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New Yorker Covers: Polite to Provocative
As scandals engulfed the National Football League, The New Yorker magazine’s cover that appeared on newsstands last week showed a player being chased down the field by police officers.
During the height of the demonstrations in Ferguson, Mo., last month, its cover depicted protesters with their hands raised, illuminated by the harsh glare of floodlights.
And early this year, as the Winter Olympics got underway in Sochi, Russia, the cover lampooned Vladimir V. Putin as a figure skater being assessed by five judges — all of them Mr. Putin.
Those three images, among others, signal a shift in The New Yorker’s cover art toward the topical and provocative.
For most of its existence, the magazine specialized in covers that its current editor, David Remnick, characterized, with some notable exceptions, as “a lot of abandoned beach houses, bowls of fruit and covers reflecting the change of seasons.”
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It’s Tartt—But Is It Art?
No one denies that Donna Tartt has written the “It novel” of the year, a runaway best-seller that won her the Pulitzer Prize. But some of the self-appointed high priests of literary criticism—at The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and The Paris Review—are deeply dismayed by The Goldfinch and its success.
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Colorless Tazaki & His Years of Pilgrimage
A devotional anticipation is generated by the announcement of a new Haruki Murakami book. Readers wait for his work the way past generations lined up at record stores for new albums by the Beatles or Bob Dylan. There is a happily frenzied collective expectancy — the effect of cultural voice, the Murakami effect. Within seven days of its midnight release, “Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage” sold over one million copies in Japan. I envision readers queuing up at midnight outside Tokyo bookstores: the alienated, the athletic, the disenchanted and the buoyant. I can’t help wondering what effect the book had on them, and what they were hoping for: the surreal, intra-dimensional side of Murakami or his more minimalist, realist side?
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Top Influential Women in Mid East Art
Slowly but surely, Middle Eastern art is gaining international recognition, a transformation in which, whether as collectors or directors, writers or curators, Middle Eastern women are playing a vital role. We have compiled a list of 10 influential women in the Middle East’s art scene who are leading creativity in the region and challenging stereotypes as they do so.
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Baghdad Is a Setting, and a Character, Too
ON an evening just a few days before his novel would win a top Arabic literary prize, Ahmed Saadawi was relaxing with his writer friends at a Baghdad cafe, a place so special to him that he had written it into his book.
About an hour after he left, a suicide bomber struck, wounding several of his friends and killing some others. It was a common enough experience for Mr. Saadawi — as it is for anyone who has lived for the last decade in Baghdad, where the simple matter of timing can determine who lives and who dies.
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Artists at war: inside PLO’s info department
The Palestinian Revolution was fought with posters and films as well as rocks and bullets. As a new exhibition opens, Nicholas Blincoe looks at the work of the PLO’s information department
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Stoner: the must-read novel of 2013
Fifty years after it was first published to little fanfare, Stoner, the story of an academic whose life is full of disappointments, has become an unexpected bestseller. Julian Barnes on how a novel he’d never heard of became his book of the year.
On 13 June 1963, the American novelist John Williams wrote from the University of Denver, where he was a professor of English, to his agent Marie Rodell. She had just read his third novel, Stoner, and while clearly admiring it, was also warning him not to get his hopes up. Williams replied: “I suspect that I agree with you about the commercial possibilities; but I also suspect that the novel may surprise us in this respect. Oh, I have no illusions that it will be a ‘bestseller’ or anything like that; but if it is handled right (there’s always that out) – that is, if it is not treated as just another ‘academic novel’ by the publisher, as Butcher’s Crossing [his second novel] was treated as a “western”, it might have a respectable sale. The only thing I’m sure of is that it’s a good novel; in time it may even be thought of as a substantially good one.”
