Tag: Marriage

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 ...

Sinkholes and Saviors

Few writers would dare to pick as the title of a collection of 11 short stories the name of a state that is home to 21 million people, more than a million alligators, countless snakes, and a few ...

Eat, Pray, Drive

The midlife-crisis novel is to contemporary literature what the coming-of-age novel was to 19th-century literature. The former picks up where the latter closes—after the happy ending. Both genres ...

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 ...

Chicago Law

Baltimore has The Wire, Newark, The Sopranos, and for seven seasons Chicago has had The Good Wife. The city with North America’s highest number of annual civilian deaths by cop and its very own ...

A Muslim Future to Come?

The devastating attacks of November 13 on Paris’s 10th and 11th arrondissements viciously targeted the “progressive” heart of the city. When I am there, that is where I live. Like many other ...

Love and Death in Indian Country

At its core, David Treuer’s latest novel is a tale of unrequited love and random violence. The stuff of melodrama, to be sure, but in Treuer’s skillful, multi-vocal telling, neither love nor death ...

Do We Need Wonder Woman?

My two-year-old daughter plays on the beach in a tiny red, white, and blue swimsuit, her chest emblazoned with winged yellow Ws that need no explanation. At a glance, the suit appears of a piece with ...

Passing Beauty

How do you break a spell? How do you get over the grief of racial, gendered, and childhood injuries? Helen Oyeyemi’s novel Boy, Snow, Bird is not a black-and-white parable but a black-and-blue story ...

Sweet Rage

Until the publication of the long-awaited See Now Then, Jamaica Kincaid’s stories and novels had met with almost unqualified praise. When it appeared last year her latest book was almost unanimously ...