Books and Arts
China’s Literary Nobel Complex Is Defused
Connie Britton: The Blue States’ Red State Dream Girl
An American
Every Diwali, I explain to my friends at school why I am so tired—garba it’s like dancing—pujas? I guess like praying— I explain in fragments because even we don’t know why we wash statues with milk, why worshipping God takes so many coats. I don’t ask, just sit beside my mother when she sings. My sister and I watch our father struggle to cross his legs; his laughter resting on his lifted knees. READ MORE >>
Clasp
You get used to it, she said, meaning the delicate mechanism of the diamond drop passed on from her mother. She was fastening the clasp around my neck, meaning preparing me for the fumbling that inheritance presents, meaning death. You get used to it, she said, meaning being inserted into the dark and learning to call it something else—the way of all flesh, for instance. It’s a box clasp: you slip a spring into a box-like feature, an 18th-century design modeled READ MORE >>
How Liberals Learned to Love Honey Boo Boo
From Radical to Right-Wing: The Legacy of Eugene Genovese
From the Archives: Eugene Genovese on Eric Hobsbawm
The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991 by Eric Hobsbawm (Pantheon, 627 pp., $30) READ MORE >>
Stop Calling “Homeland” The Anti-“24”
What’s “Homeland”’s secret? READ MORE >>
