American Fiction Research Articles

Национально-маркированная лексика в современной американской художественной литературе: особенности и возможности перевода на русский язык

Национально-маркированная лексика в современной американской художественной литературе: особенности и возможности перевода на русский язык

Slantwise Moves: Games, Literature, and Social Invention in Nineteenth-Century America. Douglas A. Guerra. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Pp. 253.

<i>Slantwise Moves: Games, Literature, and Social Invention in Nineteenth-Century America</i>. Douglas A. Guerra. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Pp. 253.

Plebeianizing the Female Soldier: Radical Liberty and The Life and Adventures of Mrs. Christian Davies

This article examines the work-related dimensions of The Life and Adventures of Mrs. Christian Davies (1740). A rollicking account of a plebeian female soldier, the Life is a key document for the history of eighteenth-century working women and their representation in narrative. By portraying both the industriousness and the radical liberty associated with the lower-class milieu of real-life female soldiers, Davies’s narrative challenges the depiction of plebeian identity in numerous early eighteenth-century fictions of low-born women, whether picaresque like Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders or sentimental like Samuel Richardson’s Pamela. Drawing on genres such as jest-books, criminal biography, and amatory fiction to break with heroic images of well-born women warriors (including those in popular ballads), it voices a resistant outlook on the regulation of women’s labour and sexuality. And, with a social perspective springing as much from class status as sexual identity, Davies’s Life marks a literary epoch in which female soldiering is plebeianized in plays and novels as diverse as John Gay’s Polly and Tobias Smollett’s Ferdinand Count Fathom.

Secular Trouble: Regulating Reality in Non-Fiction Literatures

Abstract: This essay examines some of the conventions of secular narration that shape mainstream journalism, scholarship, and other non-fiction literatures. By bracketing the agency of non-natural forces, the conventions generate an authoritative authorial position outside the narrative, a worldly kind of God's-eye view or "higher ground," and generates secular knowledge that can be exchanged by diverse supernaturalists and naturalists. Similar conventions are also at work in much mainstream American fiction. Indeed, abiding by such secularizing conventions is part of what defines a literature as mainstream.

Aspects of postmodernism and humour. A glimpse on Raymond Federman’s work

The purpose of this paper is to review aspects of postmodernism in the work of the American writer Raymond Federman, in which humour plays a very important part. This paper demonstrates that Raymond Federman’s literary work is a typically postmodern creation, through the challenges towards the conventions of literature, through the use of discontinuity, fragmentation, metafiction and self-referentiality. The French-American writer captures the way in which the contemporary human being perceives reality in today’s society. Raymond Federman’s novel “The Twofold Vibration” illustrates very well the features of the postmodern novel. Humour is a means of reviving contemporary American fiction.

Pro-Social Trickstars in Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns

Tricksters are usually defined as non-heroic male characters obsessed with food, sex, and general merrymaking, occasionally changing shape and even gender but eventually returning to their masculine self. But is this necessarily true in contemporary ethnic literature? The current essay explores the notion of the trickstar, or the female trickster, in Afghan- American fiction, analysing the three heroines in Khaled Hosseini’s 2007 novel A Thousand Splendid Suns, which is a mother-daughter story set in Kabul at the turn of the millennium. In order to place this text into a cultural context and underscore the significance of the trickstar figure, it is compared to a traditional Afghan folk tale, “Women’s Tricks.” Two research questions are at the centre of this article: (1) In what ways are trickstars from Afghan folklore similar to the heroines of Hosseini’s novel? and (2) What roles do his heroines perform as pro-social trickstars?&#x0D;

