In forlorn diners and working-class bars lay the solution to a mystery hiding in plain sight. If one could only drill down into the center of the country’s psyche, one might reason a way back from the brink.

If Kairos has an arc, it’s toward her will to act, to feel something other than the guilt and pressure Hans exerts, to question his version of events, to regard his violent control not as inevitable but as a force she can resist.

Surface Studies is about reading and writing, not encyclopedic knowledge, cultural context or the history of literature, awards, sales, or markets.

Both the impotence of art and the complicity of the world in the face of atrocity have demonstrated that armed, decolonial struggle never lost its urgency or necessity, despite what the triumphalists of the “end of history” would have hoped.

But more and more Robinson’s public statements have tended to emphasize a broadminded civic rhetoric and a wishy-washy liberalism that seem a far cry from the radicalism evinced in early works like Mother Country.

I’m at the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles with a friend waiting on a green card. He’s just moved to Ohio. Same as me.

What Bugs performs for us—and, in a different way, for Elmer Fudd, because the internal machination of their awareness is notably different—is Wagner’s opera.