Our Winter issue features fiction, nonfiction, and poetry: “Throwback Thursday” by Joshua Mohr: online, it’s the appearance of happiness that matters most. “Revision” by Mar Colón-Margolies: on assignment covering Texas’s abortion laws, a journalist considers the line between his humanity and his profession. “Wild Kingdom” and “World Away” by Octavio Solis: the tenacity of adolescent memories reveal themselves in a father’s explosive anger and in a school production of “The Diary of Anne Frank.” “Operator, Information” by Glen David Gold: picking up from Issue No. 100’s “The Plush Cocoon,” we offer another installment from Gold’s forthcoming three-volume memoir. “Flood Control,” […]
Day: November 23, 2016
The Push and Pull of Forming an Identity: ‘Swing Time’ by Zadie Smith
by John Gibbs
If it weren’t for the prologue in Zadie Smith’s new novel, Swing Time (464 pages; Penguin Press), a reader might be confounded by the many undulations the narrative takes as it kicks off in the present then looks back upon a past traumatic incident, excavating it. What could have been off-putting proves to be an adventure zig-zagging from public housing to brownstones, from England to Senegal, from 1982 to 2008, filling in the gaps in time and place and creating a definitive arc, albeit one completely warped. Relationships, and the action that subsequently alters them, form the novel’s backbone, cementing the nonlinear […]
Obsessions: Authoritarian Kitsch
by Sean Gill
I am strongly drawn to Camp, and almost as strongly offended by it. —Susan Sontag, from her essay “Notes on Camp’” (1964) Charles Bronson steps away from the dinner table, a Norman Rockwell tableau of elderly friends, gravy boats, and stuffed cabbage. He folds his napkin and politely excuses himself. On the street below, he discovers two gang members removing the stereo from his Cadillac Seville, a vehicle he bought several scenes earlier for the express purpose of enticing criminals. After a brief exchange with the thieves, one remarks, “We’re stealin’ the fuckin’ car, what’s it to you?” Bronson retorts, […]