Some Current Publications

Some Current Publications Dylan P. Lewis APHRA BEHN Bell, Maureen. “‘Literary pimping’ or Business as Usual? Aphra Behn and the Book Trade.” Women’s Writing, vol. 27, no. 3, 2020, pp. 275–293. Bell explores the influence of gender on Aphra Behn’s literary career by examining her relationship with publishers and the capitalist practices of the book trade industry both during her lifetime and in the decade after her death. Central to Bell’s examination is the question of whether or not Behn and her literary works were treated differently by publishers because of her gender. After providing a concise but detailed look at the legal and commercial operations of the book trade during the Restoration period, Bell emphasizes that Behn’s work appeared in print when a number of women were involved in many different aspects of the London book trade, from printing to bookselling. Through her examination of Behn imprints alongside the imprints of some of her literary predecessors and contemporaries, Bell persuasively argues that Behn’s publishers were not “a bunch of literary pimps,” (283) who exploited writers along gendered lines. Rather, Bell presents Behn not as a victim of sexual degradation, but as an author who “understood the market for her work” (287) under the pervasive capitalist realities of the Restoration book trade. Rahman, Arifa Ghani. “Negotiating Masculine Circles: Female Agency in Aphra Behn’s Work.” Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, vol. 12, no. 4, 2020, pp. 1–9. Rahman explores the agency of the women in Aphra Behn’s work, specifically her play The Rover. Although some amount of female agency can be seen through strong, active women in earlier plays by William Shakespeare and Christopher [End Page 143] Marlowe, Rahman argues that those playwrights never “yield complete power to them” (3). Behn’s work differs from that of her notable predecessors, Rahman posits, because “Behn’s women take care of themselves and each other” (4), especially when forced marriage or patriarchal economic control is involved. However, Rahman traces Behn’s utilization of masks, crossdressing, and disguises in her work as a way to render female liberation or empowerment only temporary, which limits the possibilities for female agency in her work. Rahman argues that such a depiction of female agency in plays like The Rover responds to Behn’s own anxieties about her economic dependence on masculine literary circles. Rubik, Margarete. “Excess and Artifice: The Depiction of the Emotions in Aphra Behn’s Amatory Fiction.” Women’s Writing, vol. 27, no. 3, 2020, pp. 377–392. Rubik considers the role of excessive (and non-gendered) passions in the works of Aphra Behn from a stylistic perspective. Rather than examining theories of emotions applicable to later eighteenth-century texts, such as the cult of sensibility, Rubik turns to Thomas Hobbes and the late seventeenth century’s “time of transition between a libertine and a more moderate Epicurean ethos,” which Behn’s writing was situated in the middle of (379). While her men and women are written to have hyperbolic emotions, rendering them breathless as if they are the victims of overpowering passions, Rubik argues Behn’s characters simultaneously use their excessive emotional ranges to both rhetorical and strategic ends. Rubik concludes that her fiction “authenticates the affective states described by a breathless syntax of emotional turmoil, yet is, in fact, written with extreme artifice which renders a clear distinction between the fake and the real impossible” (389). Such a diverse, multi-layered treatment of passions and their wide range of effects had a considerable amount of influence on later writers, such as Delarivier Manley and Eliza Haywood. Stephenson, Joseph F. and Darren Freebury-Jones. “A New Source for Two Aphra Behn Plays: The Dutch Lady, A Restoration Comedy in Manuscript.” ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews, vol. 33, no. 2–3, 2020, pp. 228–233. Stephenson and Freebury-Jones consider the anonymously authored manuscript play The Dutch Lady as a source text for Aphra Behn’s plays The Roundheads; or, The Good Old Cause and The City Heiress; or, Sir Timothy Treat-all. Using a digital plagiarism detector named WCopyfind, as well as their own close readings of the...

Violence and victimization in the novels of Joyce carol Oates

For the past six decades the American land witnessed with major controversial issues like Race and Racism, Violence against women, Feminist sensibilities, and Gothic horror, social, political, cultural, economic and racial changes. After William Faulkner, Joyce Carol Oates, plays a crucial role in the American literature. Oates is America’s most honored and respected authors, and is certainly one of the most productive serious writers in modern time. When her earliest novels and story collections began appearing in the 1960s, Oates quickly developed the reputation as “writer’s writer”: passionately engaged in the craft of fiction’. Oates was recognized as a major new voice in American fiction while still in her twenties. As a result, it is very difficult to summarize her novels. The present Research paper is an attempt to explore the genius of Joyce Carol Oates thematic concerns in her novels. Though Oates creative writing includes novels and other genres, the focus of the present paper is exclusively on her novels.

