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books

The Origin of Others

Samantha Fu LSE Review of Books
In this book, based on a series of lectures given at Harvard University in 2016, Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winning novelist Toni Morrison offers her insights into how discrimination and animus cross racial and ethnic lines occurs.

books

A Novel Tackles Capitalism and Boredom

Constance Grady Vox
In Ling Ma's debut novel Severance, a radically understated post-apocalyptic novel about boredom, the apocalypse looks a lot like another day at the office.

theater

Lillian Hellman’s Days to Come

Jane LaTour ZNet
The great mystery to me, is why the play was a failure. Originally it ran for only 3 days, and then closed. Hellman was responding to an all-too-common ethical dilemma that persists down to today. Her own sympathies lay with the striking workers.

books

Remembering Philip Roth (1933-2018)

Nathaniel Rich The New York Review of Books
An homage to the esteemed late novelist and nonfiction writer Philip Roth, who died on May 22, leaving a legacy of thick description of an American culture where, in Roth's ironic words, “everything goes and nothing matters."

How Philip K. Dick Redefined What it Means to Be (In)Human

James Burton The Conversation
No being – whether mammal, robot, computer, bird, slug, stone, or star – that is excluded from the category of humanity on the basis of its physical nature. Conversely, each and any being may qualify as human by demonstrating empathy for other beings.

books

Philip K. Dick and the Fake Humans

Henry Farrell Boston Review
We’re not living in the dystopias of George Orwell or Aldous Huxley, the author insists, but in the shifty algorithmic universe of Philip K. Dick, where the world that the Internet and social media shape is less a system than an ecology, a proliferation of unexpected niches, and entities created and adapted to exploit them in deceptive ways. In this view, it’s a world in which technology is developing in ways that fudge the difference between the human and the artificial.

books

We Know About Bad Books, But Are There Bad Readers, Too?

Merve Emre Boston Review
The author queries the existence of bad readers, linking causes not to illiteracy or injuries of class or the diffusion of mass culture, but to a Cold War literary trend sporting "an abundance of paraliterary works," such as memoirs, diaries, biographies, diplomatic studies, and feature reports as primers for engaging with literary texts as seemingly historically accurate yet stressing outcomes and expectations consonant with systemic social ends.

Eduardo Galeano, Monster Wanted

Eduardo Galeano Tom Dispatch
The most dramatic and beautiful of writers who caught history -- the history of continents and of half-forgotten figures who struggled for what truly mattered -- in a unique fashion, in passages of hardly a page or more.
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