Maureen Corrigan
Appearances
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
In 2017, historian Judith Giesberg and her team of graduate student researchers launched a website called The Last Seen Project. It now contains over 4,500 ads placed in newspapers by formerly enslaved people who hope to find family members separated by slavery. The earliest ads date from the 1830s and stretch into the 1920s.
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The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
Giesberg says that when she's given public lectures about this online archive of ads, the audience always asks the question, did they find each other? Giesberg says, I always answer the question the same way, and no one is ever satisfied with it. I don't know. Giesburg's new book, called Last Scene, is her more detailed response to the question.
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The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
In each of the ten chapters here, she closely reads ads placed in search of lost children, mothers, wives, siblings, and even comrades who served in the United States Colored Troops during the Civil War. Giesburg isn't trying to generate reunion stories, although there are a couple of those in this book.
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The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
Giesburg tells us the cruel reality was that the success rate of these advertisements may have been as low as 2%. Instead of happy endings, these ads offer readers something else. They serve as portals into the lived experience of slavery.
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The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
For instance, countering the lost cause myth that enslaved people were settled on southern plantations and Texas cotton fields, the ads, which often list multiple names of white owners as a finding aid, testify to how black people were sold and resold. The ads that hit hardest are the ones that illuminate what Giesburg refers to as America's traffic in children.
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The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
Selling children away from their mothers, she says, was the rule of slavery, not the exception. Clara Bashup's story opens last scene. Bashup had been searching for her daughter and son for 30 years when she took out an ad in 1892 in the African-American newspaper, The Chicago Appeal. Here are some portions. I wish to find my daughter patience green.
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The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
I have no trace of her since she was sold at Richmond, Virginia in 1859. She was then 12 years of age. John William Harris, my son, went with some servants after the surrender. He was 14 years old. Both belonged to Dick Christian in name only, by whom they were sold. The language of Bashup's ad is direct and somewhat defiant.
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The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
Giesburg comments on the words in name only that Bashup appended after the name of Dick Christian, the man who owned her children. Against this legal right, Giesburg says, Clara Bashup asserted a moral and emotional one. In comparison, Giesburg unpacks the language of a human interest story aimed at white readers about Bashup's search. That story ran in the New York World newspaper.
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The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
There, Patience is described as the missing child of an aged mother, and Dick Christian is a country gentleman. Giesburg says that white papers everywhere were publishing similar stories that threw a thick blanket of nostalgia over the history of slavery.
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The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
Another ad that speaks volumes is one posted in 1879 by Henry Tibbs in the Lost Friends column of a New Orleans paper, The Southwestern Christian Advocate. It opens, Mr. Editor, I desire some information about my mother. Tibbs recalls being put in a jail with other boys prior to being sold away. I cried, he writes.
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The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
Tibbs says he was told that if he would hush, the slave trader would bring my mother there the next morning, which he did. Mother then brought me some cake and candy, and that was the last time I saw her. Throughout Last Seen, Giesburg steps back from these individual ads to give readers the larger historical context that made them necessary.
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The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
For instance, she reminds readers that no federal agency existed to help freed people locate loved ones after the Civil War ended. Instead, there were things like the Grapevine Telegraph, which she describes as And there were the ads, many of which were read aloud in black churches.
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The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
Those ads testify to the inner strength of people like Henry Tibbs, who was still placing ads in search of his mother when he was 55 years old.
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What Measles Outbreaks Tell Us About Public Health In America
To us readers who admired Tony Horowitz's writing infused with his animated and wry first-person voice, his sudden death in 2019 was hard to take in. Horowitz, who was a fit 60-year-old, died of cardiac arrest a few days after his book, Spying on the South, was published.
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What Measles Outbreaks Tell Us About Public Health In America
Like his 1998 bestseller, Confederates in the Attic, Spying on the South presciently explored the great divide in America between red states and blue. Curiously, for a writer so attuned to boundary lines, Horowitz, who was traveling on book tour, collapsed and died on a street that divides Washington, D.C. and Maryland.
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What Measles Outbreaks Tell Us About Public Health In America
Horwitz's wife, novelist Geraldine Brooks, was far away at their home in Martha's Vineyard. The opening of her memoir, Memorial Days, describes in present tense fragmented phrases what it was like to be on the receiving end of a call from an ER doc whose voice is flat, exhausted, impatient, and who refers to her husband's body as it.
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What Measles Outbreaks Tell Us About Public Health In America
That call, Brooks reflects, was the first brutality in what I would learn is a brutal, broken system. Memorial Days is a beautifully modulated cry in the wilderness, an unsentimental contribution to the ever-growing pile of secular literature about grief, in which the end of life is punctuated by a period, not an ellipsis.
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What Measles Outbreaks Tell Us About Public Health In America
Brooks converted to Judaism when she married Horowitz some three decades earlier, and though Judaism doesn't offer her the assurance of an afterlife, it endows her with a spiritual language and vision. Memorial Days alternates between the immediate time after Horwitz's death and 2023, when Brooks flies to an isolated cabin on Flinders Island, off the coast of her native Australia.
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What Measles Outbreaks Tell Us About Public Health In America
The trip, Brooks tells us, represents an effort to escape what Hebrew scriptures call the Metsar, the narrow place. Tending to her two sons in the wake of their father's death and meeting her own writerly deadlines meant that Brooks couldn't surrender to grief. Here's how she explains the need to withdraw.
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What Measles Outbreaks Tell Us About Public Health In America
I am taking something that our culture has stopped freely giving, the right to grieve, to shut out the world and its demands. I've come to realize that my life since Tony's death has been one endless, exhausting performance. I have cast myself in a role, woman being normal. I have not allowed myself the wild wideness of an elaborate, florid, demonstrative grief.
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What Measles Outbreaks Tell Us About Public Health In America
Instead, it has been this long feeling of constriction, of holding it in and tamping it down and not letting it show. Brooks is far from clueless about the privilege that enables such a retreat. She grew up, as she tells us, in a blue-collar neighborhood of Sydney, in a house where all the furniture was secondhand.
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What Measles Outbreaks Tell Us About Public Health In America
She arrived as a scholarship student at Columbia Journalism School, where she met Horowitz, and her life took a turn. The luxury of spending weeks alone in a cabin by the sea gives Brooks not only the time to grieve her husband, but also to grieve the life she might have lived had she never met him.
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What Measles Outbreaks Tell Us About Public Health In America
Given Brooke's own distinguished career as a novelist and journalist, it's no surprise Memorial Days is such a powerful testament of grief. But what is more of a surprise is the emergence of another subject, namely the tough reality of the writing life. Brooke says at one point that she thinks of Spying on the South as the book that killed Tony.