Self-identification issue in American fiction of 2000s

The article focuses on the issue of self-identity search in the novels of two American authors such as David Ebersghoff with his “The Danish Girl” (2000) and Jeoffrey Eugenides with his “Middlesex” (2002). Identity transformation being one of the main categories of our research makes the process of identity shift together with the influence of space travels and gender blurring on it more vivid. This article logically continues a previously started research of the self-identity issue in American fiction. The identity process is a remarkable trait of social and cultural life of all the times and is still crucial for national and family identification. As a consequence another problem arises that is differentiation between the categories of gender and sex as well as the issue of self appreciation within your family and certain location / community. Yi-Fu Tuan’s space and place theory from the perspective of experience facilitates the approach to the analysis of body and space relationnship in the novels and creates a smooth background for transition from space and body issues into body and gender field. J. Butler’s gender theory together with H. Urbach’s theory of gender and space order serve the basis for the detailed investigation of various somatic codes’ functioning and interaction. The analysis has shown the way the so-called identificational chain fluctuates both in the somatic and spacial spheres and the way these spheres interact. As a result the main protagonists Einar Wegener and Cal Stephanidis’ gender roles together with the identity change to such an extent that they both come to understanding of being trapped in their body. And it’s important to say that the process of the identity fluctuation obtains dynamic and continuous character that constantly redefines gender identity borders. The formation of an integral (artistic or familial, national, cultural) space within the text facilitates the gender identity’s transition and provides additional instruments for a better identity performance.

AMERICAN LITERATURE(S) IN MOTION: MIGRATION, IMAGINATION, AND IDENTITY IN CONTEMPORARY U.S. FICTION

This article analyzes the remaking of American literature and its identity, focusing transnational American literature in general and, in particular, the contemporary American novel. It discusses a sense of postnational and anational motion of/in U.S. fiction, with an emphasis on the 21st - century American novel, created by both American and non-American authors and observed from a perspective of both American and non-American Americanists. Aimed at exploring literature in motion across “imagined” borders, the article also discusses the synergies between literature and other arts and disciplines in contemporary American literatures in order to provide new insights into literature in general and American literatures in particular. In the dialogue of literature with other disciplines, it examines the synergies between the local, regional, national, and global in contemporary U.S. fiction, as well as the synergies between different discourses of contemporaneity. Moving beyond established models in the way that even the term “transnational” transcends its own definition, the aim is to newly theorize a transnational/post-national/anational as well as transtextual motion of/in American fiction toward new directions of both American and non-American creation of American literatures.

Chinese Anthologies of American Literature, Multiculturalism, and Cultural Import-Export

