:Grandmothering While Black: A Twenty-First-Century Story of Love, Coercion, and Survival

A Story in Love's Default:André Brink's States of Emergency Madeleine Sorapure (bio) Despite the difficulties of my story, despite discomforts, doubts, despairs, despite impulses to be done with it, I unceasingly affirm love, within myself, as a value. —Roland Barthes This epigraph from Barthes' A Lover's Discourse is also one of three epigraphs cited at the beginning of André Brink's recent novel, States of Emergency. In Barthes' "story," in Brink's novel—what does it mean to affirm love as a value and to see writing as the space of that affirmation? For Barthes, the affirmation of love arises out of the "extreme solitude" (1) of the lover's discourse: it is "completely forsaken by the surrounding languages: ignored, disparaged, or derided by them, severed not only from authority but also from the mechanisms of authority (sciences, techniques, arts)" (1). In contrast to the lover's discourse, the love story would seem to enjoy a privileged status in Western culture: it offers a certain understanding of the relation between self and other, it presents us with universally commended values, and it places these values appealingly within our reach. But the love story, Barthes suggests, achieves its success precisely by domesticating the lover's discourse, subjugating it to "the great narrative Other" (7), ordering the disruptive force of this intractable discourse by re-forming it in terms of a "painful, morbid crisis of which [the lover] must be cured, which he must 'get over'" (7). Displacing [End Page 659] the love story to the lover's discourse, Barthes writes a "story" of a different kind, staging a series of "figures" or episodes that mark the subject of love; these figures are organized in an "absolutely insignificant order" (8) and are composed of an array of anecdotes, fragments, references, and quotations. In this sense, the contradictory, intractable, and discontinuous lover's discourse disrupts and reconfigures the love story. Citing Barthes' words at the beginning of States of Emergency —a love story which foregrounds the act of writing a love story—Brink indicates the similarity of A Lover's Discourse to his own project and suggests the discomforts, despairs and doubts that attend the process of reworking this genre while writing within it. Like Barthes, Brink constructs a story that is discontinuous, self-referential, and intertextual. However, in States of Emergency it is not the lover's discourse through which the love story is reconfigured; rather, Brink articulates the question of the love story in terms of its context and, specifically, in terms of the context of contemporary South Africa, a context in which the love story seems to have defaulted on its considerable promise. Neil Lazarus has suggested that "The scarring of white South African literature, its ruthless overdetermination by the exigencies of apartheid, is fundamental, and cannot be wished away" (141). Is the love story, with its focus on two individuals and on a romantic relationship, a naively humanist attempt to wish apartheid away? Does the love story displace or domesticate the implications of political struggle (implications in which a sense of responsibility or a sense of guilt may figure largely) in a genre that is eminently familiar, readable, and palatable? What would it mean to write a love story in a situation and from a position that would seem to make this genre banal and somewhat pathetic, peripheral to broader social imperatives? Amid intolerance, violence, racism, and "apartness"—in a context which is, one might say, short on love—does a love story written by a liberal white writer represent anything more than a form of nostalgia? To rephrase these skeptical questions: can a love story effectively oppose apartheid? And beyond opposition, can a love story become engaged in the struggle to envision a future for South Africa? These questions can inform our reading of several recent novels by prominent white South African writers: Nadine Gordimer's My Son's Story and J. M. Coetzee's Age of Iron, as well as Brink's States of Emergency. Each novel focuses on a love relationship set in the more or less realistically rendered context of contemporary South Africa. Each novel works as well with a certain...

Hate arises from stories. The story portion of the theory of hate must be understood in its relation to stories of love. Hence, we discuss stories of love first, in order to contrast them later with stories of hate. The stories of hate are obviously not the same as the stories of love. So why would one want to understand stories of love to understand stories of hate? The reason emanates from considerations discussed in the last chapter. Stories of love can and sometimes do transform themselves into stories of hate. The opposite is less likely to happen. For example, one may have a story of love toward one's romantic partner. But this story may give way to a story of hate if one's story of love is transformed into a story of hate by a perception of betrayal, as when one finds one's partner in bed with someone else, or when one finds that things one has always believed about one's partner turn out to have been the result of an intentional deception on the part of a partner. Oddly, it is important to understand the relation of love and hate as well because stories of hate can give way to stories of love. Romeo and Juliet is a story of rival families that hate each other. Nevertheless, a member of each family comes to love a member of the opposing family. West Side Story , Leonard Bernstein's most favorite musical, picks up on this theme.

