Tag
Cults
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Marriage and Other Shams
In the early 1980s, an Indian guru homesteaded a tract of ranchland in rural Oregon, building a utopia equipped to withstand both HIV and American hypocrisy. Armed with free love and even freer enterprise (and guns), the Rajneeshees and their ostensible leader, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (nowadays more popularly known as Osho), delivered equal measures of…
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Perestroika Blues
Now nearing the end of its fourth season, The Americans is a confounding success. It’s hard to figure out which of its triumphs is the most unlikely: that it has millions of Americans rooting for KGB agents to outsmart our country every week, or that the FX network has produced a critical darling that is…
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Translating The Magic Flute
When I got a call last year about translating a new Magic Flute libretto for an English-language production at the Opera Theatre of St. Louis, I couldn’t have been more thrilled. The Magic Flute had always been one of my all-time favorite operas, though I’d never paid particular attention to the libretto. Mozart composed the…
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Cult Fiction
In the alternate, very recent past of Fiona Maazel’s second novel, Woke Up Lonely, Esme Haas, mistress of disguise and secret agent for the secretive “Department of the Interior,” is tasked with monitoring the Helix, a mysterious and unlikely cult. Originally formed to combat a national epidemic of loneliness and led by the lonely, well-meaning…
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Realism with Benefits: Of Zombies and Commuters
What’s ordinary these days in fiction (at least Anglo-American fiction) is the lives and loves of two or three school chums, what happens to them as they wander out into the post-school world, what secrets emerge and how their relationships get rearranged. You’ve seen this pattern recently (think The Sense of an Ending), maybe more…
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