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What Measles Outbreaks Tell Us About Public Health In America
She recalls that to finish it on deadline, her husband chewed boxes of Nicorette gum, nibbled Provigil, the pill developed to keep fighter pilots alert, and drank pints of coffee. At night, he countered all the stimulants with wine. Wondering how she can practically sustain her life without Horowitz, Brooks is told by a financial advisor that she'll be okay as long as she just keeps writing.
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What Measles Outbreaks Tell Us About Public Health In America
There's the rub. Fortunately, Brooks was able to finish her stalled novel-in-progress Horse, which was published in 2022. And fortunately, she was able to go on to write Memorial Days, a book that not only pays tribute to a loving marriage between two successful writers, but also manages to be a clear-eyed assessment of the costs of that success.
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Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
Unprecedented surely was one of the most popular words of 2024. So it's fitting that my best books list begins with an unprecedented occurrence. Two novels by authors who happen to be married to each other. James by Percival Everett reimagines Huckleberry Finn told from the point of view of Jim, Huck's enslaved companion on that immortal raft ride.
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Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
Alternating mordant humor with horror, Everett makes readers understand that for Jim, here called James, the Mississippi may offer a temporary haven. But given the odds of him making it to freedom, the river will likely be a vast highway to a scary nowhere. Everett is married to Danzy Senna, whose novel Colored Television is a revelatory satire on race and class.
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Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
Senna's main character, Jane, is a mixed-race writer and college teacher struggling to finish her second novel. Desperate for money, Jane cons her way into a meeting with a Hollywood producer who's cooking up a biracial situation comedy. Disaster ensues. Senna's writing is droll and fearless. Listen to Jane's thoughts about teaching.
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Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
One of the worst parts of teaching was how, like a series of mini-strokes, it ruined you as a writer. A brain could handle only so many undergraduate stories about date rape and eating disorders, dead grandmothers and mystical dogs. Two other novels invite readers to catch up with familiar characters.
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Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
Long Island is Colm Tobin's sequel to his 2009 bestseller, Brooklyn, whose main character, Eilish Lacey, is now trapped in a marriage and a neighborhood as stifling as the Irish town she fled. It's Tobin's omissions and restraint, the words he doesn't write, that make him such an astute chronicler of this working-class Catholic world.
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Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
I've come to dread a new novel by Elizabeth Strout because I usually can't avoid putting it on my best-of-the-year list. Tell Me Everything reunites readers with writer Lucy Barton, lawyer Bob Burgess, and retired teacher Olive Kitteridge, all living in Maine.
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Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
Nobody nails the soft melancholy of the human condition like Strout, and that's a phrase she would never write because her style is so understated. Martyr is Iranian-American poet Kaveh Akbar's debut novel about a young man named Cyrus Shams struggling to make sense of the violent death of his mother and other martyrs, accidental or deliberate, throughout history.
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Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
Akbar's tone is unexpectedly comic, his story antic, and his vision utterly original. Two literary novels on my best list are indebted to suspense fiction. Rachel Kushner's Creation Lake is an espionage thriller sealed tight in the plastic wrap of noir. Her main character, a young woman, is a former FBI agent turned freelance spy who infiltrates a radical farming collective in France.
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Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
You don't read Kushner for the relatability of her characters. Instead, it's her dead-on language and orange threat alert atmosphere that draw readers in. In Cahokia Jazz, Frances Spufford summons up a femme fatale, crooked cops and politicians, and working-class resentment as bitter as bathtub gin.
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Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
He weds these hard-boiled elements to a story about the actual vanished city of Cahokia, which before the arrival of Columbus was the largest urban center north of Mexico. Spufford's novel is set in an alternative America of 1922, where the peace of Cahokia's indigenous, white, and African-American populations is threatened by a grisly murder. One straightforward suspense novel sits on this list.
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Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
Liz Moore's The God of the Woods. There's a touch of gothic excess about Moore's story, beginning with the premise that not one, but two children from the wealthy Van Laar family disappear from a camp in the Adirondacks some 14 years apart. Moore's previous book, Long Bright River, was a superb novel about the opioid crisis in Philadelphia.
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Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
The God of the Woods is something stranger and unforgettable. Nonfiction closes out this list. I've thought about A Wilder Shore, Camille Perry's biography of the bohemian marriage of Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson ever since reading it this summer. In her introduction, Perry says something that's also haunted me.
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Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
She describes her book as an intimate window into how the Stephensons lived and loved, a story that is, I hope, an inspiration for anyone seeking a freer, more unconventional life. That it is. I began this list with the word unprecedented, and I'll end it with an unprecedented voice, that of Emily Dickinson. A monumental collection of the letters of Emily Dickinson was published this year.
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Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
Edited by Dickinson scholars Chris Dan Miller and Donald Mitchell, it's the closest thing we'll probably ever have to an autobiography by the poet. Here's a thank you note Dickinson wrote in the 1860s to her beloved sister-in-law. Dear Sue, the supper was delicate and strange. I ate it with compunction as I would eat a vision. 1,304 letters are collected here, and still they're not enough.
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Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
Happy holidays. Happy reading.
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How Screenwriting Saved Novelist Richard Price
Sometimes I do believe there is a book god who sends the book I need when I need it. This week, the book god sent a special delivery of not one, but two much-needed books. For years, Billy Collins has been both blessed and burdened with the tagline that identifies him as one of America's favorite poets.
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How Screenwriting Saved Novelist Richard Price
I say burdened because if a poet is popular, the suspicion arises that they're a mere rhymester, a step or two up from a hallmark assembly line troubadour. Even at this late stage in Colin's career, he's in his early 80s now, has served as poet laureate, and has published 12 earlier collections of poetry. His simplicity of language invites cynics to regard him as simplistic.
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How Screenwriting Saved Novelist Richard Price
Those of us who've long read his work know better. Water, Water, Collins' collection of 60 new poems, takes its title from the romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge's ballad, The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, and its often misquoted lines, Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink.
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How Screenwriting Saved Novelist Richard Price
Coleridge is also the guy who talked about making the familiar strange and the strange familiar, which is an apt description of what Collins has always done in his own work. If anything has shifted in Collins' poems over the years, it's that the theme of aging is more prevalent, specifically the way aging makes a person estranged from their former selves and others.
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How Screenwriting Saved Novelist Richard Price
Take the poem called When a Man Loves Something. Like most of Collins' work, it appears to be autobiographical, narrated in what Collins himself drolly calls the first-person selfish point of view. Collins starts out remembering a night when he heard the blues singer Percy Sledge perform in a roadhouse on the edge of a California desert. A loopy interlude follows.