The following sections are included:IntroductionBanks’ Love Story with Sovereign Debt: CausesBanks’ Love Story with Sovereign Debt: ConsequencesBanks’ Love Story with Sovereign Debt: PolicyConclusionReferences

Historically, animal characters and animal-child encounters in children’s narratives have served largely metaphorical functions. More recently, scholars have become interested in exploring literary human-animal relations as interesting in and of themselves and not purely as background for promoting values and attitudes considered desirable for adolescent readers. The article proposes a reading of Mary O’Hara’s novel My Friend Flicka (O’Hara 1941) which embeds the relationship between the human protagonist and the horse in the wider stories of equine domestication and the settling of the Western frontier. In effect, while the story of Ken and Flicka is read as a metaphor – a synecdoche even – it is not a metaphor of human-human encounters but of the contradictions and ethical dilemmas inherent to the process of human-directed animal domestication in a capitalist settler colonial society. Ken’s coming of age through the story of love and loss is representative of dilemmas that humans engaged in processes of domestication have had to grapple with: Ken must come to terms with the violence of domestication. Concurrently, Flicka’s story of pain, fear, and love is read not just as the unique story of an individual horse but of the generations of equines that have been forced to adapt to an environment shaped by human dominance.

Reviewed by: Ask Tesadüfleri Sever2/Love Likes Coincidences 2 Cigdem Slankard (bio) Ask Tesadüfleri Sever2/Love Likes Coincidences 2 Feature, Starring Nesrin Cavadzade, Yiğit Kirazcı, Elif Doğan, and Uğur Polat, 2020, 121 Minutes, Directed by Ömer Faruk Sorak and İpek Sorak, Produced by Ömer Faruk Sorak and Alp Tekin Love Likes Coincidences 2 is a popular Turkish feature from husband-and-wife co-directors Ömer Faruk Sorak and İpek Sorak, which tells an implausibly intertwined tale of two love stories. One takes place in Istanbul in 1963 with the backdrop of Istanbul’s Greek Community’s mistreatment by the Turkish government, while the second story is set in contemporary Ankara. Although the title hints at a sequel, Love Likes Coincidences 2 contains a narrative independent of the first film, namely, Love Likes Coincidences 1. Yet, the fact remains that both films explore similar themes like love and coincidence. Love Likes Coincidences 2 is inspired by a true story, originally written by İpek Sorak and adapted to screenplay by Nuran Evren Şit. We first meet the main characters from the 1960s love story, Sema (starring Elif Doğan), a high school student, and Niko (starring Uğur Polat) who is training at a mechanic’s shop and is slightly older than Sema. They run into each other one day when Sema is late for school. Her dad, a local police officer (starring Erkan Can), usually drives her to school. Distracted by Sema’s tardiness, he calls her to hurry up only to find himself rear-ending a motorcycle. This scene constitutes the first coincidence of the first love story: Meet cute 1: Sema meets Niko as he opens his eyes after a gentle tumble off his vehicle. Upon eye contact with the beautiful Sema, he utters the words “Am I dead?” a line which ends up bookending their love story throughout the film. The Niko-Sema love story is contextualized in the social and family structure of 1960s Turkey where it was not uncommon for a high school girl to start considering her options for marriage at a young age. While casual dating and any aspect of premarital sex would have been taboo, this type of romance was encouraged in some families with the hope of young people entering into a marriage grounded in both logic and love. This idea is repeatedly expressed throughout the film’s narrative as the relationship between Sema and Niko unfolds, featuring their families’ reception of their love story. The film then flash-forwards to 2011-Ankara, where the audience meets Kerem (starring Yiğit Kirazcı), an attractive and charismatic young man with his soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend, Aylin (starring Türkü Turan), at a night club where the beautiful and talented Defne (staring Nesrin Cavadzade) takes the stage to perform a song, “I had a Dream Last Night.” Her voice captures Kerem’s attention. Kerem is [End Page 126] captivated by Defne and can’t keep his eyes off her despite his girlfriend’s attempts to distract him from the stage. Kerem and Defne make eye contact right before Aylin drags Kerem off: Meet Cute 2, which is followed by a montage of letter-writing from the 1960s and texting from the new millennium as couples-to-be connected on the eve of their budding romances. Indeed, all four main characters do pair up, Sema with Niko and Defne with Kerem in no time. How romantic advances are shared may have changed, but the gist of it remains the same. In presenting two intertwined and parallel love stories, the film comments on how romance and relationships have changed over time. The ease of connecting with a new potential partner in contemporary modern societies is contrasted to the slow-moving romantic communication, from decades ago, between two people via handwritten notes messengered by a young boy. The cautious conversations between a young couple of the 1960s is juxtaposed to a contemporary couple hooking up immediately after their first face-to-face encounter. The filmmakers acknowledge and highlight these changes and variations. At some points, however, this happens at the expense of an authentic representation of romance in Turkish culture...

