Category Archives: Contemporary novel
Samuel Delany, Marilyn Hacker?
March 20, 2013 He met her on the first day, Bronx High School of Science, September 1956. They got married five years later (in Detroit — Michigan was one of the two states where interracial marriage was not illegal). … Continue reading
The Global North: Alexander, Boo, Erdrich, Ferry
February 13, 2013 The blizzard this past weekend made me think of Argus, North Dakota. Louise Erdrich’s country. Love Medicine opens with a blizzard: “The snow feel deeper that Easter than it had for forty years, but June walked over … Continue reading
Jane Austen’s Philadelphia, Toni Morrison’s Denver
January 30, 2013 2013 is the bicentennial of Pride and Prejudice, so I’ve been learning new things about Jane Austen — for instance, the fact that her aunt was named Philadelphia, Phila for short. Phila never saw Philadelphia; no, at … Continue reading
Ntozake Shange, Alice B. Toklas: What Cooks Know
January 23, 2013 “The first effable gazpacho was served to us in Malaga,” Alice notes. She and Gertrude Stein would also find “entirely different but equally exquisite” versions of the that soup in Seville and Cordoba, cities once under Islamic … Continue reading
Louise Erdrich, Kurt Vonnegut: Germany’s Wars
November 21, 2012 There is a longer title to Kurt Vonnegut’s famous novel: “Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty Dance with Death, by Kurt Vonnegut, a Fourth-Generation German-American Now Living in Easy Circumstances on Cape Cod [and Smoking Too … Continue reading
Unending Katrina: Dave Eggers’ Zeitoun
October 31, 2012 I never made it to the World Humanities Forum, a small story in a big storm. New Orleans and New York: this is the tale of two cities that is now unfolding. I wish I could say: … Continue reading
Soul food: Jack Kerouac, Charles Johnson
October 17, 2012 Japhy – Gary Snyder – has no interest in the Buddhism of Chinatown, he likes only the real thing, the Zen taught in Japan. But Kerouac likes everything, especially after a feast of dim sum at Nam … Continue reading
Jack Kerouac, Edwidge Danticat: Joual and Creole
October 10, 2012 The name on his birth certificate is Jean Louis Kirouac – that’s the most common spelling of the name in Quebec, which is where his parents were from. His father, Léon-Alcide, continued to work as a printer … Continue reading
Toni Morrison, Slade Morrison: More Children’s Books
September 12, 2012 Toni Morrison also had trouble with publishers. At least she managed to get it in print — The Big Box, the first of several coauthored with her son Slade, first appeared in Ms. Magazine in 1980 and, … Continue reading
Tender is the Translation
June 20, 2012 Because of my online lectures on Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner, I’ve been getting inquiries about these authors from Asia, Europe, South America – many viewers of the Open Yale Courses are outside the US. This week I … Continue reading