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Pulitzer Winner: ‘Toms River’ by Dan Fagin
This year’s Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction was awarded yesterday to Dan Fagin, an NYU science journalism professor, for Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation. According to the Pulitzer committee, Fagin’s book, which chronicles the effects of chemical waste dumping on a small New Jersey community, “deftly combines investigative reporting and historical research to probe a New Jersey seashore town’s cluster of childhood cancers linked to water and air pollution.”
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Why Free Speech Loses in India
The news from India these days is rarely cheery. The country’s long-overdue winning streak in the international press, which saw old clichés upgraded to shiny new high-tech models, ended around 2010. Since then, the headlines have been relentlessly grim: corruption, poverty, political dysfunction, violence against women, mistreatment of maids, and the criminalization of homosexuality. On Thursday morning, the big story was a brawl inside the Indian Parliament, during which a lawmaker used a can of pepper spray against his colleagues.
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Web Fiction, Serialized and Social
Every few days, Anna Todd uses Wattpad, a storytelling app, to post a new episode of this couple’s torrid tale. Chapter 278 of “After” came out last week, moments after Ms. Todd, a 25-year-old former college student in Austin, Tex., finished writing it.
The first comment appeared 13 seconds after the chapter was uploaded. By the next day, there were 10,000 comments: always brief, overwhelmingly positive, sometimes coherent. “After” has more than a million readers, Wattpad says.
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Tove Jansson: Love, war and the Moomins
This year Finland is celebrating the centenary of the birth of Tove Jansson, creator of the Moomins, and one of the most successful children’s writers ever. Her life included war and lesbian relationships – both reflected by the Moomins in surprising ways.
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The Wrestler
“Covering entertainment means that you come across people whose faces you first saw 20-feet-tall on a movie screen. They tend to shrink when you meet them, but Mr. Hoffman was far from disappointing in person. He didn’t enjoy press even a tiny bit, but knew everyone had a job to do and mine, on occasion, was covering him during the awards season. And he was always available for a quote about a fellow actor or a project he was working. He was a professional, and a kind, decent guy to boot.”
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Khaled Khalifeh’s cafe society: Damascus life ‘must go on’
“There is a table at the cafe which has the same customers every single day. They start with coffee and end up in the evening drinking locally-made arak and smoking the affordable Al Hamra cigarettes made in the coastal city of Latakia.
The four men at this table are almost the only ones left of the old customers in this cafe, which once bustled with Syrians from all walks of life. Music nights, poetry readings, exhibitions, gossip and cultural debate all took place over wine and dinner.”
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The Egyptian Army’s Unlikely Allies
When the Egyptian writer Alaa Al Aswany took the stage in October at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris to promote the French translation of his latest novel, he was presumably not expecting to be heckled and chased from the venue by a crowd of his own countrymen. But minutes into his talk, the author’s voice was drowned out by the shouts of Egyptian emigrés who had come out for the chance to tear him to bits.
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Occupied Pleasures: diverse Palestinian life
Now, in Occupied Pleasures, a short video edited by Amber Fares and twinned with music from Stormtrap Asifeh, Habjouqa’s images are given even greater scope to display the humor and strange, stereotype-challenging juxtapositions in which she seems to delight.
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The Sound of Resistance
The photograph shows Vedran Smailović, known as the cellist of Sarajevo, playing in his country’s largely destroyed National Library at the height of the siege of Sarajevo in 1992, in an act of resilience that has become iconic of the power of music to triumph over the ravages of war.
The Cultures of Resistance Network’s Make Music Not War project area aims to give exposure to music that is created and performed by those immediately affected by political and military oppression who are committed to using their music as a force for justice. The network has done a more in-depth study of musical resistance traditions in four Middle Eastern countries: Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine.
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Brain Pickings
Brain Pickings is the brain child of Maria Popova, an interestingness hunter-gatherer and curious mind at large, who has also written for Wired UK, The New York Times, Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab, and The Atlantic, among others, and is an MIT Futures of Entertainment Fellow.
In this post, Maria brings together 8 books which she rates as the year’s best on writing and creativity, quoting masters like Kurt Vonnegut, Neil Gaiman and Isabel Allende. With this post’s trove of inspiration, you should be set for 2014.
