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All children have different eyes: learn to play and make friends
Par Edie A Glaser, Maria R Burgio, Doina Paraschiv. 2007
Spend a day with Tommy and Wendy and find out what it's really like to play and make friends with…
kids who see in different ways. Grades K-3 and older readers. 2007.Everything Inside: Stories
Par Edwidge Danticat. 2019
From the internationally acclaimed, best-selling author of Brother, I'm Dying, a collection of vividly imagined stories about community, family, and…
love. Rich with hard-won wisdom and humanity, set in locales from Miami and Port-au-Prince to a small unnamed country in the Caribbean and beyond, Everything Inside is at once wide in scope and intimate, as it explores the forces that pull us together, or drive us apart, sometimes in the same searing instant. In these eight powerful, emotionally absorbing stories, a romance unexpectedly sparks between two wounded friends; a marriage ends for what seem like noble reasons, but with irreparable consequences; a young woman holds on to an impossible dream even as she fights for her survival; two lovers reunite after unimaginable tragedy, both for their country and in their lives; a baby's christening brings three generations of a family to a precarious dance between old and new; a man falls to his death in slow motion, reliving the defining moments of the life he is about to lose. This is the indelible work of a keen observer of the human heart--a master at her bestNothing that Is, The: Essays on Art, Literature and Being (Essais Series #9)
Par Johanna Skibsrud. 2019
Rather than making "something" out of "nothing," what follows is an endeavour to express the potential of language and thought…
to encounter what is infinitely beyond both yet to be imagined.In The Nothing That Is, Johanna Skibsrud gathers essays about the very concept of "nothing." Addressing a broad range of topics—including false atrocity tales, so-called fake news, high-wire acts, and telepathy, as well as responses to works by John Ashbery, Virginia Woolf, Anne Carson, and more—these essays seek to decentre our relationship to both the "givenness" of history and to a predictive or probable model of the future.The Nothing That Is explores ways in which poetic language can activate the possibilities replete within our every moment. Skibsrud reveals that within every encounter between a speaking "I" and what exceeds subjectivity, there is a listening "Other," be it community or the objective world.Praise for The Nothing That Is:"Skibsrud adds brilliantly to what we can know of poetry. By entering into the words of Woolf, Oppen, Stephens, Rukeyser, Carson and others, and thinking in our presence, she gives us the experience of touch and beauty and the poem. A friend to Burke's sublime and to Pato?s at the limit, this book urges us to receive poetry's "nothing" for here an abundance lives. Put The Nothing That Is into the hands of whoever is puzzled by or afraid of poetry, into the hands of whoever teaches it!" —Erín Moure"Why do I find Skibsrud's consideration of Nothing essentially hopeful? Because her approach to the possibilities of thinking Nothing arise out of, and include, the despair of Celan's babble—which is to say the incomprehensible, a place where all known structures, including language, have fallen away. Skibsrud invites us to participate in the very human process of re-seeing and remaking the world; she challenges us to venture with her into the unknown, where experience and language empty themselves, then create themselves anew." —Sam Ace, author of Our Weather Our Sea"At some point in my relationship with The Nothing That Is I began to forget that I was reading a collection of essays on art, language, and being, and began, instead, to believe that I was reading a guidebook on how to approach and appreciate outer space. Because, in her recuperative and intimate readings of the often despairing, always life-affirming schisms between what is expressed and what remains inexpressible, Johanna Skibsrud has written a manifesto of liminal, reverberative space, as essential to our understanding of poetry and art, as to that of black holes and the Milky Way." —Brandon Shimoda, author of The Grave on the WallJournalist Aaron Shulman presents an absorbing and atmospheric historical narrative that takes us deeply into the circumstances surrounding the Spanish…
Civil War through the lives, loves, and poetry of the Paneros, Spain's most compelling and eccentric family, whose lives intersected memorably with many of the most storied figures in the art, literature, and politics of the time-a searing tale of love and hatred, art and ambition, and freedom and oppressionRed comet: The short life and blazing art of sylvia plath
Par Heather Clark. 2020
"Finally, the biography that Sylvia Plath deserves . . . A spectacular achievement." —Ruth Franklin, author of Shirley Jackson: A…