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How Screenwriting Saved Novelist Richard Price
Years later, Collins says, when I lived in Florida, we had a plumber whose name was Lynn Hammer. I like to introduce people to one another, but Lynn Hammer said he had never heard of Percy Sledge and put his head back under the sink. So many miscues like that these days. Near the poem's end, Collins imagines there's a planet called the past, and he's on it, orbiting the sun.
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How Screenwriting Saved Novelist Richard Price
Collins is his own most eloquent critic. In a poem bearing the stripped-down title of Your Poem, he suggests that one of the go-to emotions in his work is buoyant ease in the shadow of mortality.
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How Screenwriting Saved Novelist Richard Price
This whole collection is filled with poems that strike that rare attitude, and some of them, like Emily Dickinson in Space, which unfortunately is too long to read here, are among the best poems that Collins has ever written. Now for something completely different. I usually hesitate to review graphic novels and illustrated books because it's hard to do justice to their visual power.
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How Screenwriting Saved Novelist Richard Price
But James Norbury's illustrated adult fable called The Dog Who Followed the Moon fell into my hands a few weeks ago, and I've been under its spell ever since. Norbury, who's the best-selling author and illustrator of the philosophical Big Panda and Tiny Dragon books, is a practicing Buddhist.
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How Screenwriting Saved Novelist Richard Price
His books are not meant to comfort as much as they're meant to accompany readers on their own hard journeys. The Dog Who Followed the Moon opens on a winter dawn in the mountains. Norbury's blue, white, and brown watercolors on the opening pages are influenced by Zen art. They make readers feel the stillness of this imaginary world.
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How Screenwriting Saved Novelist Richard Price
A puppy named Amaya, who's become separated from her parents, wanders into the snowy landscape. Starving and lonely, she mistakes a wolf pack for friendly dogs. The wolves circle her and attack. Just as Amaya is about to be torn apart, she's rescued by an old wolf, the former leader of the pack.
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How Screenwriting Saved Novelist Richard Price
Together they set off through a fantastic landscape of ancient ruins and despair and loss, always looking for the moon to lead them and struggling to keep the faith when it disappears behind clouds. Norbury says in his afterword that his moon was his art and that he spent 25 years with very little money, depressed, anxious, defeated, addicted, before coming out the other side.
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How Screenwriting Saved Novelist Richard Price
inspirational is a word that's become cheapened, but it's a fitting word for The Dog Who Followed the Moon, an inspirational and gorgeous book about not giving up.
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Having A Child In The Digital Age
In the German legend, Faust signs a contract with the devil, exchanging his immortal soul for vast knowledge and other earthly rewards. It's a cut-and-dried transaction. In Daniel Kelman's new novel, The Director, the demonic deal-making is murkier, more drawn out. Little by little, a series of compromises eat away like acid at the integrity of a once great artist.
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Having A Child In The Digital Age
Not only is Kelman's rendering of the Faustian bargain more psychologically plausible than the original, but it takes its inspiration from a true-life story. The director is an historical novel based on the life of G.W. Pabst, the early film director who worked with actresses like Louise Brooks, Lottie Lenya, and Greta Garbo.
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Having A Child In The Digital Age
Pabst's career moves were circuitous and puzzling, which makes him a tasty subject for historical fiction. He was born in Austria and worked in theater in New York as a young man. Then, after World War I, he became one of the most influential directors in Germany.
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Having A Child In The Digital Age
Pabst moved to Hollywood in the 1930s and was a temporary and less successful member of that émigré colony of filmmakers that included Otto Preminger and Fritz Lang. On a trip to France in 1939 to make a film and visit his mother, Pabst was stranded by the outbreak of war and returned to Nazi Germany. Entered the devil in the form of propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.
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Having A Child In The Digital Age
In Kelman's reimagining, Goebbels cunningly wields a stick and a carrot. He alternates the accusation that Pabst was a communist who belongs in a concentration camp with appeals to Pabst's ego, bruised by Hollywood's treatment of him as a highbrow hack.
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Having A Child In The Digital Age
In Germany, Goebbels promises, Pabst will make artistic films, sublime films, films that touch the German hearts of good, deep, metaphysical people to oppose the American cheap commercial trash with a resounding no. It's an offer Pabst feels he can't refuse. As a novel, the director itself joins the pleasures of commercial fiction with the moral weight of a novel of ideas.
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Having A Child In The Digital Age
Kelman clearly has fun vividly invoking a sun-splashed Hollywood party where Billy Wilder cavorts in a cowboy hat and studio execs casually confuse the émigré filmmakers with one another. But comedy turns sinister and surreal in later sections, where Pabst and his family return to their castle in Germany, where the caretaker, now the local Nazi party leader, relegates them to the basement.
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Having A Child In The Digital Age
And then there's the absurdist scene where Pabst directs close Hitler confidant Leni Reifenstahl in an imagined film. As the extras, shipped in from a nearby detention camp, look on, Reifenstahl insists that Pabst retake the scene some 21 times. Each time, Reifenstahl's performance is terrible.
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Having A Child In The Digital Age
But Pabst quickly catches on that it's dangerous to tell her anything but, it's perfect, just perfect again. Perhaps Kelman's greatest accomplishment is that he manages to raise larger themes through compact dialogues. Here, for instance, is a conversation about art and morality that he conjures up between Pabst and his wife, Trudy, who was an actress and writer.
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Having A Child In The Digital Age
All this will pass, Pabst tells Trudy, but art remains. Even if it remains, Trudy asks, the art, doesn't it remain soiled? Doesn't it remain bloody and dirty? Pabst responds this way. And the Renaissance? What about the Borgias and their poisonings? What about Shakespeare, who had to make accommodations with Elizabeth?
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Having A Child In The Digital Age
He adds, the important thing is to make art under the circumstances one finds oneself in. Referencing his film Paracelsus, Papps says, Paracelsus will still be watched 50 years from now when this nightmare is long forgotten. When do compromises turn into full-blown capitulation? How many accommodations can someone make with evil before they themselves become part of the evil?
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Having A Child In The Digital Age
Do we forget nightmares, or is history just the reliving of them over and over again? The director doesn't answer these questions, cannot answer them, but it leaves them rattling around in our minds like a roulette wheel that never stops spinning.