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Rapper challenges veiled women mold
Egyptian Mayam Mahmoud stirred debate in the Middle East when she appeared at Arabs Got Talent’s stage and rapped, defying the expectations of a veiled woman in this part of her world.
“It’s got a lot of people talking about whether it’s possible for a veiled girl, or even a girl, to do this,” says Mahmoud, who says her veil is a personal choice and has little relevance to her music. “If a girl has a dream to work in a field where many girls don’t work, or to do post-graduate study, or to work in a position higher than her husband – all these things often can’t be done.”
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Journey Into Darkness
In her book “A House in the Sky”, Amanda Lindhout recounts the experience of being held captive in Somalia for 460 days.
“In the cleanest prose, she and Corbett allow events both horrific and absurd — like Lindhout’s diligently translating, from a smartphone, a message to jihadis from Osama bin Laden — to unfold on their own. Lindhout’s resilience transforms the story from a litany of horrors into a humbling encounter with the human spirit.”
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Muslim convert behind Marvel’s Pakistani-American superhero
Marvel’s Pakistani-American superhero? Apparently Kamala is not Marvel’s first female Muslim superhero – in 2002 the X-Men-related comic books introduced Sooraya Qadir, a niqab-wearing mutant who could transform herself into a cloud of dust.
“Kamala Khan is not your typical teenage Pakistani-American girl from New Jersey – Marvel Comics’ latest superhero is gifted with special powers that enable her to change shape.”
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Audiovisual archive for Palestine refugees
On this website, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) unveils the first images of its newly digitized archive. Over half a million images and hours of film will follow, covering all aspects of the lives and history of Palestine refugees from 1948 to the present day.
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Flesh and Blood
Using Skype as a digital rehearsal studio, Sofiane and Selma Ouissi’s experimental choreography is surviving long distance
Selma and Sofiane Ouissi share a body with two heads – at least that’s how Sofiane, the Tunis-based half of this Tunisian brother and sister dance duo, sees it. They do have their differences, he explains. Selma, who is currently based in Paris, is the more pensive of the two, while he is driven by impulse and instinct. When they dance together however, they are bound by a palpable energy, one that allows them to flow through each other’s bodies.
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Putting Saddam Hussein back in the frame
When Saddam Hussein fell, we Iraqis were disoriented. For all our lives, he had always been there. His image was everywhere,’ says photographer Jamal Penjweny, whose series Saddam is Here depicts Iraqis in everyday locations covering their faces with pictures of the former dictator. ‘His image was in the cities where we live, on the walls of our schools, on our money, everywhere. Then he vanished. So taking a picture with Saddam was breaking a taboo that was created after the fall of the regime.’ Penjweny, a former shepherd, will show his work in the Iraq pavilion at the Venice Biennale (Welcome to Iraq, 1 June to 24 November).
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The Importance of Not Being Ernest
“Mariel Hemingway gets up early, perhaps as an unconscious homage to her famous grandfather, to watch the sun rise. Each morning, while still in bed, she and her live-in boyfriend, an erstwhile stuntman and actor named Bobby Williams, begin a series of predawn exercises that consist of breathing, stretching, contemplating the things they’re grateful for and visualizing the day ahead. Hemingway then makes the bed and a pot of jasmine green tea. She fills the hummingbird feeders with organic sugar water, feeds organic soy-free meal to the brood of egg-laying hens that live in her backyard and heads back to the kitchen to prepare a smoothie.”
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Close encounters of the Arab kind
Have you ever heard of Alif the Unseen, computer hacker and recipient of an ancient scroll written by mythological spirits?
Or Ajwan, a teenager on an intergalactic quest to save her son from the clutches of those who wish to convert him into a super-warrior?
Probably you haven’t. Possibly you should have. Introducing the rapidly evolving face of Arabic science fiction literature.
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