African characters that go beyond the limitations of sympathy, to depict periods of upheaval where pity is a useless consolation, where we cannot generalize any specific case.
Where is upstate? A proximity, a region positioned degrees away from somewhere not upstate, forever elsewhere.
We have to rearrange our lives—to give a handful of days more weight than entire years, to give a few characters starring roles—so we can feel they are something more than administrative projects marked by disappointment.
Bale’s aim in this book is to write in a rigorous and entertaining way about medieval travel writing; it would be a disservice to the subject to exclude the fictitious or the tasteless.
The material conditions that underpinned social democracy have disappeared. Against this backdrop, left populism constitutes a sincere, but plaintive, desire for the lost world to return.
This makes of poetry—true poetry—either a task that is more difficult even than sainthood, or else simply a fool’s errand altogether. There is a dignity specific to either option.
Comics show eyes, minds, people where to go, how to organize spatial information, what’s important, what to see. Photographs don’t, or not in the same way: maps do.
He emphasizes the way that content prophesies form, or the way that form supervenes upon content—which is to say, he emphasizes the way in which the void leaps and sticks its landing.
The desire to flay and spread open the guts, to commit sin and confess it, to claim responsibility by way of observational learning.
There is an established tradition of Latin American novelists who started off as journalists.
Novels narrated through IMs or letters can manipulate the space between messages, relying on the reader to intuit the gap between what someone might be feeling and what they might be saying.
Merchant demonstrates that to act as a Luddite is to be anything but out-of-touch: it is to mobilize a common sentiment that marches from the past, and to stride as part of a collective toward a more equitable future.