea of rural southern Montana. It has microbreweries, artists, a cowboy hat–fixing genius, solar-powered lofts, and huge summer street events, along with homeless people, addicts,…
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The Road to the Holy Mountain
Twenty years ago, I stumbled upon one of the most unusual places on earth. A young student of logic, I was attending a workshop in Thessaloniki with extra time to spare, and the teacher suggested that I go to Mount Athos, the Holy Mountain. He would organize a pilgrim’s pass since the peninsula was an…
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Gandhi in Africa
The title of this biography, Gandhi Before India, glances backwards and forwards. It invokes Ramachandra Guha’s previous blockbuster India After Gandhi and suggests a likely title—Gandhi After India—for volume two of the Mahatma’s life story. Gandhi, India, before, after: these titles quadrate nation and leader, time and space—a rather tame-looking matrix perhaps but one that…
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Margaret Mead’s Countercultures
If you were raised in the United States during the 1960s, as I was, and if you came of intellectual age in the 1980s, as I did, chances are that you too have inherited a strangely black-and-white history of mid-20th-century American culture. The story goes something like this: In the wake of World War II,…
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Masters of Reinvention
For the first 40 years of his life, Albert O. Hirschman was a little-known accessory to world-historic events. Born in Berlin in 1915, he was a refugee from Nazi Germany who wound his way through Europe’s anti-fascist movements, US wartime intelligence, the Marshall Plan, a McCarthyist investigation, and the World Bank’s first foray into Third…
