Barack Obama has long emphasized the importance of reforming American medical care, both as a candidate in the 2008 election and as president. During the month of June, however, he dramatically increased his efforts to secure major reform legislation by the end of the year.
What is an anthology? It is always a little too much and a bit too little. Too much, I mean, in particularly physical terms. The anthologies I own — “The Oxford Anthology of British Literature,” “The Best American Short Stories of the Century” — are prodigious volumes, not the little bouquets of verse denoted by the Greek anthologia. I leave them on my shelves. Sometimes, when I want to exert myself, I go over to where they sit next to the dictionaries and the grammarian handbooks. Otherwise, they sit dusty while I type something into Google. In the Internet Age,
Vertigo, a DC Comics label active since 1993, has long specialized in a particular type of fantasy comic, grounded in contemporary realism but with an eye toward timeless stories. This is the stuff of popular, writer-driven series like The Sandman and Fables, literary-minded accumulations of myth and folklore in which tales interact with one another, although the style also runs through more acidly critical works, ranging from the lurid socioreligious inquiry of Preacher to the flickering streetwise political awareness of Hellblazer.
Lev Grossman’s third novel, The Magicians, pulls liberally from a grab bag of very familiar fantasy tropes: the troubled boy–turned–master conjurer; the school of wizardry, hidden by spellcraft in plain sight; the sinister presence that haunts the students’ nightmares; even a sport played, tournament-style, exclusively by young mages. As the book opens, seventeen-year-old Quentin Coldwater is preparing to leave his bucolic Brooklyn, New York, neighborhood for the greener lawns of the Ivy League. He has a small circle of friends, kind but distant parents, and a GPA “higher than most people even realize it is possible for a GPA to
In a 1998 essay recently reprinted in his book Close Calls with Nonsense, critic Stephen Burt christened the “Elliptical school” of poetry, which encompasses writers prone to “hinting, punning, or swerving away from a never-quite-unfolded backstory,” who “believe provisionally in identities (in one—or in at least one—‘I’ per poem),” but who, amid their “fast-forward and cut-up,” “suspect the I’s they invoke.” He grants only an elliptical mention to April Bernard, noting that he wishes he had room to quote her first volume, Blackbird Bye-Bye (1989). That book embraces a rhetoric of zig-zags, shifting swiftly from one image or sentiment to
Tragedy and irony can be fickle playmates. Consider for example Philip K. Dick’s struggle to be accepted as a mainstream author, to have his work appreciated and understood outside the genre of science fiction, which was a dilemma he considered “a very long-term tragedy – of my creative life.”
Nicola Keegan’s novel about a Kansas girl who swims her way to the Seoul Olympics sounds drearily good-natured and uplifting, but if that’s what you’re after, you should paddle back to the shallow end. This isn’t like one of those sentimental biopics that give everybody a chance to go to the bathroom between the big races. Yes, the young heroine shatters records (and bones) and collects enough gold medals to fill a pirate’s treasure chest, but she also discovers that beating a husky East German with a 5 o’clock shadow is easier than competing against hopelessness and death.
New Yorkers encounter the peculiar, comic-sounding word knickerbocker all over the city: on street signs and at subway stops, in the names of condominiums, restaurants, and bars, and—shortened to the catchier Knicks—on basketball jerseys. When consummate man-about-town George Plimpton died in 2003, the New York Observer called him “the last Knickerbocker.” But what is a knickerbocker? Is being called one praise or a curse? According to historian Elizabeth L. Bradley’s new study, the term has been “used alternately with reverence or disdain” over its two-hundred-year history, quickly slipping its original meaning to become a “link between a strange, sometimes unholy
When I was a little girl, my mom—consummate feminist and literary mother par excellence—gave me Tatterhood and Other Tales, an anthology of feminist folk tales whose cover sported a soot-cheeked minx gamely beating back a gang of trolls with a wooden spoon. Published by the Feminist Press in 1978, Tatterhood was one of a slew of anthologies that emerged in the wake of the women’s rights movement to combat the patriarchal Brothers Grimm and Disney party line. But employing fairy tales for activist means was nothing new. In Weimer Germany, fairy-tale collections like the pungently titled Proletarischer Kindergarten (1921) were
The large segment of the Haitian population that is unable to read or write inhabits an oral history culture, which produces, when looking into the past, a curious foreshortening. First comes the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804, the only successful slave revolution in history and an event with whose fundamentals practically all Haitians are reasonably conversant. Then there’s a compressed, indeterminate period of confused and repetitious instability, ending with President Woodrow Wilson’s decision in 1915 to use the collection of outstanding American and French loans as a pretext for installing Marines in Haiti to prevent the election of an anti-American president.