Women and War in Contemporary Love Stories from Uganda and Nigeria Sofia Ahlberg (bio) This essay puts contemporary women's short fiction from Uganda and Nigeria in conversation through the analysis of literary representations of love in the context of war. Proposed here is a mode of reading the love story by reflecting more generally upon narrative's relation to political turmoil, violence, and conquest. Addressing the underlying theme of love as a creative stimulus for self-expression, it explores the potential of women's love stories from Uganda and Nigeria to resist, and sometimes resolve, conflict. Though Nigeria and Uganda share similarities with regards to their social, cultural, and economic conditions, as well as their colonial histories, the extent of their literary output differs considerably. In comparison to Uganda where there has been a revival of literature only relatively recently, Nigerian writing has already altered the collective social body and even the land itself has been transformed under its influence. It is perhaps no coincidence that the Ugandan writers looked at in this essay write about issues concerning daughters confronting the challenges of a modern world. Theirs is an internalized narrative, one that acknowledges that social and political change begins from within the self and the ability to raise one's voice above that of the mainstream. Their Nigerian counterparts, by comparison, write from the point of view of the mother who struggles to keep together and shepherd her dependents in moments of disunity and national crises. When considered together, Nigerian and Ugandan texts occasion a rare possibility to discuss the shifts in African women's writing in times of Civil War and regional conflict. The concerns shared by women writers from both countries point to the benefits gained from transnational dialogue, especially within equatorial Africa. However sober the writing from Uganda seems by comparison [End Page 407] to the more idealistic vision from Nigeria, all narrators considered in this essay stand out as women in control of their destinies, women of personal integrity and self-worth. By engaging in the cultural and socio-political transformation of Uganda and Nigeria as evident in the literature of some of their contemporary women authors, this essay aims to embrace a new vision of what constitutes love and how subjects express it. Though universal, the portrayal of love is far from inclusive. Buchi Emecheta gives voice to the erroneous belief that literary love is the domain of the West when she notes in her autobiography that as a young woman she equated England with romance and the typical Englishman with Mr. Darcy.1 As defined and informed by its chivalric, European origins, there is seldom an African presence in romantic fiction. Fiction, including romantic fiction, is monopolized not only by white authors, but by white, male authors, notes Juliana Makuchi Nfah-Abbenyi in the preface to Gender in African Women's Writing.2 The overall aim here is not only to shift focus from the white, male world of fiction from last century to the black, female world of today (although this in itself would be a worthy pursuit considering the still disproportional weight toward Eurocentric, male authors in literature departments around the world), but to contribute to a new appreciation of the love story as a textual antidote to war. For the purpose of this discussion, the meaning of war is diverse, ranging from armed conflict in which women fall victim as civilians to women's own struggle or "war" for control over their bodies and their sexuality. In her discussion of Ama Ata Aidoo's novel Changes—A Love Story, Nfah-Abbenyi argues that the author's portrayal of love is political for many reasons, not least because it is informed by a cultural and socio-historical context beyond any individual's control.3 Similar claims can be made about the stories discussed in this essay with one significant difference. Politicized without doubt, love as narrated by Monica Arac de Nyeko, Doreen Baingana, SefiAtta, and Anthonia Kalu is also there for pleasure alone, as part of "the human condition," as Aidoo herself writes in the introduction of the recently published anthology African Love Stories.4 Paradoxically, however, it is precisely...