Chinese Anthologies of American Literature, Multiculturalism, and Cultural Import-Export Qin Dan (bio), Joe Lockard (bio), and Shih Penglu (bio) Discussions of the anthology genre need to emphasize the genre's scale of importance. Understanding the centrality of the anthology genre as a foreign language and cultural teaching vehicle can illuminate that importance. For many non-native readers encountering English or American literatures, the anthology is either the basic or an exclusive means of access, using selected short texts or excerpts rather than complete novels, dramas, or non-fiction prose volumes. For these readers, a literature anthology replaces the variety of texts that native English speakers would ordinarily employ in their studies. The anthology genre mediates foreign-ness to readers for whom English-language narrative is alien. The importance of anthologies grows as the likelihood of classroom exposure to a wider range of literature diminishes. Theoretical discussions have addressed American literature anthologies as artifacts of nationalism, racial exclusion, gender discrimination, and their interrelationships (Lockard and Sandell 2008). These editorial ideologies emerged in the context of the use of anthologies by Americans attempting to define, assemble and explicate their own literary traditions. Yet today "to discuss the 'American-ness' of American literature is to discuss minority discourse of the United States" (Lockard and Sandell 2008, 230). Contemporary American literature anthologies have paid particular attention to cultural groups that have been denied citizenship or equal rights, have been economically or socially marginalized, or have been suppressed by means of law. These anthologies range from the first African American literature anthology, The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922) edited by James Weldon Johnson, to Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's foundational Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The English Tradition (1985), to early compendia of gay literature such as Winston Leyland's Angels of the Lyre: A Gay Poetry Anthology (1975). U.S. literature anthologies are not only for domestic readers: they are created, published, read, heavily used, and exert influence far beyond the [End Page 277] borders of the United States. What is the relationship between U.S.-published American literature anthologies and those published elsewhere in the world? Is this a heavily dependent relationship, copying prevailing organization and selections of standard American literature anthologies, or is it a more autonomous relationship that adapts, explicates, and shines a different ideological light over the landscape of American literatures? As with so much U.S. culture, have American literature anthologies become a product that replicates American cultural self-positioning and values? Might there be a reflexive reception through which these anthologies are re-invented to mediate both Chinese and U.S. cultures? Anthologies are the primary and often exclusive vehicle for American literature studies in China. Virtually all these anthologies are edited and published domestically, and few if any U.S.-published anthologies are employed in university classrooms. There are two classes of American literature anthologies—a) "indigenous" anthologies published locally, and b) anthologies from trade publishers or UPes. Anthologization practices in China are complicated by use of the term "English" to cover both English and American literatures and by creation of mixed American-English anthologies. Frequently a mixed anthology contains near-entirely American literature, or even in the case of Hong Zengliu's American Fiction: The Canons of British and American Literature (2003), contains only American literature despite the appearance of "British" in the title. We shall discuss this second class in terms of both entirely American literature anthologies and mixed American-English anthologies. The frequent collapse of a distinction between "American" and "British" literature indicates a destabilization of these national categories in "English" anthologies published in China. After reviewing the modern history of Chinese anthologies of American literature and their editorial ideologies, we will discuss selected examples as they relate to multiculturalism. We will conclude with a theorization of the uses of U.S.-style multiculturalism in Chinese-produced anthologies of American literature. The argument that will emerge, broadly phrased, is that Chinese anthologies of American literature tell us as much or more about China as they do about the United States or American literature. The present study locates itself within the context of Chinese-U.S. comparative studies, especially as they...

The Lag: Technology and Fiction in the Twentieth Century

Literary histories of the twentieth century often emphasize how rapid technological innovation spurred writers to reimagine the novel's form and central concerns. This essay investigates that claim, comparing the presence of various information technologies in American fiction with their nonfictional presence in American households. What this comparison reveals is a pronounced lag: a gap in time between when a new technology becomes ubiquitous in the home and when it becomes ubiquitous in the novel. Moreover, the shape of this lag is consistent across multiple technologies, tracing a normative trajectory of fictional representation over time. Whereas more popular and more prestigious novels travel in tandem for much of the twentieth century with respect to their inclusion of technology, the two subfields diverge substantially at the close of the century, as conceptions of literary prestige become increasingly defined by an opposition to technologies of the present. (AM)

The Paradox of Blackness in African American Vampire Fiction by Jerry Rafiki Jenkins

The Paradox of Blackness in African American Vampire Fiction by Jerry Rafiki Jenkins

Вербальна об’єктивація концептів „FAILURE” і „НЕВДАЧА” в творах сучасної американської та української художньої літератури: перцептивно-когнітивний та регулятивний аспекти

