March 12, 2019 Arts & Culture The Left Hand of Darkness at Fifty By Charlie Jane Anders Collage. Icy landscape photo: Harley D. Nygren, public domain. Ursula K. Le Guin photo: Marian Wood Kolisch. When I first read The Left Hand of Darkness, it struck me as a guidebook to a place I desperately wanted to visit but had never known how to reach. This novel showed me a reality where storytelling could help me question the ideas about gender and sexuality that had been handed down to all of us, take-it-or-leave-it style, from childhood. But also, Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic novel felt like an invitation to a different kind of storytelling, one based on understanding the inner workings of societies as well as individual people. Of course, The Left Hand of Darkness is literally a guidebook to the fictional world of Gethen, also known as Winter. The book takes the form of a travelogue, roaming around the nations of Karhide and Orgoreyn. And by the time you finish reading, you might actually feel like you’ve been to these places, to the point where you kind of know what their food tastes like and how the people act. But for me, and for a lot of other people, The Left Hand of Darkness also left us with a map that leads to another way of telling stories. I’ve read The Left Hand of Darkness a few times, and each time I come away with a new piece of that map. Le Guin’s writing still surprises me every time. In particular, I’m startled over and over by all the strange details and beautiful quirks she packs into descriptions of her made-up world. I’m also startled by the warmth and generosity of The Left Hand of Darkness, considering how bleak and brutal the actual story is. Somehow, in the midst of a horrifying ordeal, Le Guin finds an incredible sweetness. Read More
March 11, 2019 Arts & Culture How to Look at a Desert Sunset By Bruce Berger Photo: Jessie Eastland (CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)), via Wikimedia Commons. Too much has been made of desert sunsets, particularly in the captions of oversaturated magazine photos. Because desert skies tend to be clear, they can’t match the Midwest for cloud effects or smog-inflamed cities for sheer longevity. But they are inferior only to novices who look, naively, in the direction of the setting sun, for the real desert sunset occurs in that unlikely direction, the east. It is opposite the sun that the last rays, deflected through clear skies, fall on the long, minutely eroded mountain ranges and bathe our eyes with light of decreasing wavelengths and cooling colors—vermilion to salmon to plum—transporting the eastern horizon to islands of pure yearning. Read More
March 11, 2019 Happily The Laws of the Fairy-Tale King By Sabrina Orah Mark Sabrina Orah Mark’s monthly column, Happily, focuses on fairy tales and motherhood. Children’s book illustration of “Old King Cole” “If we didn’t have rules,” I say to my sons, “we’d all be on the roof in our underpants talking to the clouds.” “But what if the rule-maker is bad? What if he hates us for no reason? What if he hates kids and brown people?” I learned about the Nuremberg Laws as a kid in yeshiva, and I learned how those original laws bloomed and spread like a virus into more and more laws: Jews are prohibited from buying cake. Jews must surrender their fur, wool, typewriters, telephones, bicycles, cars, radios, dogs, cats, and birds. Jewish children are prohibited from going to school. And, eventually, Jews cannot exist. I think I was nine. I had a dog. I would hide her, I decided. I’d break all the laws. I’d make sure my brothers always had cake. I’d exist. Read More
March 11, 2019 YA of Yore The Creepy Authoritarianism of Madeleine L’Engle By James Frankie Thomas In her monthly column, YA of Yore, Frankie Thomas takes a second look at the books that defined a generation. Madeleine L’Engle (Photo: Sigrid Estrada / FSG) The date December 16 is seared into my brain. Every time I see it on a calendar I snap to attention, thinking, just for a second, That’s the big day! This is a complete neurological accident. There is nothing significant about December 16, except that in 1996 I saw it on a flier in the lobby of my elementary school. The flier announced that Madeleine L’Engle, the Newbery-winning author of A Wrinkle in Time, would be visiting my school for a book-signing event. Madeleine L’Engle. I was going to meet her. I was nine years old, too young to keep a calendar or manage my own schedule or do much of anything except read. I stood in the crowded lobby and read the date over and