Reviewed by: Iron Curtain: A Love Story by Vesna Goldsworthy Damjana Mraović-O'Hare VESNA GOLDSWORTHY Iron Curtain: A Love Story New York. W. W. Norton. 2023. 336 pages. MILENA URBANSKA, the main character of Vesna Goldsworthy's Iron Curtain: A Love Story, is a child of privilege. An offspring of one of the two founders of a politically restrictive Soviet satellite state, Milena's life in the 1980s is marked by indulging in foreign pop culture, designer clothes, and trips abroad. Despite having a "dismal" attendance record and average performance, she is recognized as the top college student. She and her boyfriend, a child of another high-ranking state politician, are considered the Diana and Charles of her country. Milena claims that she is a rebel, both against the system and, consequently, her father, but her trespasses amount to decadent parties, sullen moods, and verbal outbursts to her parents. Milena is misunderstood and unhappy—she claims—and yet her discomfort is rather generational than political. When Milena complains about the constant lack of toilet paper in public bathrooms, she laments that she had to "waste another handkerchief. I like the touch of silk, but it was a pity always to have to throw these things away." Milena, though, changes when Misha, her Charles, kills himself playing drunk Russian roulette after serving only a few weeks of mandatory army service. Milena did not stop the game in which she also participated, and the guilt transforms her into a dedicated student and, later, a successful translator. The second change is instigated by Jason, a visiting British poet for whom she translates at a literary conference: an intense and brief love affair is followed by plans to continue their life in London. Expectedly, when Milena finally reaches the West, nothing lives up to its promise, while Jason's ultimate betrayal can be avenged only by asking for help from those against whom Milena supposedly initially revolted: her motherland and her father. The decision to acknowledge the political power of an eastern country, however, is ironic: the novel opens in December 1990, with the fall of the Iron Curtain. Milena's happiness is unattainable, regardless of politics. In her third novel, the well-established Goldsworthy revisits some of the themes she has previously discussed in her fiction and academic work, notably the ways in which the West and the East perceive each other, as well as questions of identity and freedom. Her Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination (1998) is an essential contribution to Balkan studies; Gorsky (2015) follows a Russian oligarch living in contemporary London but is inspired by The Great Gatsby; Monsieur Ka (2018) is about Anna Karenina's son in post-World War II Britain. Iron Curtain, although "just" a love story, is Goldsworthy's finest novel so far: it is nuanced, funny, and relevant in a world that seems to be actively working on a new Iron Curtain. Damjana Mraović-O'Hare Carson-Newman University Copyright © 2023 World Literature Today and the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

One of the major challenges of writing the Rwandan genocide is how to move away from figuring it as a spectacle, without minimising the significance of the genocide in the cultural history of Rwanda. Although nearly a million Tutsis and some moderate Hutus perished in the Rwandan genocide, some Tutsis and moderate Hutus survived. Yet very little creative art has devoted itself to exploring in metaphors and images how these people survived. Celebrated films such as Hotel Rwanda provide gory scenes of the killing of the Tutsis as background to the creation of their heroes. In sharp contrast Andrew Brown's novel, Inyenzi: a story of love and genocide, is not oblivious to this dimension, but it deliberately foregrounds the positive contribution of individuals and the much reviled Christian Church showing that some Hutus and Tutsis joined forces to redefine themselves through identities that transcended ethnicity. The aim of this article is to briefly highlight the figurative contours of what Julia Kristeva (1982) has described as the abject depicted in the novel Inyenzi: a story of love and genocide. The article argues that the presence of the abject in literature underlines or invokes the desire to work for the creation of a just Rwandan society. The article demonstrates that the depiction of the abject in Inyenzi: a story of love and genocide gives way to the re-establishment, retrieval and re-interpretation of romantic narratives whose social vision reveals an aspiration for a peaceful life and social reconciliation amongst the ethnic groups of Rwanda.

Background: Generally, people tend to create stories relevant to their romantic beliefs based on their personalities and personal experiences. Objectives: The current study aimed at investigating and determining the role of attachment styles and the Sternberg love story to predict marital satisfaction. Methods: The current descriptive-correlational study was conducted on a population including all couples in Qeshm Island, Iran. The 400 participants (200 couples) were selected through stratified sampling method. To collect the needed data, three different instruments were employed namely couples satisfaction index (CSI), the Sternberg love story index, and experiences in close relationships questionnaire. The collected data were analyzed through correlation and multiple regression analyses. Results: The results of the study revealed that the male dominant love story, male and female social receptivity, and male entertainment significantly and positively predicted the marital satisfaction. On the other hand, female and male anxious and avoidance attachment, female dominant, female and male submission, and female self-pleasure negatively and significantly predicted marital satisfaction. It is noteworthy that the relationship between entertainment love story in females and pleasure love story in males was not significant. Totally, 49% of marital satisfaction variance in males and 77% of marital satisfaction variance in females were accounted by predictor variables. Conclusions: Variety of male and female love story and attachment styles can affect marital satisfaction.

