Tag: first novel
Zombie History Stalks Ukraine – The Atlantic
The Ukrainian writer Tanja Maljartschuk’s novel Forgottenness broods upon what I’d call zombie history. There are other terms for inherited memory of catastrophic events experienced by one’s forebears, such as intergenerational transmission of trauma and postmemory. But the past in this novel rises from the grave and takes possession of the bodies of the living. Memories resurface as tics, gestures, obsessions—the condensations of meaning that Freud called neurotic symptoms. Sometimes these show up in the personally traumatized. Much
Can PEN Preserve Intellectual Freedom?
Updated at 9:21 p.m. ET on August 7, 2023
In June 1953, at the height of the McCarthy era, while congressional investigators and private groups were hunting down “subversive” or merely “objectionable” books and authors in the name of national security, the American Library Association and the Association Book Publishers Council issued a manifesto called “The Freedom to Read.” The document defended free expression and denounced censorship and conformity in language whose clarity and force are startling today.
What Goodreads Is Doing to the Publishing World
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When Megan Nolan published her first novel, fellow authors warned her in “ominous tones” about the website Goodreads. The young Irish writer looked at the book’s listing there in the winter of 2020, the day the first proof copy arrived at her house. “Nobody but me and the
A World Without White People
A man wakes to find himself transformed. He looks around, seeking his bearings as he tries to come to terms with what has happened to him overnight, perhaps after uneasy dreams. He looks at his hand, which he knows like … well, like the back of his hand. It is unfamiliar, the hand of another. He seeks out his reflection. The man who looks back at him is a stranger.
These are the opening beats of Mohsin Hamid’s latest novel,