If the news is anything to be believed: Egypt is a nation in a state of more or less constant political and social strife; Egyptians are nearly all Islamists, coercing the few and far between secular intellectuals into silence; it is a society not only incapable of democracy, but more generally, incapable of progress.
If the news is anything to go by, there are only two kinds of Egyptians: There are Islamist fanatics who want to reshape Egyptian society and position it as hostile toward America, and hostile toward multiplicity, and there are the young, hip, activists, who only want democracy. The former are no good because they look nothing like us. The latter are only good because they look just like us. The wide swath of Egyptians in between, the rural and politically active, the moderately religious but mostly tolerant, all the apolitical bystanders, are utterly absent from the conversation, and lost from our imaginations.
Midway through Joan Didion’s memoir Blue Nights, she recognizes tone as though it were a found object held in her hand— a photograph of her daughter Quintana Roo, who died in 2009. It’s not stoicism that keeps her from staring at it but more of a kind of nimbleness (or agility?) of mind, flipping through a book of sketches of when Quintana was three years old, of when she got married—the stephanotis woven into her braid—and ultimately, when she passed away.
Queer kids take their own lives all the time. For some reason last fall the media took notice and focused on the suicide of nine teenagers. In response sex columnist Dan Savage, with partner Terry Miller, started the It Gets Better Project (IGB), a viral video intervention reaching out to bullied lesbian, gay, bisexual and [...]
Justin Torres is the author of We The Animals. His stories have appeared in Tin House, Granta, Gulf and Glimmer Train, along with other publications. He is currently a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. He will be giving a reading on Monday, September 12 at 6:30 pm at The New School, moderated by Jackson Taylor, [...]
TOMATOES— As banal a subject it might seem, there might be further possibilities of engagement with the tomato besides whether it’s heirloom or not and where to grow it. I’m speaking about its interpretative potential, or of any piece of fruit, in fiction. There’s a great deal of argument one overhears about the rules of [...]
The Social Climbers Handbook Reviewed by Stephanie Spiro “But manslaughter was what happened when rich or famous people killed someone; they got convicted of manslaughter. They didn’t murder people; that was something vulgar, like wearing white shoes after Labor Day.” – Daisy Greenbaum In her timely and fun new book, The Social Climber’s Handbook, Molly [...]
Reviewed by: Mario Alberto Zambrano For a good two years living in New York City, I was bitter each time I would see a couple out in public holding hands or making out, because I was single—eating alone, going to the cinema or walking through Central Park by myself—and the only place I felt somewhat [...]
Reviewed by Mario Alberto Zambrano What if you broke your arm and a shaft of light came shooting out of your elbow? Or if your boyfriend left you and your chest glowed with brilliant radiance–the pain could be an illumination. So is the basis of Kevin Brockmeier’s new novel The Illumination. He takes the most [...]
True Grit - by Mario A. Zambrano There might be a better reason why I was impressed after seeing True Grit, the latest Coen film, other than that it was a film masterfully put together; from soundtrack to dialog to cinematography. I didn’t watch Westerns growing up, even with the insistent coaxing from my father. [...]
Susan Shapiro, a New School professor since 1993, instructs students to live the “least secretive life you can.” Her latest comic novel, Overexposed does this for her characters and reads like a tell-all expose. Rachel Solomon strives to make a name for herself in the Manhattan’s competitive world of photography. Fresh out of graduate school [...]
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