본 연구는 내러티브 연구방법을 사용하여 청년들의 사랑이야기를 심층연구를 하였다. 청년들은 사랑을 통하여 무엇을 경험하고, 청년기의 사랑이 청년기의 삶에 주는 의미는 무엇이며, 그 경험과 그 의미가 기독청년과 비기독청년의 사랑에서는 어떻게 다르게 나타나는가를 연구문제로 설정하였다. 연구결과 청년들의 사랑의 경험과 의미는 신앙의 유무에 따라 확연히 다르게 나타났다. 연구의 결과로 도출되어진 공통점과 차이점은 다음과 같다.BR 기독청년과 비기독청년의 사랑이야기에서 도출된 공통점은 첫째, 사랑은 변한다는 것이다. 둘째, 자신이 가지고 있는 세계관대로 사랑이야기를 만들어 나간다는 것이다. 본 연구에 참여한 청년들은 기독교인은 기독교인의 세계관으로, 비기독교인은 비기독교인의 세계관으로 다른 사랑이야기를 가지고 있었다. 셋째, 사랑은 원가족 경험에 의해 영향을 받는다는 것이다. 넷째, 사랑을 통하여 공통적으로 느끼는 감정은 행복이었다. 참여자들은 사랑을 하면서 느끼는 감정을 여러 가지로 표현했는데 공통적으로 나온 감정은 행복이었다.BR 비기독청년과 기독청년의 사랑이야기에서 도출된 차이점은 다음과 같다.BR 첫째, 비기독교인과 기독교인은 사랑의 근원이 다르다는 것이다. 사랑의 시작점이 기독교인과 비기독교인은 다르게 나타났다. 둘째, 비기독교청년과 기독청년의 사랑의 구성에 있어 낭만과 헌신의 우선순위의 다르다는 것이다. 셋째, 비기독교인과 기독교인의 헌신의 의미가 다르다는 것이다. 넷째, 비기독청년과 기독청년의 이야기 프로파일은 미래이야기에 대한 우선순위가 다르다는 것이다.BR 본 연구는 개인적인 사랑이야기의 지평을 하나님과의 관계적 정체성의 이야기로 확장시켜 주는 지평의 융합이라는 재해석과정에 이르는 계기를 제공하고자 하였다. 청년들이 사랑을 통하여 어떤 경험을 하며, 그 경험은 삶에 어떤 의미를 부여 하는지를 연구하는 것은 청년들의 실존 문제를 실재적으로 접근할 수 있어서 상담학적으로도 큰 의미가 있었다.