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A Dominatrix/Writer Takes Readers Into A Dungeon
I've always loved coming to New York stories, and judging from the acclaim that's greeted the new Bob Dylan movie, America does too. Dylan, played by Timothee Chalamet, arrives in the Greenwich Village of 1961. In no time, this complete unknown is embraced by the burgeoning folk scene of Greenwich Village, thanks in part to the city's gift of proximity.
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A Dominatrix/Writer Takes Readers Into A Dungeon
But I wonder about the longevity of the coming-to-New York genre. These stories of arrival and promise fulfilled are almost always nostalgic, predating the New York of obscenely high rents. And does a dreamer even need to come to New York, or any city for that matter, in the age of the internet? In a New York minute, Kay Sohini vanquished my doubts.
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A Dominatrix/Writer Takes Readers Into A Dungeon
Her debut book, a graphic memoir called This Beautiful Ridiculous City, affirms the enduring power of New York and the power of literature to give people the courage to cross all manner of borders. Sohini is a South Asian graphic artist who grew up in the suburbs of Calcutta, living, as she says, in a sprawling ancestral house with four generations and far too many territorial people.
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A Dominatrix/Writer Takes Readers Into A Dungeon
From a young age, she was a loner and a reader, a reader peculiarly drawn to New York stories. Everybody writes about New York with so much tenderness, even when they are sick of it, Sohini says. And so from afar, she began to read her way into New York. Years later, Sohini broke away from a long, abusive relationship with a man who she says made a room smaller just by walking into it.
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A Dominatrix/Writer Takes Readers Into A Dungeon
Staking her escape on little more than her years of reading and a modest fellowship to grad school, the wounded Sohini flew to New York. Through understated language and jolting comic-style images, Sohini tells a vivid, multidimensional New York story of her own. There's her odyssey, a capsule history of modern India, and always references to books, books, books.
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A Dominatrix/Writer Takes Readers Into A Dungeon
This beautiful, ridiculous city engages with a good slice of the essential New York City literary canon— From Anne Petrie to Fran Lebowitz, E.B. White to Dylan Thomas, Colson Whitehead, Nora Ephron, and fellow graphic memoirist Alison Bechdel. Like all these chroniclers of the city, Sohini sometimes questions her illogical attachment to such a difficult place.
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A Dominatrix/Writer Takes Readers Into A Dungeon
wondering if I am forever doomed to love things and people whose reciprocation is fraught with contradictions. But New York, in image and reality, saved her, and her love for the city remains hardy. One New York City writer Sohini doesn't mention is Gay Talese, who's hailed, along with Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, and Tom Wolfe, as a pioneer of new journalism.
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A Dominatrix/Writer Takes Readers Into A Dungeon
Talese, now in his early 90s, has written a lot of great pieces about New York – many of which are gathered together in a new book called A Town Without Time. The very first piece Talese published in Esquire in 1960 leads off this collection. It's called New York is a City of Things Unnoticed.
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A Dominatrix/Writer Takes Readers Into A Dungeon
Among the thousands of things Talese notices are the night workers, truck drivers, cops, hacks, cleaning ladies who line up for movies in Times Square at 8 a.m. Other essays here ruminate on the oft-overlooked Verrazano Narrows Bridge and mobster Joe Bonanno. Worth the price of this collection alone is Talese's masterpiece, Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.
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A Dominatrix/Writer Takes Readers Into A Dungeon
This 1966 profile of old blue eyes packs the sparkle, fizz, and complexity of genuine New York seltzer. Here's Talese reading from the opening of that profile as originally heard on This American Life.
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A Dominatrix/Writer Takes Readers Into A Dungeon
Just as Sohini assures us that New York still draws in dreamers, Talese reminds us that New York is already riddled with ghosts, many of them tough-talking and hard-drinking. Eight million stories and counting about the city, but still room for more.
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Best Of: Why Do We Itch? / Writer Richard Price
Sometimes I do believe there is a book god who sends the book I need when I need it. This week, the book god sent a special delivery of not one, but two much-needed books. For years, Billy Collins has been both blessed and burdened with the tagline that identifies him as one of America's favorite poets –
Fresh Air
Best Of: Why Do We Itch? / Writer Richard Price
I say burdened because if a poet is popular, the suspicion arises that they're a mere rhymester, a step or two up from a hallmark assembly line troubadour. Even at this late stage in Colin's career, he's in his early 80s now, has served as poet laureate, and has published 12 earlier collections of poetry. His simplicity of language invites cynics to regard him as simplistic.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Why Do We Itch? / Writer Richard Price
Those of us who've long read his work know better. Water, Water, Collins' collection of 60 new poems, takes its title from the romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge's ballad, The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, and its often misquoted lines, "'Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink.'"
Fresh Air
Best Of: Why Do We Itch? / Writer Richard Price
Coleridge is also the guy who talked about making the familiar strange and the strange familiar, which is an apt description of what Collins has always done in his own work. If anything has shifted in Collins' poems over the years, it's that the theme of aging is more prevalent, specifically the way aging makes a person estranged from their former selves and others.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Why Do We Itch? / Writer Richard Price
Take the poem called When a Man Loves Something. Like most of Collins' work, it appears to be autobiographical, narrated in what Collins himself drolly calls the first-person selfish point of view. Collins starts out remembering a night when he heard the blues singer Percy Sledge perform in a roadhouse on the edge of a California desert. A loopy interlude follows.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Why Do We Itch? / Writer Richard Price
Years later, Collins says, when I lived in Florida, we had a plumber whose name was Lynn Hammer. I like to introduce people to one another, but Lynn Hammer said he had never heard of Percy Sledge and put his head back under the sink. So many miscues like that these days. Near the poem's end, Collins imagines there's a planet called the past, and he's on it, orbiting the sun.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Why Do We Itch? / Writer Richard Price
Collins is his own most eloquent critic. In a poem bearing the stripped-down title of Your Poem, he suggests that one of the go-to emotions in his work is buoyant ease in the shadow of mortality.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Why Do We Itch? / Writer Richard Price
This whole collection is filled with poems that strike that rare attitude, and some of them, like Emily Dickinson in Space, which unfortunately is too long to read here, are among the best poems that Collins has ever written. now for something completely different. I usually hesitate to review graphic novels and illustrated books because it's hard to do justice to their visual power.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Why Do We Itch? / Writer Richard Price
But James Norbury's illustrated adult fable called The Dog Who Followed the Moon fell into my hands a few weeks ago, and I've been under its spell ever since. Norbury, who's the best-selling author and illustrator of the philosophical Big Panda and Tiny Dragon books, is a practicing Buddhist.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Why Do We Itch? / Writer Richard Price
His books are not meant to comfort as much as they're meant to accompany readers on their own hard journeys. The Dog Who Followed the Moon opens on a winter dawn in the mountains. Norbury's blue, white, and brown watercolors on the opening pages are influenced by Zen art. They make readers feel the stillness of this imaginary world.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Why Do We Itch? / Writer Richard Price
A puppy named Amaya, who's become separated from her parents, wanders into the snowy landscape. Starving and lonely, she mistakes a wolf pack for friendly dogs. The wolves circle her and attack. Just as Amaya is about to be torn apart, she's rescued by an old wolf, the former leader of the pack.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Why Do We Itch? / Writer Richard Price
Together they set off through a fantastic landscape of ancient ruins and despair and loss, always looking for the moon to lead them and struggling to keep the faith when it disappears behind clouds. Norbury says in his afterword that his moon was his art and that he spent 25 years with very little money, depressed, anxious, defeated, addicted, before coming out the other side.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Why Do We Itch? / Writer Richard Price
inspirational is a word that's become cheapened, but it's a fitting word for The Dog Who Followed the Moon, an inspirational and gorgeous book about not giving up.