Rather Haunted Life The highly anticipated new biography of Sylvia Plath that focuses on her remarkable literary and intellectual achievements, while restoring the woman behind the long-held myths about her life and art. With a wealth of never-before-accessed materials—including unpublished letters and manuscripts; court, police, and psychiatric records; and new interviews—Heather Clark brings to life the brilliant daughter of Wellesley, Massachusetts who had poetic ambition from a very young age and was an accomplished, published writer of poems and stories even before she became a star English student at Smith College in the early 1950s. Determined not to read Plath's work as if her every act, from childhood on, was a harbinger of her tragic fate, Clark evokes a culture in transition, in the shadow of the atom bomb and the Holocaust, as she explores Plath's world: her early relationships and determination not to become a conventional woman and wife; her conflicted ties to her well-meaning, widowed mother; her troubles at the hands of an unenlightened mental-health industry; her Cambridge years and thunderclap meeting with Ted Hughes, a marriage of true minds that would change the course of poetry in English; and much more. Clark's clear-eyed portraits of Hughes, his lover Assia Wevill, and other demonized players in the arena of Plath's suicide promotes a deeper understanding of her final days, with their outpouring of first-rate poems. Along with illuminating readings of the poems themselves, Clark's meticulous, compassionate research brings us closer than ever to the spirited woman and visionary artist who blazed a trail that still lights the way for women poets the world overWhat we carry: A memoir
Par Maya Shanbhag Lang. 2020
&“A gorgeous memoir about mothers, daughters, and the tenacity of the love that grows between what is said and what…
is left unspoken.&”—Mira Jacob, author of Good Talk If our family stories shape us, what happens when we learn those stories were never true? Who do we become when we shed our illusions about the past? Maya Shanbhag Lang grew up idolizing her brilliant mother, an accomplished physician who immigrated to the United States from India and completed her residency all while raising her children and keeping a traditional Indian home. Maya&’s mother had always been a source of support—until Maya became a mother herself. Then the parent who had once been so capable and attentive became suddenly and inexplicably unavailable. Struggling to understand this abrupt change while raising her own young child, Maya searches for answers and soon learns that her mother is living with Alzheimer&’s. Unable to remember or keep track of the stories she once told her daughter—stories about her life in India, why she immigrated, and her experience of motherhood—Maya&’s mother divulges secrets about her past that force Maya to reexamine their relationship. It becomes clear that Maya never really knew her mother, despite their close bond. Absorbing, moving, and raw, What We Carry is a memoir about mothers and daughters, lies and truths, receiving and giving care, and how we cannot grow up until we fully understand the people who raised us. It is a beautiful examination of the weight we shoulder as women and an exploration of how to finally set our burdens down. Praise for What We Carry "Part self-discovery, part family history. . . [Lang's] analysis of the shifting roles of mothers and daughters, particularly through the lens of immigration, help[s] to challenge her family&’s mythology. . . . Readers interested in examining their own family stories . . . will connect deeply with Lang&’s beautiful memoir." — Library Journal (Starred Review) &“A stirring memoir exploring the fraught relationships between mothers and daughters . . . astutely written and intense . . . [ What We Carry ] will strike a chord with readers.&” —Publishers Weekly &“Lang is an immediately affable and honest narrator who offers an intriguing blend of revelatory personal history and touching insight.&” —BookPageShame on me: An anatomy of race and belonging
Par Tessa Mcwatt. 2020
Interrogating our ideas of race through the lens of her own multi-racial identity, critically acclaimed novelist Tessa McWatt turns her…
eye on herself, her body and this world in a powerful new work of non-fiction. Tessa McWatt has been called Susie Wong, Pocahontas and "black bitch," and has been judged not black enough by people who assume she straightens her hair. Now, through a close examination of her own body—nose, lips, hair, skin, eyes, ass, bones and blood—which holds up a mirror to the way culture reads all bodies, she asks why we persist in thinking in terms of race today when racism is killing us. Her grandmother's family fled southern China for British Guiana after her great uncle was shot in his own dentist's chair during the First Sino-Japanese War. McWatt is made of this woman and more: those who arrived in British Guiana from India as indentured labour and those who were brought from Africa as cargo to work on the sugar plantations; colonists and those whom colonialism displaced. How do you tick a box on a census form or job application when your ancestry is Scottish, English, French, Portuguese, Indian, Amerindian, African and Chinese? How do you finally answer a question first posed to you in grade school: "What are you?" And where do you find a sense of belonging in a supposedly "post-racial" world where shadism, fear of blackness, identity politics and call-out culture vie with each other noisily, relentlessly and still lethally? Shame on Me is a personal and powerful exploration of history and identity, colour and desire from a writer who, having been plagued with confusion about her race all her life, has at last found kinship and solidarity in storyBegin again: James baldwin's america and its urgent lessons for our own