"I'm nothin. I'm nowhere":Echoes of Queer Messianism in Brokeback Mountain Richard Block (bio) To read the reviews of Brokeback Mountain, one would believe that the central issue of the film is whether this is a gay love story or a love story for everyone. Arguably mainstream America's favorite critic, Roger Ebert, defends his praise for the film by insisting that its appeal is universal and not just gay: "It could be a gay cowboy movie. [But] the more specific a film is, the more universal, because the more it applies to everyone. I can imagine someone weeping at this film, identifying with it, because he always wanted to stay in the marines, or be an artist or a cabinetmaker" (2005). Without fancying what it means to have wanted to be a life-long marine while watching two cowboys screw, I will merely point out that universality is evidently not a quality that inheres in love stories that are "really" gay cowboy movies.1 David Mendelsohn, writing for the New York Review of Books, insists that Brokeback Mountain is a queer love story, focused on obstacles specific to homosexuals forced to endure Wyoming and so-called cowboy country in the closet (2006). What such discussions overlook is whether or not this is [End Page 253] even a love story. Do a "couple of high-altitude fucks once or twice a year," as Jack laments, constitute love? Or is it precisely a gay love story because it never materializes? Equally perplexing is that at least one-half of the film follows the lovers as members of a traditional family and their travails as heterosexuals. Almost every time we see Jack and Ennis together, the following scene concerns life on the heterosexual home front where girlfriends, wives, children, and in-laws both protect and threaten the closet. This binary is a first indication of the movie's understanding of homosexuality as pure inversion; it always stands in reverse relationship to heterosexual marriage, which governs the center and essence of all sexuality. The back cover of the DVD could not be more explicit in its marginalizing of homosexuality. There are four images. At the left margin is Ennis Del Mar; at the right margin is Jack Twist. Center left are Ennis and his wife; center right, Jack and his wife. In other words, gravity pulls even queers to a center occupied by heterosexual unions. To focus on the universal dimensions of homosexuality obscures issues of class and race—an oversight all the more striking given how "coming out" or moving out of the closet is so central to the concerns of critics. Class is hardly obscured in the film. Jack Twist, the one whose marriage jumpstarts his social mobility, is ever ready to come out and set up house, thereby triangulating class, coming out, and domestication. Ennis del Mar, on the other hand, may live in a mobile home and move from job to job, but he goes nowhere fast. Mobility, at least for him, is a fiction. As is his family name, del Mar. He is "of the sea" or queer to mountain country, and apparently, of Hispanic origin despite his porcelain skin. The sexual partners Jack finds on the other side of the border in Mexico for backroom, anonymous adventure are therefore metonymies for the one Hispanic who remains forever removed by a border of a different kind. But the love story, if there is one, is over before it begins; metonymous, anonymous sex fills the void. Their relationship, as we will see, is always seen through a rear-view mirror; its rear end always in sight before anything begins,2 and such rear viewing renders class and race inconsequential. Those antagonisms have already been played out. This brings us to the most glaring oversight of all: the time line. The film begins in 1963 or pre-Stonewall and ends in 1983, post-Stonewall and the [End Page 254] beginning of the AIDS crisis. Perhaps that explains why, in the middle of Buttfuck, Wyoming, everyone has homosexuality on his mind. In the period during which the narrative of coming out is being (re)constructed as essentially a gay...

Reviewed by: Star of the Week: A Story of Love, Adoption, and Brownies with Sprinkles Deborah Stevenson Friedman, Darlene . Star of the Week: A Story of Love, Adoption, and Brownies with Sprinkles; illus. by Roger Roth. Bowen/HarperCollins, 200932p. Library ed. ISBN 978-0-06-114137-9$18.89 Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-06-114136-2$17.99 R 6-9 yrs "Star of the Week is when you bring in a poster that's all about YOU," explains Cassidy-Li, our narrator. As she pulls together her family pictures, Cassidy-Li, a transracial adoptee, revisits her past as a baby in China and touches on the ways in which she remains connected to that part of her life (Chinese school, orphanage reunions) as she discusses more generally common life experiences (best friends, relatives, pets). She observes with modest regret that she has no picture of her birthparents, about whom she thinks a great deal, but she solves that problem by drawing a portrait of them to include in her poster. Though this is more message-driven than story-powered, the exploration of an adoptee's concerns is realistic, and it expands naturally and calmly into some delicate territory. The acknowledgment of the importance of birth parents is helpful, especially since adoption books often glide past the question of origins, and there's useful modeling of ways to approach the subject both with and for the adoptee ("I don't like to talk about it sometimes. Mom and Dad say I can tell people it's private if I want to"). Roth (husband of author Friedman) brings a cozy, unassuming realism to his pencil and watercolor illustrations, and the "photos" are particularly lively and believable; they also serve to effectively place Cassidy-Li's origins in perspective as a part, not the whole, of her multifaceted life. This is a sympathetic approach for youngsters not yet ready for Cummings' Three Names for Me (BCCB 12/06), and it will help clarify some aspects of adoption to kids who've been there, kids who haven't, and adults looking for a way into the conversation. There's no note, but the jacket information implies that the book draws on the author and illustrator's own family experience. Copyright © 2009 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Reviewed by: Reynard's Tale: A Story of Love and Mischief by Ben Hatke Kate Quealy-Gainer, Editor Hatke, Ben Reynard's Tale: A Story of Love and Mischief; written and illus. by Ben Hatke. First Second, 2023 [80p] Trade ed. ISBN 9781250857910 $22.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R* Gr. 7-10 Hatke takes a deft hand to his contribution to the stories of Reynard the Fox, the trickster at the center of a trove of medieval tales, bringing in familiars from the original sources and adding his own creations and sardonic edge. Readers first meet Reynard settling in around a campfire just as summer ends in the Borderlands, "that precarious space between civilization and the True Wild." A messenger crow and summons from the king, however, sets Reynard on the run, who first finds refuge (and wine and a good time) at the Inn at the Edge, but then flees again with the Clockwork Conjurer, facing memory stealers, Death herself, and eventually a lover he left behind. The pace is quick, the characters are memorable, and the narrative tone is a careful balance of folkloric formality with a gentle earnestness, allowing Reynard to be both tricksy and sympathetic. Hatke's signature art is all languid lines and loose angles, with crosshatching bringing textures and composition underscoring emotion: Death is elegant and looms large upon her arrival, for example, but her subsequent efforts to get Reynard into bed have a desperation as the scene homes in on the two. The target age is a bit ambiguous, as the writing itself skews young but the content older, but it would certainly make an entertaining and lovely companion to class units on medieval literature or folklore, while fans of Hatke's previous works will find his signature wit here. The final chapter sees Reynard tamed—at least temporarily—by the most unexpected of sources, a little child with a fox tail: "Love is like that, isn't it? … Always a surprise. Always a mystery." Copyright © 2023 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