The article describes the features of the perception-cognitive and regulation macrostructure components of the FAILURE and НЕВДАЧА concepts in the epidigmatic plane on the basis of the text pieces selected from modern American and Ukrainian fiction. The analysis of these components of the concepts under consideration is carried out in the framework of the semantic cognitive approach by performing the cognitive interpretation procedure of the text pieces, the results of which have been used for formulating semantic cognitive features that constitute the perception-cognitive and regulation layers of the concept. The specificity of the regulatory aspect of understanding the essence of failure by the bearers of American and Ukrainian linguistic consciousness is clarified due to the semantic cognitive features that structure the regulatory zone of the concept macrostructure and update the strategies of the value and target block of the individual in the context of failure. It has been found that in the epidigmatic plane, in the process of conceptualizing failure by American and Ukrainian speakers, perceptual receptors dominate cognitive-mental thought projections. The visual analyzer is the most effective for the bearers of the American and Ukrainian linguistic consciousness in the context of sensory reflection of the failure category, the sound, taste, smell and tactile receptors are less effective. Cognitive subcomponents of the FAILURE and НЕВДАЧА concepts are structured due to vital and floromorphic metaphorical images; zoomorphic and aeromorphic images for the FAILURE concept as well as religious, aquamorphic and subject images for the НЕВДАЧА concept are considered nationally specific. The regulation zone of the FAILURE concept is significantly larger than the similar НЕВДАЧА concept zone, so for Ukrainian speakers rules and guidelines that help regulate areas covering the conceptual nature of failure are more important in understanding the failed outcome of action than for American ones.

Editors' Introduction

Editors' Introduction

Model Minority Terrorist: Post-9/11 Asian American Racial Formation and Brown Peril Narrative Discourse in Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Model Minority Terrorist:Post-9/11 Asian American Racial Formation and Brown Peril Narrative Discourse in Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist Stephen Hong Sohn1 (bio) Over approximately a single decade (1965–1975), the landscape for Asian Americans changed radically: the harshest quotas for Asian immigrants were lifted, ethnic studies programs were created, and academic excellence became associated with Asian Americans. Given all these seemingly positive changes, how can we engage the continued production of novels that fixate upon damaged Asian American subjects? How does racism get configured in today's age of unparalleled legislative inclusion? If the model minority stereotype merely represents the flip side to the yellow peril (Okihiro 142), then Asian American racial formation continues to revolve around a subtle dialectic in which oppression and prejudice emerge in more insidious ways. We can thus read the work of contemporary Asian American fictions through their illumination of the malleable contours of racial formation, as it has changed during the post-1965 period. Since 1966, the predominant racial formation attached to Asian Americans has been that of the model minority. Presumed to be astute, hardworking, and obedient, Asian Americans have been promoted as the minority ideal. However, South Asian Anglophone and South Asian American fiction writers have been incisive in their attention to racial formation, as it was re-scripted in the post-9/11 moment and as civil liberties [End Page 232] began to erode in light of the war on terror. In a range of novels, the South Asian American body transforms into a site of racial anxiety that manifests in acts of prejudice and violence. Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist takes a prominent place within this grouping, which includes Marina Budhos's Ask Me No Questions, Saher Alam's The Groom to Have Been, H. M. Naqvi's Home Boy, Nafisa Haji's The Writing on My Forehead, and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's Queen of Dreams. But Hamid's status as a transnational author has moved critical considerations of his work largely into the purview of postcolonial and global studies. Though published in 2007, the novel has already received widespread critical attention in dozens of articles, book chapters, reviews, and conference papers. Some scholars read the novel as exemplary of a global or world novel (Medovoi; Morey, "'The Rules of the Game Have Changed'") or as a postcolonial narrative boasting a trenchant critique of American imperialism and globalization (Singh; Haider; Keeble). Others focus on its unique combination of formal elements and social contexts (Adami; Mandala White). My article builds upon the work of Anna Hartnell, who argues that the novel reveals the complicated dynamics of religion and racial formation. As Hartnell notes, "The fact that America hosts a far more assimilated and upwardly mobile population of Muslims and Arabs than any European country suggests" (340) a form of privilege that some minority groups could not claim, at least prior to 9/11. Hartnell's larger point is that the novel critiques the melting pot formulation precisely because America's racial and religious minorities rarely inhabit the same positions in social hierarchies and are often positioned against one another. I extend Hartnell's argument by emphasizing the shift in American ethnoracial and religious alignments that repositions South Asians alongside Arabs and Muslims in the period following 9/11. The novel's depiction of a Pakistani transnational necessarily places this text within the purview of Asian American Studies, its attendant critical methodologies, and its central thematics (such as racial formation). At the same time, this novel encourages further interdisciplinary dialogues. With respect to US ethnic studies after 9/11, Ibrahim G. Aoudé provocatively considers how "Ethnic Studies, especially Asian American Studies, is compelled to deal with Arab American issues if it wants to remain a relevant field and revitalize its traditional commitments" (144). [End Page 233] Nadine C. Naber notes the affiliations between Asian American and "Arab/South Asian/Muslim American(s)" in that same period through the germination of activist coalitions (217–27). In light of the heightened paranoia, Shireen Roshanravan investigates how the targeting of Filipino airport screeners after the terrorist attacks demonstrated a large-scale attack on civil liberties in the name of...