Par Eddie S Glaude. 2020
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • James Baldwin grew disillusioned by the failure of the civil rights movement to force America…
to confront its lies about race. In our own moment, when that confrontation feels more urgently needed than ever, what can we learn from his struggle? NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST AND TIME • Shortlisted for the Goddard Riverside Stephan Russo Book Prize for Social Justice • &“A powerful study of how to bear witness in a moment when America is being called to do the same.&”— Time We live, according to Eddie S. Glaude Jr., in a moment when the struggles of Black Lives Matter and the attempt to achieve a new America have been challenged by the election of Donald Trump, a president whose victory represents yet another failure of America to face the lies it tells itself about race. From Charlottesville to the policies of child separation at the border, his administration turned its back on the promise of Obama&’s presidency and refused to embrace a vision of the country shorn of the insidious belief that white people matter more than others. We have been here before: For James Baldwin, these after times came in the wake of the civil rights movement, when a similar attempt to compel a national confrontation with the truth was answered with the murders of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. In these years, spanning from the publication of The Fire Next Time in 1963 to that of No Name in the Street in 1972, Baldwin transformed into a more overtly political writer, a change that came at great professional and personal cost. But from that journey, Baldwin emerged with a sense of renewed purpose about the necessity of pushing forward in the face of disillusionment and despair. In the story of Baldwin&’s crucible, Glaude suggests, we can find hope and guidance through our own after times, this Trumpian era of shattered promises and white retrenchment. Mixing biography—drawn partially from newly uncovered interviews—with history, memoir, and trenchant analysis of our current moment, Begin Again is Glaude&’s endeavor, following Baldwin, to bear witness to the difficult truth of race in America today. It is at once a searing exploration that lays bare the tangled web of race, trauma, and memory, and a powerful interrogation of what we all must ask of ourselves in order to call forth a new AmericaThe book collectors: A band of syrian rebels and the stories that carried them through a war
Par Delphine Minoui. 2020
"An urgent and compelling account of great bravery and passion." ―Susan Orlean Award-winning journalist Delphine Minoui recounts the true story…
of a band of young rebels, a besieged Syrian town, and an underground library built from the rubble of war Reading is an act of resistance. Daraya is a town outside Damascus, the very spot where the Syrian Civil War began. Long a site of peaceful resistance to the Assad regimes, Daraya fell under siege in 2012. For four years, no one entered or left, and aid was blocked. Every single day, bombs fell on this place―a place of homes and families, schools and children, now emptied and broken into bits. And then a group searching for survivors stumbled upon a cache of books in the rubble. In a week, they had six thousand volumes; in a month, fifteen thousand. A sanctuary was born: a library where people could escape the blockade, a paper fortress to protect their humanity. The library offered a marvelous range of books―from Arabic poetry to American self-help, Shakespearean plays to stories of war in other times and places. The visitors shared photos and tales of their lives before the war, planned how to build a democracy, and tended the roots of their community despite shell-shocked soil. In the midst of the siege, the journalist Delphine Minoui tracked down one of the library's founders, twenty-three-year-old Ahmad. Over text messages, WhatsApp, and Facebook, Minoui came to know the young men who gathered in the library, exchanged ideas, learned English, and imagined how to shape the future, even as bombs kept falling from above. By telling their stories, Minoui makes a far-off, complicated war immediate and reveals these young men to be everyday heroes as inspiring as the books they read. The Book Collectors is a testament to their bravery and a celebration of the power of wordsOne Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter: Essays
Par Scaachi Koul. 2017