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Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
Unprecedented surely was one of the most popular words of 2024, so it's fitting that my best books list begins with an unprecedented occurrence, two novels by authors who happen to be married to each other. James by Percival Everett reimagines Huckleberry Finn told from the point of view of Jim, Huck's enslaved companion on that immortal raft ride.
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Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
Alternating mordant humor with horror, Everett makes readers understand that for Jim, here called James, the Mississippi may offer a temporary haven, But given the odds of him making it to freedom, the river will likely be a vast highway to a scary nowhere. Everett is married to Danzy Senna, whose novel Colored Television is a revelatory satire on race and class.
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Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
Senna's main character, Jane, is a mixed-race writer and college teacher struggling to finish her second novel. Desperate for money, Jane cons her way into a meeting with a Hollywood producer who's cooking up a biracial situation comedy. Disaster ensues. Senna's writing is droll and fearless. Listen to Jane's thoughts about teaching.
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Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
One of the worst parts of teaching was how, like a series of mini-strokes, it ruined you as a writer. A brain could handle only so many undergraduate stories about date rape and eating disorders, dead grandmothers, and mystical dogs. Two other novels invite readers to catch up with familiar characters.
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Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
Long Island is Colm Tobin's sequel to his 2009 bestseller, Brooklyn, whose main character, Eilish Lacey, is now trapped in a marriage and a neighborhood as stifling as the Irish town she fled. It's Tobin's omissions and restraint, the words he doesn't write, that make him such an astute chronicler of this working-class Catholic world.
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Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
I've come to dread a new novel by Elizabeth Strout because I usually can't avoid putting it on my best-of-the-year list. Tell Me Everything reunites readers with writer Lucy Barton, lawyer Bob Burgess, and retired teacher Olive Kitteridge, all living in Maine.
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Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
Nobody nails the soft melancholy of the human condition like Strout, and that's a phrase she would never write because her style is so understated. Martyr is Iranian-American poet Kaveh Akbar's debut novel about a young man named Cyrus Shams struggling to make sense of the violent death of his mother and other martyrs, accidental or deliberate, throughout history.
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Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
Akbar's tone is unexpectedly comic, his story antic, and his vision utterly original. Two literary novels on my best list are indebted to suspense fiction. Rachel Kushner's Creation Lake is an espionage thriller sealed tight in the plastic wrap of noir. Her main character, a young woman, is a former FBI agent turned freelance spy who infiltrates a radical farming collective in France.
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Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
You don't read Kushner for the relatability of her characters. Instead, it's her dead-on language and orange threat alert atmosphere that draw readers in. In Cahokia Jazz, Frances Spufford summons up a femme fatale, crooked cops and politicians, and working-class resentment as bitter as bathtub gin.
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Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
He weds these hard-boiled elements to a story about the actual vanished city of Cahokia, which before the arrival of Columbus was the largest urban center north of Mexico. Spufford's novel is set in an alternative America of 1922, where the peace of Cahokia's indigenous, white, and African-American populations is threatened by a grisly murder. One straightforward suspense novel sits on this list.
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Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
Liz Moore's The God of the Woods. There's a touch of gothic excess about Moore's story, beginning with the premise that not one, but two children from the wealthy Van Laar family disappear from a camp in the Adirondacks some 14 years apart. Moore's previous book, Long Bright River, was a superb novel about the opioid crisis in Philadelphia.
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Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
The God of the Woods is something stranger and unforgettable. Nonfiction closes out this list. I've thought about A Wilder Shore, Camille Perry's biography of the bohemian marriage of Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson ever since reading it this summer. In her introduction, Perry says something that's also haunted me.
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Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
She describes her book as an intimate window into how the Stephensons lived and loved, a story that is, I hope, an inspiration for anyone seeking a freer, more unconventional life. That it is. I began this list with the word unprecedented, and I'll end it with an unprecedented voice, that of Emily Dickinson. A monumental collection of the letters of Emily Dickinson was published this year.
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Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
Edited by Dickinson scholars Chris Dan Miller and Donald Mitchell, it's the closest thing we'll probably ever have to an autobiography by the poet. Here's a thank you note Dickinson wrote in the 1860s to her beloved sister-in-law. Dear Sue, the supper was delicate and strange. I ate it with compunction as I would eat a vision. 1,304 letters are collected here, and still they're not enough.
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Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
Happy holidays. Happy reading.
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Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
In the German legend, Faust signs a contract with the devil, exchanging his immortal soul for vast knowledge and other earthly rewards. It's a cut-and-dried transaction. In Daniel Kelman's new novel, The Director, The demonic deal-making is murkier, more drawn out. Little by little, a series of compromises eat away like acid at the integrity of a once great artist.
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Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
Not only is Kelman's rendering of the Faustian bargain more psychologically plausible than the original, but it takes its inspiration from a true life story. The director is an historical novel based on the life of G.W. Pabst, the early film director who worked with actresses like Louise Brooks, Lottie Lenya, and Greta Garbo.
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Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
Pabst's career moves were circuitous and puzzling, which makes him a tasty subject for historical fiction. He was born in Austria and worked in theater in New York as a young man. Then, after World War I, he became one of the most influential directors in Germany.
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Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
Pabst moved to Hollywood in the 1930s and was a temporary and less successful member of that émigré colony of filmmakers that included Otto Preminger and Fritz Lang. On a trip to France in 1939 to make a film and visit his mother, Pabst was stranded by the outbreak of war and returned to Nazi Germany. Enter the devil in the form of propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.