over and over, burning it into myself so I’d never forget: December 16. December 16. Madeleine L’Engle is coming on December 16. * To me, she was so much more than the author of A Wrinkle in Time. In fact, I felt about A Wrinkle in Time the way Beach Boys superfans feel about “Surfin’ USA”: it was beginner stuff. I was a L’Engle completist, or as much of a completist as was possible for a nine year old in the pre-internet era. If a book of hers was still in print, I owned it and had read it multiple times. If it was out of print, like the underrated Prelude, I had borrowed it from the library. I had also borrowed an authorized children’s biography of L’Engle herself, so I knew she’d been a writer even as a child. That excited me. We were the same. Read More
March 8, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Peasants, Postpartum, and Palestine By The Paris Review Kate Colby. Photo: Caroline Larabell. Kate Colby’s Dream of the Trenches is the book I never knew I needed. I wrote last week about my love for fiction about women interacting with art, and Colby’s unique blend of poetry, essay, and autofiction offers yet another angle on that conversation. She considers works by writers such as Ben Lerner and Virginia Woolf while incorporating her meandering thoughts into the ongoing narrative of “Driving to Margaret’s Mother’s Memorial Service.” In a stream of consciousness that roves I-195, Colby contrasts her literary critique with truisms and memories that careen the reader into questions about the nature of language. At the beginning of these musings, Colby notes that “writers tend to be preoccupied with what makes everything unique, but I get hung up on the countless ways they clump.” Language and life congeal throughout Dream of the Trenches, spanning topics from motherhood and middle age to metaphysical literature. Colby makes tongue twisters out of her inquiries, with exquisite turns of phrase such as “time let go and oblivious to dog hair.” She’s the kind of writer who notices both the windshield and the speck of dust on it, and Dream of the Trenches is the kind of book that places them side by side and says, Look. —Nikki Shaner-Bradford Read More
March 8, 2019 At Work American Blood: An Interview with Mitchell S. Jackson By Annie DeWitt An excerpt of Mitchell S. Jackson’s Survival Math was published in The Paris Review’s Fall 2018 issue. Mitchell Jackson (Photo: John Ricard) Mitchell S. Jackson’s debut novel The Residue Years was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, and it was the winner of both the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence and a Whiting Writers’ Award winner. He is arguably one of America’s most important contemporary voices. For years, readers like myself have been awaiting his next proclamation. His new memoir, Survival Math, arrives not a day too soon amid the political turmoil of 2019. In his second masterpiece, Mitchell has cast aside the fictive cover and turned the lens deeply inward. He delves headlong into issues of race, class, masculinity, love, addiction, and redemption, which unfold into an urgent American odyssey that sweeps history, time, register, and place. His writing is searingly beautiful, self-abnegating, clairvoyant, and brave. Celebratory and confessional, deeply researched and fully realized, he speaks from the gut about the dissolution of family, the disquiet of a country still steeped in deep racial prejudice, and what it means to survive everything, from prison to his mother’s addiction. Survival Math is at once risky and immaculately conceived. Mitchell is the only person who has invited me to an event so fancy the invitation was flown to my home overnight express. When we attended the awards ceremony, Joy Williams wore her signature cowboy boots and sunglasses onstage. Don DeLillo stared, stone-like, straight ahead. “Hey,” I leaned over to Mitch and asked, “Isn’t that woman handing out awards with her back to us a famous actress?” “You mean Meryl Streep?” he said. We both laughed. This, it seemed, was already his milieu. It was my honor to interview him about his craft. INTERVIEWER Survival Math opens with a quote by Baldwin: “That man who is forced each day to snatch his manhood, his identity, out of the fire of human cruelty that rages to destroy it knows, if he survives his effort, and even if he does not survive it, something about himself and human life that no school on earth—and indeed no church—can teach.” If you could boil it down to one edict, what is it that you most want to teach readers with this book? Read More