**National Bestseller**A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice**A Globe and Mail Best Book of 2017**A National Post Best Book…
of 2017**A CBC Best Book of 2017**An Amazon Best Book of 2017**A Popsugar Best Book of 2017**A Kobo Best Book of 2017**An NPR Best Book of 2017**A Chatelaine Best Book of 2017**A Buzzfeed Best Book of 2017**A Book Riot Best Book of 2017**A Chicago Review of Books Best Book of 2017**A Paste Best Book of 2017**An Amazon Best Humour and Entertainment Book of 2017**Finalist for the 2018 Kobo Emerging Writer Prize**Finalist for the 2018 Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour**Nominated for the 2017 Goodreads Choice AwardFor readers of Mindy Kaling, Jenny Lawson and Roxane Gay, a debut collection of fierce and funny essays about growing up the daughter of Indian immigrants in Canada, "a land of ice and casual racism," by the irreverent, hilarious cultural observer and incomparable rising star, Scaachi Koul.In One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter, Scaachi deploys her razor-sharp humour to share her fears, outrages and mortifying experiences as an outsider growing up in Canada. Her subjects range from shaving her knuckles in grade school, to a shopping trip gone horribly awry, to dealing with internet trolls, to feeling out of place at an Indian wedding (as an Indian woman), to parsing the trajectory of fears and anxieties that pressed upon her immigrant parents and bled down a generation. Alongside these personal stories are pointed observations about life as a woman of colour, where every aspect of her appearance is open for critique, derision or outright scorn. Where strict gender rules bind in both Western and Indian cultures, forcing her to confront questions about gender dynamics, racial tensions, ethnic stereotypes and her father’s creeping mortality—all as she tries to find her feet in the world. With a clear eye and biting wit, Scaachi Koul explores the absurdity of a life steeped in misery. And through these intimate, wise and laugh-out-loud funny dispatches, a portrait of a bright new literary voice emerges.Hamnet and Judith: A novel
Par Maggie O'Farrell. 2020
WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION"[An] exceptional winner.... It expresses something profound about the human experience that seems both…
extraordinarily current and at the same time, enduring." --Martha Lane Fox, Chair of The Women's Prize for Fiction judges TWO EXTRAORDINARY PEOPLE. A LOVE THAT DRAWS THEM TOGETHER. A PLAGUE THAT THREATENS TO TEAR THEM APART.England, 1580. A young Latin tutor--penniless, bullied by a violent father--falls in love with an eccentric young woman: a wild creature who walks her family's estate with a falcon on her shoulder and is known throughout the countryside for her unusual gifts as a healer. Agnes understands plants and potions better than she does people, but once she settles on the Henley Street in Stratford she becomes a fiercely protective mother and a steadfast, centrifugal force in the life of her young husband. His gifts as a writer are just beginning to awaken when their beloved twins, Hamnet and Judith, are afflicted with the bubonic plague, and, devastatingly, one of them succumbs to the illness.A luminous portrait of a marriage, a shattering evocation of a family ravaged by grief and loss, and a hypnotic recreation of the story that inspired one of the greatest literary masterpieces of all time, Hamnet & Judith is mesmerizing and seductive, an impossible-to-put-down novel from one of our most gifted writers.Published as Hamnet in the US and the UK.Square haunting: Five writers in london between the wars
Par Francesca Wade. 2020
Mecklenburgh Square has always been a radical address. Nestled in the heart of Bloomsbury, these townhouses have borne witness to…
the lives of some of the century's most revolutionary cultural figures-many of whom were extraordinary women. United by their desire to experiment with new ways of living-and therefore of being-these authors and thinkers were trailblazers in their commitment to creative independence. Square Haunting is a glorious portrait of five of the square's inhabitants whose lives intersected in the interwar years: modernist poet and novelist Hilda Doolittle; crime writer Dorothy Sayers; celebrated classicist Jane Harrison; historian and suffragist Eileen Power; and Virginia Woolf. Francesca Wade's luminous group biography restores a female voice to London's streets, revealing five unforgettable characters who forged careers and identities that would have been impossible without these rooms of their own. Roving across a time of historical upheaval, Wade takes us beyond the famed bohemian parties and political salons into the emotional texture and gender politics of daily life itself-and an era that gave birth to a new modes of working, loving, and beingShakespeare in a divided america: What his plays tell us about our past and future
Par James Shapiro. 2020
One of the New York Times Ten Best Books of the Year A New York Times Notable Book From leading…