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Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
In Kelman's reimagining, Goebbels cunningly wields a stick and a carrot. He alternates the accusation that Pabst was a communist who belongs in a concentration camp with appeals to Pabst's ego, bruised by Hollywood's treatment of him as a highbrow hack.
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Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
In Germany, Goebbels promises, Pabst will make artistic films, sublime films, films that touch the German hearts of good, deep, metaphysical people to oppose the American cheap commercial trash with a resounding no. It's an offer Pabst feels he can't refuse. As a novel, the director itself joins the pleasures of commercial fiction with the moral weight of a novel of ideas.
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Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
Kelman clearly has fun vividly invoking a sun-splashed Hollywood party where Billy Wilder cavorts in a cowboy hat and studio execs casually confuse the émigré filmmakers with one another. But comedy turns sinister and surreal in later sections, where Pabst and his family return to their castle in Germany, where the caretaker, now the local Nazi party leader, relegates them to the basement.
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Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
And then there's the absurdist scene where Pabst directs close Hitler confidant Leni Reifenstahl in an imagined film. As the extras, shipped in from a nearby detention camp, look on, Reifenstahl insists that Pabst retake the scene some 21 times. Each time, Reifenstahl's performance is terrible.
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Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
But Pabst quickly catches on that it's dangerous to tell her anything but, it's perfect, just perfect again. Perhaps Kelman's greatest accomplishment is that he manages to raise larger themes through compact dialogues. Here, for instance, is a conversation about art and morality that he conjures up between Pabst and his wife Trudy, who was an actress and writer.
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Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
All this will pass, Pabst tells Trudy, but art remains. Even if it remains, Trudy asks, the art, doesn't it remain soiled? Doesn't it remain bloody and dirty? Pabst responds this way. And the Renaissance? What about the Borgias and their poisonings? What about Shakespeare, who had to make accommodations with Elizabeth?
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Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
He adds, the important thing is to make art under the circumstances one finds oneself in. Referencing his film Paracelsus, Papps says, Paracelsus will still be watched 50 years from now when this nightmare is long forgotten. When do compromises turn into full-blown capitulation? How many accommodations can someone make with evil before they themselves become part of the evil?
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Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
Do we forget nightmares, or is history just the reliving of them over and over again? The director doesn't answer these questions, cannot answer them, but it leaves them rattling around in our minds like a roulette wheel that never stops spinning.
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Best Of: Michelle Williams / Sarah Snook
Good. Molly. Hey. We have something for your list. Orgasm with another person.
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Best Of: Jazz Clarinetist Doreen Ketchens / 'White Lotus' Actor Natasha Rothwell
In 2017, historian Judith Giesberg and her team of graduate student researchers launched a website called The Last Seen Project. It now contains over 4,500 ads placed in newspapers by formerly enslaved people who hope to find family members separated by slavery. The earliest ads date from the 1830s and stretch into the 1920s.
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Best Of: Jazz Clarinetist Doreen Ketchens / 'White Lotus' Actor Natasha Rothwell
Giesberg says that when she's given public lectures about this online archive of ads, the audience always asks the question, did they find each other? Giesberg says, I always answer the question the same way, and no one is ever satisfied with it. I don't know. Giesburg's new book, called Last Seen, is her more detailed response to the question.
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Best Of: Jazz Clarinetist Doreen Ketchens / 'White Lotus' Actor Natasha Rothwell
In each of the ten chapters here, she closely reads ads placed in search of lost children, mothers, wives, siblings, and even comrades who served in the United States Colored Troops during the Civil War. Giesburg isn't trying to generate reunion stories, although there are a couple of those in this book.
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Best Of: Jazz Clarinetist Doreen Ketchens / 'White Lotus' Actor Natasha Rothwell
Giesburg tells us the cruel reality was that the success rate of these advertisements may have been as low as 2%. Instead of happy endings, these ads offer readers something else. They serve as portals into the lived experience of slavery.
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Best Of: Jazz Clarinetist Doreen Ketchens / 'White Lotus' Actor Natasha Rothwell
For instance, countering the lost cause myth that enslaved people were settled on southern plantations and Texas cotton fields, the ads, which often list multiple names of white owners as a finding aid, testify to how black people were sold and resold. The ads that hit hardest are the ones that illuminate what Giesberg refers to as America's traffic in children.
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Best Of: Jazz Clarinetist Doreen Ketchens / 'White Lotus' Actor Natasha Rothwell
Selling children away from their mothers, she says, was the rule of slavery, not the exception. Clara Bashup's story opens last scene. Bashup had been searching for her daughter and son for 30 years when she took out an ad in 1892 in the African-American newspaper, The Chicago Appeal. Here are some portions. I wish to find my daughter patience green.
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Best Of: Jazz Clarinetist Doreen Ketchens / 'White Lotus' Actor Natasha Rothwell
I have no trace of her since she was sold at Richmond, Virginia in 1859. She was then 12 years of age. John William Harris, my son, went with some servants after the surrender. He was 14 years old. Both belonged to Dick Christian, in name only, by whom they were sold. The language of Bashup's ad is direct and somewhat defiant.
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Best Of: Jazz Clarinetist Doreen Ketchens / 'White Lotus' Actor Natasha Rothwell
Giesburg comments on the words in name only that Bashup appended after the name of Dick Christian, the man who owned her children. Against this legal right, Giesburg says, Clara Bashup asserted a moral and emotional one. In comparison, Giesburg unpacks the language of a human interest story aimed at white readers about Bashup's search. That story ran in the New York World newspaper.
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Best Of: Jazz Clarinetist Doreen Ketchens / 'White Lotus' Actor Natasha Rothwell
There, Patience is described as the missing child of an aged mother, and Dick Christian is a country gentleman. Giesburg says that white papers everywhere were publishing similar stories that threw a thick blanket of nostalgia over the history of slavery.
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Best Of: Jazz Clarinetist Doreen Ketchens / 'White Lotus' Actor Natasha Rothwell
Another ad that speaks volumes is one posted in 1879 by Henry Tibbs in the Lost Friends column of a New Orleans paper, The Southwestern Christian Advocate. It opens, Mr. Editor, I desire some information about my mother. Tibbs recalls being put in a jail with other boys prior to being sold away. I cried, he writes.
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Best Of: Jazz Clarinetist Doreen Ketchens / 'White Lotus' Actor Natasha Rothwell
Tibbs says he was told that if he would hush, the slave trader would bring my mother there the next morning, which he did. Mother then brought me some cake and candy, and that was the last time I saw her. Throughout Last Seen, Giesburg steps back from these individual ads to give readers the larger historical context that made them necessary.
