Mother
The business of men
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On pregnancy’s bloody histories & its visceral fictions. A review of Trudy Dehue’s brilliant history of pregnancy research, « Egg, Fetus, Baby ».
The Barren Nothing-Place
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On growing up in the creases of bilingual versions of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land
The Mothers Grimm
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What ties Gretel to her witch? Louise Glück’s poem Gretel in Darkness provides answers.
Trouble at work and home while my son is abroad
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A story about living. « I have a family and I have a job and I have a teaching gig, and these things have me. »
The pulverization of memory
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Write your memoir in a hostile tongue. On Marina Jarre, from Latvia to Italy and back.
« When I was silent… » — Interview with Sulaiman Addonia
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Stop! I am doing what they all do: presenting writer Sulaiman Addonia as one-who-has-suffered, because he grew up as a refugee. It is a problem of genre. Suffering has become an interviewer’s crutch.
An Unlucky Man
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« He rolled down the window, went back to honking the horn, and started waving my underpants out the window. »
All is not vanity
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Lose, delete, restore. What to remember when everything is always, forever, in a digital now?
Woman is space
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« Space », or prostranstvo, is a key word for understanding the literary and philosophical history of Russia. Oksana Vasyakina’s Rana (Wound), a Siberian road novel, remakes the Russian landscape and the Russian novel for women’s worlds. It renders prostranstvo unruly, polysemous, queer.
Stupid illnesses called « childhood »
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An excerpt from I padri lontani / Distant Fathers (1987), the rediscovered memoir of Marina Jarre, available in English translation from New Vessel Press.