scholar James Shapiro, a timely exploration of what Shakespeare&’s plays reveal about our divided land, from Revolutionary times to the present day The plays of William Shakespeare are rare common ground in the United States. They are read at school by almost every student, staged in theaters across the land, and long valued by conservatives and liberals alike. For well over two centuries, Americans of all stripes—presidents and activists, writers and soldiers—have turned to Shakespeare&’s works to explore the nation&’s fault lines, including such issues as manifest destiny, race, gender, immigration, and free speech. In a narrative arching across the centuries, from Revolutionary times to the present day, leading scholar James Shapiro traces the unparalleled role of Shakespeare's four-hundred-year-old tragedies and comedies in illuminating the many concerns on which American identity has turned. Reflecting on how Shakespeare has been invoked—and at times weaponized—at pivotal moments in our past, Shapiro takes us from President John Quincy Adams&’s disgust with Desdemona&’s interracial marriage to Othello, to Abraham Lincoln&’s and his assassin John Wilkes Booth&’s competing obsessions with the plays, up through the fraught debates over marriage and same-sex love at the heart of the celebrated adaptations Kiss Me, Kate and Shakespeare in Love. His narrative culminates in the 2017 controversy over the staging of Julius Caesar in Central Park, in which a Trump-like leader is assassinated. Deeply researched, and timely, Shakespeare in a Divided America reveals how no writer has been more closely embraced by Americans, or has shed more light on the hot-button issues in our history. Indeed, it is by better understanding Shakespeare's role in American life, Shapiro argues, that we might begin to mend our bitterly divided landA swim in a pond in the rain: In which four russians give a master class on writing, reading, and life
Par George Saunders. 2021
From the New York Times bestselling, Booker Prize–winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo and Tenth of December comes a…
literary master class on what makes great stories work and what they can tell us about ourselves—and our world today. For the last twenty years, George Saunders has been teaching a class on the Russian short story to his MFA students at Syracuse University. In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain , he shares a version of that class with us, offering some of what he and his students have discovered together over the years. Paired with iconic short stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol, the seven essays in this book are intended for anyone interested in how fiction works and why it&’s more relevant than ever in these turbulent times. In his introduction, Saunders writes, &“We&’re going to enter seven fastidiously constructed scale models of the world, made for a specific purpose that our time maybe doesn&’t fully endorse but that these writers accepted implicitly as the aim of art—namely, to ask the big questions, questions like, How are we supposed to be living down here? What were we put here to accomplish? What should we value? What is truth, anyway, and how might we recognize it?&” He approaches the stories technically yet accessibly, and through them explains how narrative functions; why we stay immersed in a story and why we resist it; and the bedrock virtues a writer must foster. The process of writing, Saunders reminds us, is a technical craft, but also a way of training oneself to see the world with new openness and curiosity. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is a deep exploration not just of how great writing works but of how the mind itself works while reading, and of how the reading and writing of stories make genuine connection possible. Bestseller.The selected letters of ralph ellison
Par Ralph Ellison. 2019
A radiant collection of letters from the renowned author of Invisible Man that trace the life and mind of a…
giant of American literature, with insights into the riddle of identity, the writer&’s craft, and the story of a changing nation over six decades A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK These extensive and revealing letters span the life of Ralph Ellison and provide a remarkable window into the great writer&’s life and work, his friendships, rivalries, anxieties, and all the questions about identity, art, and the American soul that bedeviled and inspired him until his death. They include early notes to his mother, written as an impoverished college student; lively exchanges with the most distinguished American writers and thinkers of his time, from Romare Bearden to Saul Bellow; and letters to friends and family from his hometown of Oklahoma City, whose influence would always be paramount. These letters are beautifully rendered first-person accounts of Ellison&’s life and work and his observations of a changing world, showing his metamorphosis from a wide-eyed student into a towering public intellectual who confronted and articulated America&’s complexitiesThe tao of pooh
Par Benjamin Hoff. 2015
Winnie-the-Pooh has a certain Way about him, a way of doing things that has made him the world's most beloved…
bear. In The Tao of Pooh, Benjamin Hoff shows that Pooh's Way is amazingly consistent with the principles of living envisioned by the Chinese founders of Taoism. The author's explanation of Taoism through Pooh, and Pooh through Taoism, shows that this is not simply an ancient and remote philosophy but something you can use, here and now.And what is Taoism? It's really very simple. It calls for living without preconceived ideas about how life should be lived-but it's not a preconception of how life-it's.... Well, you'd do better to listen to this book, and listen to Pooh, if you really want to find outHarry Potter and history (Wiley Pop Culture and History Series #bk. 1)
Par Nancy R. Reagin. 2020
Harry Potter lives in a world that is both magical and historical. Hogwarts pupils ride an old-fashioned steam train to…