In the beginning, before the Big Bang, all the matter in the universe was concentrated in a single point. Qfwfq can tell you about it: He was there. “Naturally, we were all there—where else could we have been? Nobody knew then that there could be space. Or time, either: What use did we have for time, packed in there like sardines?”
Nic Brown’s Floodmarkers is set in 1989, but in its fractured portrait of small-town American life, it feels considerably older—a Winesburg, Ohio run through with Gen-X slang. Like Sherwood Anderson, Brown is essentially a still-life artist; he eschews plot for portraiture, the linear for the lateral. “His instinct was to present everything together, as in a dream,” Malcolm Cowley once wrote of Anderson. So, too, with Brown, whose first novel scatters brilliantly in a dozen directions at once, without advancing a single day.
While there’s a lot we don’t know about Bigfoot, his enthusiasts generally agree that he smells terrible, enjoys leaving footprints where people can find them, and frequents the deepest woods of northern California—a region not coincidentally inhabited by marijuana growers and tall-tale-telling lumberjacks. Primitive, hairy, big-buttocked, and benign (except when he kidnaps local women and takes them home to meet the parents), Bigfoot represents an all-natural alternative to megamalls, the Internet, and TV. Oh, and another thing—after thousands of purported sightings, there’s still not a single piece of evidence that this wise, benevolent naturist actually exists. Perhaps this is because
Jealousy has a range of settings. At boil, it’s the green-eyed monster that destroys love affairs. At simmer, it’s a twinge in the gut when we’re confronted with something we covet. In third grade, it was the Cabbage Patch doll. In ninth grade, perfectly matched outfits from the Gap. In college, the Velvet Underground box set. In adulthood? A Craftsman in Silver Lake would be just fantastic, thank you.
Call it the changing of seasons or a trick of time zones, but for English speakers, the slowly cooling summer of Japanese manga may yet be the spring of Korean manhwa. These comics have been on North American bookstore shelves almost as long as their Japanese counterparts have, though they’ve received less attention from the reading public, and few scholars have ventured to explore the distinctions between the two approaches. Often, titles and series seem selected for publication on the basis of how closely they emulate the look and feel of popular Japanese comics, so manhwa shoulders the burden of
Revisionist history is often a bitter pill to swallow, especially when the consensus has permeated the very language of the debate. In the early 1950s, one crucial issue divided American public opinion, and continued to do so for decades. The question centred on the nature of Soviet communism, and the internal threat posed by American agents working for the KGB in the United States. Was the ‘Konspiratsia’ real, or were the accusers simply political fantasists seeking ‘Reds under the beds’? The answer lies within the pages of John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr’s remarkable book.
The plucky unnamed street urchin who narrates Affinity Konar’s vivid and disturbing first novel, The Illustrated Version of Things, is seemingly sprung from a Carson McCullers novel. A high school version of Jodie Foster’s knock-kneed nymph in Taxi Driver, she possesses an almost beatific naïveté that is decidedly Dargeresque, despite being a survivor of the streets and the foster-care system and recently released from a mental hospital.
To call Mark Nowak’s haunting new book a collection of poetry would be a bit of a misnomer. It would also be misleading to say Nowak is its author. The poems in Coal Mountain Elementary comprise three strands of found text; Nowak has selected and braided them, achieving an arresting effect. This is a book that exposes the darkest reaches of the global coal industry by using the industry’s own means—politely referred to as “extraction”—to lay bare the official language used to obfuscate mining’s human and environmental impact and to recover the far truer language of miners themselves.
“The essential American soul,” wrote D.H. Lawrence in a celebrated description, “is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.” Of course, he was talking about Natty Bumppo and similar rough-and-tumble frontier spirits. By contrast, the amoral Tom Ripley—novelist Patricia Highsmith’s most famous character—is easygoing, devoted to his wife and friends, epicurean, and a killer only by necessity. By my count, necessity leads this polite aesthete to bludgeon or strangle eight people and watch with satisfaction while two others drown. He also sets in motion the successful suicides of three friends he actually, in his way, cares about. Yet aside from an
Trying to sum up Kevin Cannon’s Far Arden in brief is a challenge on the order of the one that the characters face in their epic attempt to locate the titular fabled island. Cannon’s graphic novel is an adventure, a comedy, a mystery, and a tragedy. It’s the story of a crusty sea-dog named Army Shanks, an orphan named Alistair, two college students, and the femme fatale Shanks once loved. There are fox pelts, a polar bear, a ship named the Areopagitica, a circus, fears of global warming, a college on the Boothia peninsula, and a deadly MRI machine. There’s