Such Violent Laughter

Such Violent Laughter Alan Singer (bio) I sit and look at myself all day and cry. I have a big hole in the middle of my face that scares people, even myself, so I can't blame the boys for not wanting to take me out. … What did I do to deserve such a terrible bad fate? Even if I did do some bad things I didn't do any before I was a year old and I was born this way. I asked Papa and he says he doesn't know, but that maybe I did something in the other world before I was born or that maybe I was being punished for his sins. I don't believe that because he is a very nice man. Ought I commit suicide? —Nathanael West (1975, 4) "What did I do to deserve such a terrible fate?" "Ought I commit suicide?" The questions are serious, and as we sometimes say, seriously funny. Harold Bloom's appreciation of the passage quoted above from Nathanael West's remarkable novel Miss Lonelyhearts, takes account of our relief that the violence suffered by the questioner is hers to endure. By the same token, Bloom does not flinch from the recognition that West's narrative conscientiousness wrings a confession from his readers, that the laughter is ours. How do we laugh at such existential violence without fearing for our lives? How else can we live? The peculiar discomfort Bloom registers in his reflection on West's greatness as a novelist turns out to be the aim of more than one twentieth century American fiction writer. One only has to quickly thumb through Bloom's writings in his posthumous collection The American Canon to pick out a conspicuous bloody thread. The essays on Nathanael West, Flannery O'Connor, and William Faulkner configure themselves as a suite of reflections on what Bloom might argue is a uniquely American rapport with comic violence, though he doesn't deploy the term. One quickly understands that Bloom's enthusiasm for these authors individually and as a group derives from their syncretistic penchants for extorting laughter from our otherwise shocked witness to the most violent human actions. It is no coincidence that each of these authors is frequently mentioned in Bloom's appreciation of each of the others. More to the point, Gnosticism, a career long obsession of Bloom's, appears to be at the root of his experience reading of West, O'Connor, and Faulkner. From a Bloomian perspective, Gnosticism is arguably equivalent [End Page 479] to knowledge of our propensity for error and suffering. I would argue that it is oddly akin to Greek hamartia, the promise of corrigibility through experience. Bloom's readerly persistence through the trials of gnostic knowing is, thanks to Gershom Scholem's reliably paradoxical phrase, "redemption though sin, easily construed as acceptance of our entrapment in experience. The relevant sin here is especially cautionary for American readers who keep faith with the phantom of an American Adam. Sin is perforce the manner of human striving after more and more experience. What is redeemed is simply what is wrought through striving. Sin, after all is the refusal of death and transcendence. It is more durable. More to the point, it is do-able; it is brutal agency itself, unencumbered by the visionary spirits of romantic sublimity. In Bloom's opening essay on Emerson, the point is already taken: "Emerson is an experiential critic and essayist, and not a Transcendental philosopher" (Bloom 2019, 13). Bloom invites us to think of Emerson's American exemplarity (though he finds the same wisdom in the Bible, Shakespeare, Freud), as his acceptance of the confliction of experience. For Emerson "…we need to be everything in ourselves while we go on fearing that we are nothing in ourselves" (14). The literary imagination is quintessentially conflicted in the very impetus of the writer to imagine what is not the case. Of course the literary confliction that we know most terrifyingly, which is to say most violently, comes to us in the genre of tragedy where human agency hangs drastically in the balance. Oedipus is of course presumed to be mistaken about who he...