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Best Of: Jazz Clarinetist Doreen Ketchens / 'White Lotus' Actor Natasha Rothwell
For instance, she reminds readers that no federal agency existed to help freed people locate loved ones after the Civil War ended— Instead, there were things like the grapevine telegraph, which she describes as a sophisticated system of surveillance by which enslaved people kept track of one another. And there were the ads, many of which were read aloud in black churches.
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Best Of: Jazz Clarinetist Doreen Ketchens / 'White Lotus' Actor Natasha Rothwell
Those ads testify to the inner strength of people like Henry Tibbs, who was still placing ads in search of his mother when he was 55 years old.
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Best Of: Ariana Grande / Inside A Dominatrix's Dungeon
Sinatra with a cold is Picasso without paint, Ferrari without fuel, only worse. For the common cold robs Sinatra of that uninsurable jewel, his voice, cutting into the core of his confidence, and it affects not only his own psyche, but also seems to cause a kind of psychosomatic nasal drip within dozens of people who work for him, drink with him, depend on him for their own welfare and stability.
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
As the saying goes, it's a marathon, not a sprint. And what better way to maintain stamina and mental equilibrium during tense times than a dose of wit? Two women writers, one a long-deceased legend, the other a debut novelist, give readers reason to keep calm and smile on.
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
In my house, every time the mail brings a dread notice from, say, the Department of Motor Vehicles, one of us humans is bound to mutter, what fresh hell is this? If for nothing else but that line, Dorothy Parker is a demigod. But of course, there's plenty else.
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
In her poems, short stories, and surgical knife-sharp reviews for magazines like Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, Parker brought into being one of the signature voices of the 1920s. Rye, risque, and hard-boiled, swaddled in a cocoon coat of humor. It's been said, rightly I think, that Parker's wit can't be fully appreciated by reading her.
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
You had to have been at one of those boozy Algonquin roundtable lunches to marvel at how quickly she whipped out one-liners. But perhaps the closest we can come is reading her poetry, which, like so many works of the 1920s, is short. The Everyman's Library has just brought out a pocket edition of her work, culled from Parker's best-selling collections, Enough Rope and Sunset Gun.
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
A lot of her poems are rueful odes to how tough it was for a smart, celebrated literary woman to find love. So how fun to discover other, lesser-known poems that are sassier. Here's one called Fighting Words that veers away from female martyrdom. Say my love is easy had. Say I'm bitten raw with pride. Say I am too often sad. Still behold me at your side. Say I'm neither brave nor young.
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Say I woo and coddle care. Say the devil touched my tongue. Still you have my heart to wear. But say my verses do not scan, and I get me another man. If Parker's voice embodies the wisecracking ethos of the 1920s, the humor of British-born novelist Camilla Barnes is more in the droll, psychologically astute tradition of a Barbara Pym novel. Barnes' debut is called The Usual Desire to Kill.
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
It's what two sisters here, Charlotte and Miranda, acknowledge that that's what they feel whenever they visit their eccentric, exhausting, retired parents at their tumble-down farmhouse in rural France. Mum, a homemaker, is described by Miranda as looking like a piece of low-slung Victorian furniture. Dad, a former philosophy professor, lives in his head.
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Here's Miranda talking about her father's way of relating to the ducks, cats, chickens, and llamas who live on the farm. They were not pets. He didn't interfere in their lives in the same way he didn't interfere in his daughter's lives. He was just not very good at being interested in other living creatures, particularly if they only had two legs. The more legs, the better, he would say.
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
He would be happier living with a spider than with mom if the spider could cook. A millipede would be paradise. The pair met in Oxford in the early 60s and married after their first real date resulted in an unplanned pregnancy. For more than 50 years, they've been nattering at each other, sunk deep into a marriage that Miranda describes as a game of stubbornness versus pedantry.
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
The constant pleasure of reading The Usual Desire to Kill is Barnes' unexpected language. A bed with a hard mattress is likened to sleeping on old toast. Dried eggs, which the father recalls eating during World War II, are said to have tasted a bit like dandruff.
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
But as the story of their parents' lives comes to the fore through old letters and other narrative devices, it's evident that, much as Charlotte and Miranda have always felt unseen by their odd parents, they in turn don't really know those parents, not in full. None of us do, given that we mostly only hear selective stories of our parents' early lives.
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
The sharpest humor is always grounded in some pain. Parker and Barnes both affirm that familiar truth. Reading these very different, very funny books boosted my spirits and lowered my tight shoulders.
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Cole Escola's 'Stupid' Dream Came True With 'Oh, Mary!'
Ocean Vuong's 2019 debut novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, was one of those novels that made me silently pledge, I'll follow you anywhere, whatever you write. And so I have, into Vuong's 2022 poetry collection, Time is a Mother, and now his second novel. The Emperor of Gladness, like its predecessor, explores what Vuong has called in a recent interview, the loneliness of class movement.
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Cole Escola's 'Stupid' Dream Came True With 'Oh, Mary!'
Sprawling where its predecessor was compact, The Emperor of Gladness opens on a view, sweeping in time and space, of East Gladness, Connecticut, a town that manufacturing left behind. Our tour guides are the spirits of the place who speak to us in a collective voice.
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Cole Escola's 'Stupid' Dream Came True With 'Oh, Mary!'
Follow the train tracks, the ghosts advise, till they fork off and sink into a path of trampled weeds leading to a junkyard packed with school buses in various stages of amnesia. Furred with ivy, their dented hoods pooled with crisp leaves, they are relics of our mislearning.
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Cole Escola's 'Stupid' Dream Came True With 'Oh, Mary!'
If the novel's opening calls to mind Thornton Wilder glazed with Springsteen, what happens next reads like Vuong's nod to Frank Capra and his classic 1946 film It's a Wonderful Life. Our main character, a 19-year-old depressed Vietnamese-American boy named Hai, stands on the town bridge. Hai has lied to his immigrant mother.
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Cole Escola's 'Stupid' Dream Came True With 'Oh, Mary!'
She knows he's dropped out of college, but in an effort to make her feel better, Hai claims he's been accepted to med school, which she naively believes. Her joy fills him with self-loathing. As High is about to jump into the river below, he's stopped, not by Clarence the angel, but by an elderly woman whose house abuts the river.
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Cole Escola's 'Stupid' Dream Came True With 'Oh, Mary!'
Grazina arrived in East Gladness as a Lithuanian refugee after World War II. She's now a widow suffering from dementia and stranded in what was once a thriving blue-collar neighborhood. Because she has an empty house and Hai can't return to his mother, the two settle in together with Hai becoming Grazina's caregiver.
