Beverly Cleary, beloved and prolific author of children’s books, dies at 104
Obituary from the Los Angeles Times.
Larry McMurtry, Novelist of the American West, Dies at 84
Obituary from the New York Times.
I Always Write in the Past: The Millions Interviews André Aciman
Here’s a fascinating article in which André Aciman talks about what he calls the irrealis mood. He defines this mood as follows:
“a category of verbal moods that indicate that certain events have not happened, may never happen, or should or must or are indeed desired to happen, but for which there is no indication that they will ever happen”—that is, “the might-be and the might-have-been.” It is a mood sometimes called fantasizing, or nostalgia, but it is really more multifaceted, informing our experience of art, desire, and even our own mortality.
A reading guide on the Asian American experience from Viet Thanh Nguyen, Charles Yu and more
“If there’s one lesson we keep having to learn in the United States, it’s that ignorance breeds hate and hate breeds violence.”
The Los Angeles Times offers a list of “more than 40 books on the experience of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in this country, including poetry, essays, memoirs, histories and some of the best fiction of the last couple of decades. Suggestions come from Times staff; novelists including Viet Thanh Nguyen, Charles Yu and Steph Cha; poet Victoria Chang; and a group of scholars from Asian American Studies departments in California and beyond.”
Audre Lorde Broke the Silence
“In her poems and ‘The Cancer Journals,’ Lorde fought to name her experience.”
Emily Bernard’s portrait of Audre Lorde focuses on “Two recent publications, The Selected Works of Audre Lorde, edited and with an introduction by Roxane Gay, and a new edition of The Cancer Journals, with a foreword by Tracy K. Smith, [that] capture the complexity of Lorde’s singular perspective.”
Lorde treated her body—the range of her corporeal needs, fears, and desires—as a resource of political and creative information, a platform from which she communicated her worldview. She was unique in her determination to speak and write without shame, but at the same time wholly representative, embodying the complexities of a contemporary radical Black feminist identity. Her life emblematized the concept of intersectionality, a term coined in 1989 by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw to describe the ways in which distinct social identities, such as race and gender, are mutually constitutive. Lorde devoted her career to building bridges across social divides as well as nurturing the distinct voices of Black feminist writers who responded to the raw physicality of her imagery and her now famous rallying cries, such as, “Your silence will not protect you.”
How Sara Gruen Lost Her Life
“The Water for Elephants author’s six-year fight to free an incarcerated man left her absolutely broke and critically ill.”
At age 80, Sylvia Byrne Pollack of Seattle will publish her first book of poetry
Don’t you love stories like this? I certainly do!
“Part of the magic of poetry is that, when you write the words, you’re a writer,” Pollack continues. “And once you put them down, they’re not really yours anymore. The reader has to do the other half of the work.”
© 2021 by Mary Daniels Brown
