The haunting is never settled. It moves in every direction, changing shape, folding inwards, transforming the living as it does the dead. All of us: diaspora of the ___.
Celan pushes what is light and human in his work into the background, to bring tragedy to the fore. Tawada does the opposite, pushing tragedy into the background to foreground what is light and human. Paul Celan and The Trans-Tibetan Angel is where they meet.
She scrutinizes her mother’s every move, as we watch her notice her mother’s failings for the first time.
Like any good parent, Zambra wants to keep some kind of record to ward off forgetting.
Withdrawn into his tower, pacing the crumbling battlements as he waits to be gathered into the artifice of eternity, Coetzee has given himself over fully to arid intellectual games.
Perhaps the fairest way to judge Tóibín’s success in On James Baldwin is by the same metric he used to judge Baldwin himself, which is style.
Desire renders life like a poem: it collapses space and time, it calls into focus images, sensations, new voices and forms of seeing and saying something.
Their analysis lends itself to an intentionally divisive strand of right wing populism that profits from cleaving the white male working-class from a broader multiracial, feminist, and unified working-class—one that might actually have the power to upend capital’s clutches.
The concept’s opaqueness allowed users to commit neither to the elite circles and institutions that lauded its virtues, nor to the egalitarian sensibilities that insisted creativity was a latent trait evenly distributed across the population.
What, then, do Jews who are invested both in being in lockstep with the Palestinian struggle and in our Jewish cultural lives do with our Judaism?
Waste is what an artist is and wants: too much. An abundance. It’s what we work to shape, what we can’t handle, what we haven’t yet made plans for.
“Elite” and “peers” are the key terms here, because compared to the rigid social divides in older and more traditional master/servant narratives, the class barrier between the protagonists of these novels and their employers is more porous.