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Cole Escola's 'Stupid' Dream Came True With 'Oh, Mary!'
This is one vision of a found family that Vuong presents in The Emperor of Gladness, and its miraculous lack of sentimentality surely owes something to the fact that he lived a similar story himself. In fact, Vuong dedicates this novel to his Grazina. Vuong's gifts of writerly restraint also keep things real here.
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Cole Escola's 'Stupid' Dream Came True With 'Oh, Mary!'
About midway through the novel, Grazina asks Hai, who is giving her a bath, if he'll undress for once so she doesn't feel like I'm some patient. Hai steps out of his boxers and Grazina looks at him, the relationship silently equalized. But it's another type of found family that this novel even more deeply explores. That is, the often fleeting but intense one that sometimes emerges through work.
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Cole Escola's 'Stupid' Dream Came True With 'Oh, Mary!'
Hive finds a job at a local fast, casual restaurant... called Home Market, although he quickly catches on that at Home Market, made by hand meant heating up the contents of a bag of mushy food cooked nearly a year ago in a laboratory outside Des Moines and vacuum sealed in industrial resin sacks.
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Cole Escola's 'Stupid' Dream Came True With 'Oh, Mary!'
There are pages of wry and often compassionate catalogs here describing the routines of High and his fellow workers, as well as the drugs they take to get through the pain and exhaustion of those routines. Every day, this crew spends more of their waking hours with each other than they do with anyone else. One result is that they can sniff each other's presence.
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Cole Escola's 'Stupid' Dream Came True With 'Oh, Mary!'
Before long, High began to know which employee was behind him by their scent alone. The Johnson & Johnson baby lotion Wayne rubbed over grease burns on his arms. The traces of whiskey coming through the Wrigley's Maureen chewed. The bootleg Tom Ford BJ wore, cut with the strawberry starbursts Russia was always sucking on.
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Cole Escola's 'Stupid' Dream Came True With 'Oh, Mary!'
The Emperor of Gladness is a truly great novel about work, still an under-acknowledged topic in American fiction. Hard work is supposed to get you somewhere. That's part of the promise of America. But the payoff feels much less certain to these characters.
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Cole Escola's 'Stupid' Dream Came True With 'Oh, Mary!'
A winning lottery ticket, an inheritance, maybe even a union would have to come along to propel these characters to a place of greater humane possibility. Vuong's achingly austere artistic vision leaves it to his readers to imagine the better world he won't let himself depict on the pages of this wonderful novel.
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For 'Severance' Star Adam Scott, Work & Life Can't Be Separated
Dreary do-gooders, a mother who runs a women's retreat center in Vermont, a 40-year-old son who represents asylum seekers and lives alone in a studio apartment in Brooklyn where the air is redolent of depression and earnestness. These are not the kind of fictional characters I'd ordinarily want to usher the new year in with. But Adam Hazlett gives me little choice.
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For 'Severance' Star Adam Scott, Work & Life Can't Be Separated
His latest novel, Mothers and Sons, is too beautifully written to pass over, too smart about how secrets feed on time, perversely taking up more room in our lives as the years go by. We first meet Peter Fisher, the adult lawyer's son, in the midst of one of his overwhelming work days.
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For 'Severance' Star Adam Scott, Work & Life Can't Be Separated
His job, as Peter ruefully sees it, is to force his clients, people who've experienced violence in other countries, to go over and over the worst thing that ever happened to them. Peter then shapes their harrowing and often convoluted stories into a narrative that will hopefully persuade a judge to grant them asylum.
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For 'Severance' Star Adam Scott, Work & Life Can't Be Separated
A gay man, Peter limits himself to sporadic hookups that don't interfere with his work, work, work. Occasionally, Peter finds himself thinking back to a question he was asked by an older lawyer at his long-ago job interview. What if, in the big picture, you aren't actually helping?
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For 'Severance' Star Adam Scott, Work & Life Can't Be Separated
What if you're a bureaucrat in an endless moral disaster, but if you walk away, the disaster will be a tiny bit worse? Will you still do it? Peter didn't know then, and doesn't know now, what the value of his work is in the big picture of things. That is, until a new client, a 21-year-old gay Albanian man seeking asylum on the grounds of his sexual orientation, pushes Peter into a crisis.
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For 'Severance' Star Adam Scott, Work & Life Can't Be Separated
While meeting with him, Peter feels a sudden deep fatigue, strong as a potion. He subsequently locks himself out of his apartment twice and experiences vertigo. A memory is forcing its way to the surface that impels Peter to contact his mother, Anne. She's the woman who runs that retreat center.
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For 'Severance' Star Adam Scott, Work & Life Can't Be Separated
Anne and Peter have been quietly distanced for decades, ever since she left Peter's father for her current partner, a woman. But as it turns out, the estrangement between this mother and son is rooted in something much more devastating.
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For 'Severance' Star Adam Scott, Work & Life Can't Be Separated
I fear I'm flattening Mothers and Sons into a melodrama when instead it's Hazlett's appreciation of the all-too-human mess of life that makes his writing so arresting, his characters and storylines so authentic. Midway through the novel, Hazlett bends the narrative back in time to Peter's adolescence, an era when coming out felt riskier, especially to Peter himself.
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For 'Severance' Star Adam Scott, Work & Life Can't Be Separated
Remembering the night he first had sex with another man, an indifferent stranger, the adult Peter thinks to himself, how full of shame it is to be lonely. Hazlett scatters such sentences throughout this novel, sentences that can make you stop and go down emotional rabbit holes of your own.
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For 'Severance' Star Adam Scott, Work & Life Can't Be Separated
Another one of Hazlett's triumphs here is the way he makes the work his two main characters do so engrossing. Both Peter and Anne, who's a former priest turned lay counselor, are engaged in the hard work of listening. Here are samplings of Anne's thoughts during an extended scene where she and two of her co-workers listen to a hospital chaplain describe how burned out she is.
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For 'Severance' Star Adam Scott, Work & Life Can't Be Separated
It was in these moments, after a person finished her first unburdening of why she had sought out the center, that the urge to soothe came most strongly to Anne. But to speak immediately would be to glide over the heaviness in the room, in this case a story about the passage of time and the aging of a vocation.
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For 'Severance' Star Adam Scott, Work & Life Can't Be Separated
People barely had room to grieve the loss of others, let alone pieces of themselves, and yet, unmourned, such fragments were bound to haunt. Mothers and Sons is an intricate, compelling novel about the power of stories and especially about the need to let go of those stories that keep people stuck. Maybe in that sense, it's a fitting novel for the new year after all.