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The Guilty Pleasure of Chelsea Summers’ Monstrous ‘A Certain Hunger’
Easy to summarize but difficult to, um, flesh out, Chelsea G. Summers’ A Certain Hunger is, without a doubt, the Great American Female Serial Killer Novel.
King Hu’s ‘Raining in the Mountain’ Is Rich with Gorgeous Atmosphere
The quiet, extended scenes in King Hu’s Raining in the Mountain are full of beauty as well as tension and anticipation.
‘City So Real’ and the Politics of a Modern Metropolis
One of the crowning achievements of City So Real is that it shows that the fight for racial justice in Chicago became adopted by people of all identities thanks to the tireless work of organizers.
Farnoosh Samadi’s Impressive Debut, ‘180 Degree Rule’, Leaves a Lasting Mark
Farnoosh Samadi's 180 Degree Rule brutally explores our tendency to condemn instead of to embrace one another with compassion and understanding.
Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera Sings ‘Every Day We Get More Illegal’
Every Day We Get More Illegal, seems to foretell a diatribe vibe, but threaded throughout Herrera's verse is the musicality--the calming, invigorating melodies that remind us, ever so sweetly, if insistently: Latino lives are beloved.
Silent Classic ‘The City Without Jews’ Wavers Between Satire and Grim Prophecy
It's the privilege of satire to apply one's opponents' "logic" towards a reductio ad absurdum, as we see in The City without Jews.
Art Historian Dora Apel Queries What We Choose to Remember
In Calling Memory into Place, art historian and cultural critic Dora Apel explores the relationship between collective and personal memory and place in a series of reflective essays that are by turns erudite and personal.
‘Step It Up and Go’ Gives North Carolina Music Its Dues
David Menconi's Step It Up is an absorbing love letter to the artists, scenes, and sounds of North Carolina's contributions to American popular music.
‘I Just Wanted to Save My Family’, or, How European Institutions Profit from the Refugee Crisis
It's not just gun-toting crooks who abuse refugees, we learn from memoir I Just Wanted to Save My Family, it's also politicians and legal officers filling their personal and national coffers with fines and extortion who profit from criminal human trafficking.
Postcolonial Re-imaginings in Mambèty’s ‘Touki Bouki’
Restored by the World Cinema Project and now available from The Criterion Collection, Djibril Diop Mambéty's cheeky critique of colonialism, Touki Bouki (Journey of the Hyena) reveals a great act of myth-making.
Bishakh Som’s ‘Spellbound’ Is an Innovative Take on the Graphic Memoir
Bishakh's Som's graphic memoir, Spellbound, serves as a reminder that trans memoirs need not hinge on transition narratives, or at least not on the ones we are used to seeing.