Editor's Note

5 welcome to a special fiction issue of The Yale Review. During the long days and (seemingly) short months of the pandemic, all of us at the journal found ourselves reading more fiction than ever before, perhaps to escape the grind of the news. In a moment when travel was not possible, transport still was. In a moment when ambiguity was sidelined, when leadership debased language, fiction reminded us of the essential ambiguities we all too often paper over or militate against. In this special issue, we are delighted to present six remarkable short stories. In these pages, you will read a debut short story by Jared Jackson, a writer of great talent; “Blanca” explores the life of an adolescent boy in Hartford, Connecticut, and is the first piece to be published from his collection in progress about residents of that city. You’llalsofindalateworkbytheItalianwriterAntonioTabucchi, who died in 2012, and who wrote a series of stories inspired by art; in “So Long,” translated by Elizabeth Harris, he responds to a work by the artist Tullio Pericoli. “The territory of writing is the imagination that goes beyond the image; it is the story of the pictures but also…the story of the unknown that surrounds them,” he wrote. “Ana and the Water,” by Carla Guelfenbein and translated by Nicole Bell, is set in the aftermath of the Chilean military coup of 1973; it offers a chilling, focused look at the ways violence changes everything we thought we understood about our lives. Jesse Ball is one of the most original writers at work today (a highly unoriginal way to express that sentiment, but why not say it plainly?); “Birthday” is a story I won’t forget. As he puts it in an interview in The Paris Review, Ball tries “to write very simply and clearly about things that are not a matter of consensus.” This is a writer who reminds us that so much of our days are propped up Editor's Note 6 by a kind of “groupthink” that obscures deeper realities lying right before us (as Guelfenbein does, in other ways). In “The Queen of Bark and Darkness,” Joanna Hershon delicately explores doppelgangers, betrayal, motherhood, and fear of what lies around us; the piece unfolds almost gently to its ending, which forcibly rearranges what the reader thought she understood. Irene Muchemi-­ Ndiritu, who was born in Nairobi, shares “The Blessing of Kali,” set in Kenya, an account of generational conflict that precisely captures postcolonial mores in a modernizing nation. Unsentimental, unflinching, the story contains a novel’s worth of event; devastation is almost too gentle a word for its ­ subtly managed conclusion. There are essays on fictions in our everyday lives—Kieran Setiya writes about finding companionship in the weirdness of H. P. Lovecraft’s short stories; Wendy S. Walters diagnoses American fictions of hospitality and trespass; and Erica Berry characterizes our narratives of climate guilt. Alongside all this there is a portfolio of photographs by Adolfo Kaminsky, better known for his work as a forger of identity papers—another kind of fiction, one that proved essential to saving many lives during the Second World War. We hope you’ll travel along with us—that you might enjoy, for a few moments, the worlds these writers have built. —meghan o’rourke ...

