Tag
Illness & Medicine
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When Language Is Lost, What Can Be Gained?
Aphasia brings up existential questions that get at the heart of human connection: Who are we without language?
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Show Me Where It Hurts: Part 2
In this second part of my survey of the growing field of graphic medicine, I review four recent nonfiction books about health, illness, recovery and loss. These books vary in many respects—in their visual styles and narrative approaches, but especially in the ways in which the educational and the personal are engaged. However, what they…
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Show Me Where It Hurts: Part 1
Illness, mental and physical, is arguably comics’ invisible master theme, deeply woven into their genome and shaping the stories they tell, from the earliest newspaper strips (chronic allergies in Winsor McCay’s Little Sammy Sneeze) through the rise of superhero comics (from Batman’s PTSD in 1939 through the Fantastic Four’s radiation poisoning in 1961). It is…
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Virtual Roundtable on the Library of Korean Literature
In this virtual roundtable, edited and introduced by Seo Hee Im, Koreanists and scholars of world literature reflect on five writers recently published in the Library of Korean Literature series by Dalkey Archive Press. • Joe Cleary on Choi In-hun, The Square • Wai Chee Dimock on Lee Ki-ho, At Least We Can Apologize •…
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Oliver’s Body
Some autism spectrum and disability activists have turned, in an age in which Asperger syndrome has come to describe Silicon Valley’s new normal, to a figure of the neuroqueer.1 If queerness came, by the early 1990s, to stand less for specific sexual and gendered identities and more for a general troubling of norms that pathologize and…
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A Letter to My Children about the Supreme Court’s Ruling on Obamacare
Want help in explaining the significance of the recent Supreme Court ruling on Obamacare to your kids? In what follows, a former Supreme Court law clerk, top appellate litigator …
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On Longer Lives and Longer Deaths
America has many open secrets. The nursing home is one of them. We try not to think too hard or too long about its residents or its low-wage staff. We’ll confront its smell, its humiliations, its bleakness, only once we need it …
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Immigrants and Illness
Illness stories recount a person’s experience with sickness and disease, often following the journey from the onset of the illness to its diagnosis, to treatment and recovery. They’ve gained increasing critical attention in recent years, thanks to what we might call the narrative turn in the study of illness and medicine. Emerging as a distinct…
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Why Is Drug Use Forbidden?
If the 20th was the century of the prohibition of drugs, the 21st has every chance to be the century of their liberation. An increasing number of initiatives—state, national, and international—have legalized or are trying to legalize the recreational use of marijuana. Colorado and Washington have, already, authorized its sale in specialized stores, and Alaska,…
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Falling Faintly: McEwan’s Latest
In 1893, the Scottish writer William Sharp began publishing poetry under the pseudonym Fiona MacLeod. MacLeod’s poems caught the eye of W. B. Yeats, who admired her lyricism even as he disdained the verse Sharp published under his own name. The elements of this minor literary intrigue—modern poetry and sexual confusion—lie behind Ian McEwan’s equally…
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Walking with the Unconsoled
What can we expect imaginative writing to do in the face of unalleviated grief? If one of fiction’s strengths remains its expression of irreducibly singular minds, what role then might it play in unbinding the grieving individual from self-isolation? In the slender and unclassifiable narrative Falling Out of Time, David Grossman tackles these entwined questions by connecting one…
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Why You Should Experience Funk, God, Jazz, and Medicine: Black Radical Brooklyn
If you think you know New York City history, Black history, American history—anything about Brooklyn at all—but you don’t know about Weeksville, then go to the Creative Time project Funk, God, Jazz, and Medicine: Black Radical Brooklyn before it closes this Sunday, October 12. There are five major sites specific to this ambitious, neighborhood-spanning creative…
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A Head of His Time
Recently longlisted for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, John Corey Whaley’s eagerly awaited second novel, Noggin, promises second chances: life after death. Or not death, quite, but whatever happens when a head is removed from a cancer-ridden body and cryogenically frozen for five years, waiting for science to catch up. And catch…
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Through the Looking Glass
Although the numbers are at epidemic levels (in the United States, it is estimated to affect 1 in 68 children and 1 in 42 boys),1 autism remains a singular experience—as unique as each individual. Reaching a formal diagnosis is often a complex task. According to the Autism Society, it typically involves a team of doctors and…
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Conversion Sickness
“Nathaniel P. is George Eliot. Nathaniel P. is Tolstoy.” Thus proclaimed a friend of mine in adulation of young novelist Adelle Waldman’s widely acclaimed debut, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. Waldman’s Nate Piven is a writer in the New York of the very recent past, after the city’s center of literary gravity slid across the…
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Cancer’s Poison Gift
S. Lochlann Jain’s Malignant: How Cancer Becomes Us is both a memoir of the author’s personal journey as a cancer patient and a trenchant analysis of why preventing cancer has never been an American priority, even though it afflicts so many of us. Jain is well known for her work on the cultural, legal, and…
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Mo Yan through a Dog’s Eyes
Mo Yan, born Guan Moye, is widely regarded as one of contemporary China’s most talented and accomplished authors. Predictably, his receipt of the 2012 Nobel Prize for Literature has brought him an avalanche of new attention. Many critics have celebrated him for being the first Chinese national to win the coveted award,1 while others have…
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Sentient Instruments
Things had been tough since Dee got back from Iraq. She and her husband were sleeping on opposite sides of the bed. “I’m sorry you’re not getting laid,” she snapped at him, “but I’m still seeing my buddies get killed in my head!” One night, they sat down to watch Transformers with their three-year-old daughter. As…
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Less Vital Phenomena
A recent New York Times profile of Anthony Marra, the author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, notes that “until the Boston Marathon bombings most Americans paid little attention to Chechnya.”1 Though Marra, whose novel is set against the backdrop of the Chechen Wars, is clearly an exception to this generalization, variations on the same…
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Michael Pollan’s Dilemma
In the 20th anniversary edition of On Food and Cooking, the celebrated food writer Harold McGee claims that “to understand what’s happening within a food as we cook it, we need to be familiar with the world of invisibly small molecules and their reactions with each other.”1 But why, we might ask? Cooking is cultural as…
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The History of Secrets
Family Secrets by Deborah Cohen injects the marrow back into two centuries of skeletons locked away in household closets. A leading historian of modern Britain and Europe, Cohen has put together a rollicking read through the hidden land of cultural morality and its fundamental institution, the family. A son who prefers lipstick to lip balm…
