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I remember on several occasions, either when you came over for a studio visit, or when you were in attendance at an exhibition of mine, you told me, “I hate you,” which was your manner of delivering a compliment. I knew what you really meant was that you saw something recognizably good in the work, and that you found it to be particularly challenging.
Those of a certain age will recall having spent hours reading to smaller people, with a mixture of boredom, fascination, and amusement, the illustrated stories of Beatrix Potter (1866–1943). But for the children listening and looking, the impact of these beast fables—about the doings of Peter Rabbit, Jeremy Fisher, and Benjamin Bunny, among others—will likely have been more profound than any reading that came later, especially if accompanied by the stories of Potter’s English fellow travelers from about the same period: A. A. Milne with Winnie the Pooh and Kenneth Grahame w...
“All American abduction stories are alike,” declares Aura, formerly a professor of Latin American literature and now one of the dozens of people abducted⎯ snatched, caged, shipped away⎯ over the course of this novel (for lack of a better word), in which every brief chapter features a miniature tragedy of separation, violent and heartbreaking, and yet each also offers some kind of talking cure, some gab-fest, though rarely face to face, rather via phone or chatbot, and in this way every brief chapter spins the core atrocity in a kaleidoscope, and the widening circle of sha...
“Can you tell me a story?” Nin asks, invoking a ‘story game’ that she says they once played every night as kids. Instead of the usual stories about talking animals or flying carpets, Nin wants to hear true stories about her sister’s life outside of the room. Hui is reluctant. The world is disappointing and broken, she says. But Nin insists.
TO THE HEART OF IT: Gaza has been a free kill zone and a “concentration camp” (to quote Israel’s National Security Director Giora Eiland in 2004), long before October 7. In light of this, the most radical position comes directly from the simplest question: are Palestinians human beings? If your answer is emphatically yes, unambiguously and without reservations, then you are a lost cause to Zionism. Because if Palestinians are human beings, then their self-defense is legitimate, and the defense of their continued existence is necessary.