I writers have been pushed into creative exile. Where once Iran had produced internationally acclaimed literary works such as Savushun, The Blind Owl, and My Uncle Napoleon, Iranian writers today are more often known for harrowing memoirs recounting their oppression under Iran’s Islamic regime. My Uncle Napoleon is no more, having been banned by the authorities since 1979, as well any uncensored edition of The Blind Owl. Unsatisfied with the physical expulsion of Americans from Iran, Khomeini’s disciples have tried to cleanse all hints of Western influence from the country and its literature, resorting to force when necessary. The effects on Iran’s creative writing scene have been deleterious, to say the least, but a few have since found success with distressing memoirs geared towards the lucrative Western market. Yet some argue that something beautiful about Iran has been lost among this surge in tales of doom and gloom. Censoring an Iranian Love Story, the latest Iranian memoir written for a Western audience, thankfully manages to bridge this gap by highlighting the beauty of Iran while refusing to pull a veil over the ugly truth. Censoring an Iranian Love Story manages to be concurrently playful and saddening, confounding and enlightening. The story follows the author, Shahriar Mandanipour, as he attempts to write a love story that would survive Iran’s exacting censors and their conservative, Islamic sensitivities. As a result, it is basically two books in one: the fictional love story, written in bold print, juxtaposed with the author’s memoir, written in plain text, which explains how he wrote the story and which portions were excised or rewritten. As the story advances, these alterations—which change or remove scenes that are at times fun and witty, at others stark or sensual—sadly account for more and more of the finished product as the story progresses. Rather than being the pro–Western polemic it easily could have been, Mandanipour instead prefers to use his story as a platform to educate the reader on Iran’s rich cultural heritage. He does so by fusing the license of literature with the weight of historical exposition, painting a nuanced portrait of his country that never compromises his honest criticism. Much of this is told through his love story; the labor of the author’s love, providing a revealing insight into Mandanipour’s affection for the country which spurns and flirts with him all the same. Outwardly modest, the book’s ambition becomes apparent as the story unfolds.

The article deals with an analysis of the Soviet Thaw films that contain love stories of USSR and USA citizens. Hollywood released a number of films that told the stories of love between representatives of the two hostile blocs; following the canon established in Ninotchka, they served as a part of the “struggle for hearts and minds,”, as it is shown in many studies. Meanwhile the Soviet cinema also produced the movies that touched the theme of romances between Soviet and American characters: from Meeting on the Elbe (1949) to Lost in Siberia (1991). The author points out that Soviet love stories, like Hollywood ones, served as a weapon of the cultural Cold War. They constructed emigration beyond the Iron Curtain as unacceptable for Soviet citizens, empha-sized the superiority of the masculinity of “us” and functioned as a means of a symbolic demasculinization of the enemy. At the same time, unlike American cinema, the Soviet one released movies that told how a woman of “us” married a man of “them.” However, the family couple chose the USSR as a place of their residence, and it was the woman who rehabilitated the American man, turning him into a Soviet person. Love stories served as a part of not only geo-political but also gender discourse of the Cold War, maintaining and reshaping a certain gender order. Whereas Hollywood constructed the woman as a person who valued the private sphere higher than political beliefs or loyalty to the country, Soviet love stories showed that the woman actively participated in transforming the world, was interested in worldview and political issues, and was able not only to obey a man, but also to lead him. In the perestroika cinema, along with the changes in evaluations of the Soviet way of life, the narrative of love stories was deconstructed: Soviet people emigrated to their beloved ones in the West.