Responses to the idea of a “post-racial” society usually follow a certain script. In most progressive circles in the US, the notion is dismissed as fantasy or delusion. In southern Africa, and ...
Tag: Literary Fiction
When Dogs Bite
“I could tell you that I was beating the dog because I was beaten, that I was six and stupid and knew no better,” Marwand recounts to his cousin Zia in eastern Afghanistan. “But here is the other ...
The Return of the Surrealist Women
In Leonora Carrington’s novel The Hearing Trumpet, a woman, Carmella, revels in sending letters to strangers ...
Killing Joke
Some things you fall for a little too fast and a little too hard. Not that long ago, a novelist friend urged this novel on me, the way your novelist friends are wont to do. “You’ll like it,” he said ...
Fairy Tales of Race and Nation
In its own allusive way, Helen Oyeyemi’s Gingerbread considers the imminent departure of the United Kingdom from the European Union. A textbook in ...
Millennials in Beattieland
No word haunts discussions of Ann Beattie like the word generation. Once upon a time, back when novelists still had the luxury of holding their publicity at a ...
We Are All King Lear’s Children
Which is Shakespeare’s timeliest play—the one that best mirrors our present moment? This is a perennial question, and perhaps a silly one, but we might begin an answer ...
