Tag
War
-
The Treachery of Machine Realism
“The bombed elementary school in Iran appears to have become a target thanks to satellite imaging. In this case, what the image represented — and to who — was a matter of life and death.”
-
Can Child Soldiers Be Saved?
Everybody loves stories about child soldiers, it seems, as long as redemption is involved. A memoir about Sierra Leone’s civil war, for example, is not exactly the feel-good stuff you’d expect to see at a Starbucks counter. But in 2007 Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, one of the first…
-
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 •…
-
Streetwise in Weimar
Scholars of Weimar Germany have long wrestled with the fact that this period of unparalleled innovation in intellectual and cultural life was a time of economic and social crisis, brought to a close by one of the greatest political catastrophes in human history. Framed by this intimate conjunction of triumph and tragedy, the analysis of…
-
The War in the Air
The staggered beginnings of Kate Atkinson’s remarkable new novel, A God in Ruins, take a lurching upward trajectory, moving from earth to sky. Its fleeting prelude offers a glimpse of a Royal Air …
-
Tsuris, FREEDOM, and Guantanamo Bay
Wherever secrecy abrades democracy, tragicomedy builds up. It’s cultural nacre: a way of processing with less pain the absurdist bent in national security. This May, Congress used a chunk of its working hours to debate renewing Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act, a provision the Obama administration had interpreted to allow the bulk collection…
-
The Stranger’s Voice
The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s riveting debut novel, is a chronicle of war wrapped in a spy thriller and tucked inside a confession. It is also a political satire, a send-up of Hollywood, and a scathing critique of mid-20th-century Orientalism. Nguyen juggles genres like so many flying AK-47s, and to dazzling, often hilarious effect. At…
-
The Armenian Genocide and the Politics of Knowledge
In this centennial year since the Armenian Genocide, countless conferences, meetings, and commemorations are underway across the globe. While they have all been peaceful so far, they come at the end of a century of violence. I refer not just to the events of 1915–17, but also the waves of violence spurred by memory, recognition,…
-
Going to Playland?
“I thought we were going to Playland. Are you coming?” This may sound like fun, but it’s not Tinkerbell who’s asking. It’s Glen’s random girlfriend Paula, and she just wants some weed. The future is a party, thrown by the Baby Boomers, to which our main characters are probably not invited. This episode, like the…
-
Morality and the Italian Civil War: An Interview with Stanislao Pugliese
After more than 20 years, Claudio Pavone’s A Civil War: A History of the Italian Resistance, recognized as a masterpiece of Italian historiography, has been translated into English. Stanislao Pugliese, professor of history at Hofstra University, edited this 700-page magnum opus and added a detailed introduction, making available for the first time to the American…
-
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…
-
Geoff Dyer’s American Liberation
Geoff Dyer may be the greatest complainer in contemporary literature. It’s a quality of Dyer’s writing that is often noticed but rarely celebrated, the snobbish and insecure voice on the page that’s infectious even when annoying and runs through all his best work. In a way Dyer’s writing exists in its own genre—a genre of…
-
Can Drones Have Ethics?
In this interview, Claire Richard and media studies professor Peter Asaro discuss the history of drone warfare and the troubling proliferation of new technologies that can surveil and kill from a distance. While we’re plenty familiar with drones thanks to the War on Terror, Asaro details the strategic rationale behind their use, along with the…
-
Caught in the Game
The Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh devotes just over a minute of his documentary, The Missing Picture (released in the US in March), to the work of Ang Saroeung, a Khmer Rouge cameraman who filmed the fields of Democratic Kampuchea as they were—barren—and the glorious “new people” of the nation as they were—starving and devastated. When…
-
Futurist Cheerfulness
In the domain of games and toys, as in all passéist manifestations, one sees only grotesque imitation, timidity (miniature trains, little cars, dolls that can’t move, cretinous caricatures of domestic objects), things that are monotonous and discourage exercise, prone only to dishearten children and make them stupid. — Giacomo Balla and Fortunato Depero, “Futurist Reconstruction…
-
Flight Patterns
Colum McCann’s novel TransAtlantic revolves around two missives that reach unanticipated recipients. The first is an undelivered letter written by an American daughter, Emily Ehrlich, on behalf of her Irish mother, Lily Duggan, to the woman who helped Lily leave her life as a maid in 19th-century Dublin. The second is The Narrative of the…
-
Wonders of Destruction in Arabic Fiction
Historians of war and society would like to believe that military conflicts have fixed beginnings and ends. Conventional depictions of the Lebanese civil war are no exception and typically confine that conflict within the notional temporal parameters of 1975–90. But the key aggravating features generally identified with the events of the Lebanese civil war—class resentments,…
-
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…
-
Periphery to Periphery
Paris, New York, and London: these are the world literary capitals that have historically attracted and nurtured aspiring artists, who in turn have mythologized such cities by lovingly evoking them in their work.1 literature.” The World Republic of Letters, translated by M. B. DeBevoise (Harvard University Press, 2004), pp. 24–30. ] But after so many repeat…
-
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…
-
Déjà Vécu
Kate Atkinson has had an intriguing literary career. After winning popular and critical success with her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum (1995), and a Whitbread Prize, she spent most of the 2000s publishing mystery novels centered on a Scottish private investigator, Jackson Brodie. Even putting the genre distinction aside, it’s hard to…