school, notes are taken on parchment with quill pens, and Muggle legends come to life in the form of werewolves, witches, and magical spells. This book is the first to explore the real history in which Harry's world is rooted. Did you know that bezoars and mandrakes were fashionable luxury items for centuries? Find out how Europeans first developed the potions, spells, and charms taught at Hogwarts, from Avada Kedavra to love charms. Learn how the European prosecution of witches led to the Statute of Secrecy, meet the real Nicholas Flamel, see how the Malfoys stack up against Muggle English aristocrats, and compare the history of the wizarding world to real-life historyLa prose d'Alain Grandbois: ou lire et relire Les voyages de Marco Polo (Collection Grise)
Par Patrick Moreau. 2019
OEuvre sinon mal aimée, du moins largement méconnue d'Alain Grandbois, Les voyages de Marco Polo ne manque pourtant pas d'intérêt,…
du moins si l'on accepte de lire ce récit comme une authentique création littéraire et non pas uniquement comme un texte qui relèverait d'un exotisme désuet. Présenté par Grandbois lui-même dans son avant-propos comme « un simple récit des voyages du Vénitien et des événements qui touchent plus particulièrement son époque », ce livre est en effet bien plus que cela.Minor feelings: An asian american reckoning
Par Cathy Park Hong. 2020
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • A ruthlessly honest, emotionally charged, and utterly original…
exploration of Asian American consciousness &“Brilliant . . . To read this book is to become more human.&”—Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen One of Time &’s 10 Best Nonfiction Books of the Year • Named One of the Best Books of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, New Statesman, BuzzFeed, Esquire, The New York Public Library, and Book Riot Poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong fearlessly and provocatively blends memoir, cultural criticism, and history to expose fresh truths about racialized consciousness in America. Part memoir and part cultural criticism, this collection is vulnerable, humorous, and provocative—and its relentless and riveting pursuit of vital questions around family and friendship, art and politics, identity and individuality, will change the way you think about our world. Binding these essays together is Hong&’s theory of &“minor feelings.&” As the daughter of Korean immigrants, Cathy Park Hong grew up steeped in shame, suspicion, and melancholy. She would later understand that these &“minor feelings&” occur when American optimism contradicts your own reality—when you believe the lies you&’re told about your own racial identity. Minor feelings are not small, they&’re dissonant—and in their tension Hong finds the key to the questions that haunt her. With sly humor and a poet&’s searching mind, Hong uses her own story as a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness in America today. This intimate and devastating book traces her relationship to the English language, to shame and depression, to poetry and female friendship. A radically honest work of art, Minor Feelings forms a portrait of one Asian American psyche—and of a writer&’s search to both uncover and speak the truth. Praise for Minor Feelings &“Hong begins her new book of essays with a bang. . . .The essays wander a variegated terrain of memoir, criticism and polemic, oscillating between smooth proclamations of certainty and twitches of self-doubt. . . . Minor Feelings is studded with moments [of] candor and dark humor shot through with glittering self-awareness.&” — The New York Times &“Hong uses her own experiences as a jumping off point to examine race and emotion in the United States.&” — Newsweek &“Powerful . . . [Hong] brings together memoiristic personal essay and reflection, historical accounts and modern reporting, and other works of art and writing, in order to amplify a multitude of voices and capture Asian America as a collection of contradictions. She does so with sharp wit and radical transparency.&” — SalonScandinavian noir: In pursuit of a mystery
Par Wendy Lesser. 2020
An in-depth and personal exploration of Scandinavian crime fiction as a way into Scandinavian culture at large For nearly four…
decades, Wendy Lesser's primary source of information about three Scandinavian countries-Sweden, Norway, and Denmark-was mystery and crime novels, and the murders committed and solved in their pages. Having never visited the region, Lesser constructed a fictional Scandinavia of her own making, something between a map, a portrait, and a cultural history of a place that both exists and does not exist. Lesser's Scandinavia is disproportionately populated with police officers, but also with the stuff of everyday life, the likes of which are relayed in great detail in the novels she read: a fully realized world complete with its own traditions, customs, and, of course, people. Over the course of many years, Lesser's fictional Scandinavia grew more and more solidly visible to her, yet she never had a strong desire to visit the real countries that corresponded to the made-up ones. Until, she writes, "between one day and the next, that no longer seemed sufficient." It was time to travel to Scandinavia