Race and Distant Reading

This essay brings together two methods of cultural‐literary analysis that have yet to be fully integrated: distant reading and the critique of race and racial difference. It constructs a reflexive and critical version of distant reading—one attuned to the arguments and methods of critical race studies—while still providing data‐driven insights useful to the writing of literary history and criticism, especially to the history and criticism of postwar African American fiction, in particular James Baldwin'sGiovanni's Room. Because race is socially constructed, it poses unique challenges for a computational analysis of race and writing. Any version of distant reading that addresses race will require a dialectical approach. (RJS and ER)

McCrack: McOndo, El Crack Y Los Destinos De La Literatura Latinoamericana ed. by Brescia Pablo and Oswaldo Estrada

Reviewed by: McCrack: McOndo, El Crack Y Los Destinos De La Literatura Latinoamericana ed. by Brescia Pablo and Oswaldo Estrada MartÍn Camps Brescia, Pablo, and Oswaldo Estrada, editors. McCrack: McOndo, el Crack y los destinos de la literatura latinoamericana. Albatros Ediciones, 2018. 270 pp. ISBN: 978- 84-7274-359-5. The sixteen essays of this anthology, plus one interview, are divided into four parts to analyze the short stories compiled by Chileans Sergio Gómez and Alberto Fuguet in 1994, and the Mexican "Crack" group. McOndo became one of the major [End Page 146] anthologies that emerged after the Latin American Boom. The editors, Pablo Brescia and Oswaldo Estrada, use "McCrack" to include the members of the Crack in Mexico formed by Ricardo Chávez Castañeda, the late Ignacio Padilla, Pedro Angel Palou, Jorge Volpi, and Eloy Urroz who stormed the literary scene with a manifesto. Mcondistas wanted to escape the long shadow of the Boom writers and, as they wrote in their introduction, address their dilemmas that were between Windows 95 or Macintosh rather than the pen or the rifle. Crack writers reacted to the fatigue brought on by the so much attention paid to "magical realism" that had turned into "magiquismo trágico" as Ignacio Padilla described it. The first section offers the views of writers in regards to these movements. Edmundo Paz Soldán reflects twenty years after the McOndo anthology launched conveniently in a McDonald's restaurant in Santiago. For him the anthology was trying to combat a stereotype of Latin American fiction while imposing another based on urban settings and the omnipresence of media and MTV in those years. He says "La utopía estaba en el prólogo, no en los cuentos" (24). Paz-Soldán also mentions how the anthology Se habla español came about, with 36 writers included and involving Latino authors such as Junot Díaz, Ernesto Quiñonez and Silvana Paternostro. In his essay, Pedro Angel Palou, a member himself of the Crack, mentions the initial disregard by critics. One of them said, for example, that because the novels were published as a package, he would not review them. Salvador Elizondo, when asked about the movement, responded: "No creo que esos muchachos fumen Crack, se ven muy fresas." Guillermo Fadanelli remarks: "más bien será el grupo del frac." He attests that the movement was an opening to a "renovado cosmopolitismo" (30), and that they were not looking to destroy the Boom but to continue it. In Naief Yehya's article he references the magazine Moho, that appeared in a moment when all literary expressions that seemed new were considered part of "La Onda," a literary movement that in the eighties had passed its prime. With Guillermo Fadanelli's collaboration they wanted to move away from the "literature that they were condemned to read" (47). Yehya moved to New York in the 90s and kept in touch with Mexico collaborating on the newspaper La Jornada, via internet. Technology and culture had been one of his areas of expertise, and his many articles relating to this topic are illuminating. He shares an anecdote: that the news articles he would send to the newspaper by email were followed by a request to send them again by fax, not because they did not receive the email, but because they did not know how to open the attachments in the early internet era. In Cristina Rivera Garza's article, she talks about the concept of chi-ixi or in between entities, and the rise of Creative Writing programs in Spanish in the US; she says "el español cruza una de las fronteras más dramáticas y poderosas de nuestro mundo globalizado sobre los hombros y en las bocas de los migrantes indocumentados" (53). The second part of the book deals with a cartography of movements. Eduardo Becerra's essay draws a map of novels based on themes and not on group designations or by decades; he mentions that for Jorge Volpi, "Bolaño construyó el último discurso épico del continente y de su historia" (63). Jorge Fornet refers to new writers and the emphasis placed on their young age...