Full Stop Recommends, Fall 2013 (pt. 1)
“I have no health insurance,” you say, “and there is a hole in my sock.” Let us point you to some novels, short stories and animated gifs that will improve your outlook.
We Always Promise: The Making of Partia e Fortë
Kosovo’s satirical “Strong Party” makes visible the perversion of the nation’s political-ideological status quo.
Like Morrissey, Oscar Wilde views his world with a humorous disdain, raising an eyebrow and a cigarette at its vanities and minor injustices. But, also like Morrissey, he seems to be performing his discontent like a character actor.
When an ordered society depends on maintaining a hierarchy of images, the ability to wield this kind of ironic superposition has a concrete political power.
To focus simply on the immediate costs of NSA spying — deterioration of privacy, tactical inefficacy — is not enough. The destruction of the commons and the privatization of public space is an equal, if not much more serious, danger.
Where Nothing Happens: On the Henry Miller Library
How can the Library sustain its status as an exciting, relevant cultural institution, while remaining a refuge for the peace-seeking?
Sneering Optimism: Jesse Michaels from Operation Ivy to Whispering Bodies
It could be demoralizing, recalling those days from the Excel-induced ennui of my nineteenth floor desk… but Jesse Michaels had grown up into a literary young man, too, and he was still punk as fuck.
Ismail Kadare’s Toolkit: Literature and Transition
He was no Václav Havel, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn or Ai Weiwei. Yet, while not explicitly taking up contrary political positions, he had a literary toolkit that allowed him to scrutinize totalitarian power.
In a country that continues to be the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, three new books grapple with what our nation’s war apparatus has wrought in our names. They attempt to figure how such acts have, with an air of permanence, seized our national imagination.
Notes for an Essay on Benjamin Lytal’s A MAP OF TULSA
Start the actual discussion by describing just how Lytal’s book winds around the not-so-wild Midwestern world of the author’s hometown. Note that the plot, too, concerns a homecoming. (Try to avoid using commas like table salt.)