Politics
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Joan Didion: Conservative to Liberal
How exactly did Joan Didion go from writing for conservative weekly the National Review to serving as a leading voice for the left? The New Yorker offers an answer: What changed was her understanding of where dropouts come from, of why people turn…
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Wet with the Tears of a Pedant
Nearly every page of this book is wet with the tears of a pedant. Nostalgic for the wordplay of the Republican primary debate? Barton Swaim has got you covered in his memoir detailing the three years he spent as a…
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The Politics of Fiction
Fiction written under an authoritarian or totalitarian government often dares readers to view the work as a critique of that society. In a review of two science fiction works by Cuban authors, Electric Literature takes a look at the surprising…
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The Rumpus Interview with Marge Piercy
Dara Barnat talks with Marge Piercy about growing up in Detroit, making a kind of Judaism through poetry, and living close to the natural world.
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Fresh Comics #2: Transmissions from Beirut
What are the fundamental differences between telling your own story, telling the story of another, and telling your story about trying to understand someone else’s story?
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Art vs. Politics
In a truly wonderful keynote speech reprinted at Lit Hub, Aminatta Forna tears down the false divide between art and politics: To tell writers not to tackle political themes because it will spoil the beauty of their work sounds very…
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NYPL as Budget Hostage
A scathing indictment from Jim Dwyer at the New York Times this week accuses city leaders of depriving funding from the library system, and its mayors of holding the NYPL hostage for leverage in budget negotiations. As Dwyer points out,…
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A Wrinkle in the Wrinkle
The Wall Street Journal has an article that questions the traditional interpretations of A Wrinkle in Time: Ms. Voiklis said she wanted readers to know the book wasn’t a simple allegory of communism. Instead, it’s about the risk of any…
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Yeats’s Easter Poem
The Ploughshares blog looks at William Butler Yeats’s “Easter 1916” and the violent uprising that inspired it.
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The Politics of Genre
The Guardian explores why crime fiction tends to lean left, while thrillers often are more conservative.
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Politics, Lost in Translation
Asymptote Journal takes a look at some of the concerns translators have when confronting a politically problematic text. The choice of text is of course the first decision a translator faces—but the challenges translators confront aren’t necessarily limited to pushing…
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Song of the Day: “Straight To Hell”
The Clash are famous for their album London Calling and their ubiquitous single, “Rock the Casbah,” which is notable perhaps for its incendiary political message—a denunciation of the Iranian ban on Western music following the 1979 revolution. But it’s “Straight to Hell,” a commemoration…