literature 
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SOURCE: New York Times
The Indigenous Sami Culture Shaped this Novelist's Fiction
Ann-Helén Laestadius grew up among the Sámi, an Indigenous people living near the Arctic Circle, in Europe. Her fiction has brought the long-running conflict between the Sami and the Swedish government, and the racism and violence endured by the Sami, to the forefront of public debate.
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SOURCE: New York Review of Books
1/22/2023
How the Russian Jews Became Soviet
The novelist Gary Shteyngart, who emigrated from the USSR to the US as a child, reviews Sasha Senderovich's "How the Soviet Jew was Made," a work that gives short shrift to neither the "Soviet" nor "Jewish" sides of the question.
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
12/19/2022
Reissued 1933 Novel in Translation Captures Fascism's Rise Around You
Lion Feuchtwanger's "The Oppermans" captures the complexity of a dilemma faced by German Jews in 1933: whether a society has become sufficiently hostile to a minority group to force its members to leave.
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12/18/2022
Revisiting the "Knickerbocker" Origin Story of Santa Claus
by Tom A. Jerman
The notion that the American Santa Claus evolved naturally from the European Saint Nicholas conceals an origin story for the character that's both simpler and more complex.
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11/20/2022
Does Novelist Robert Keable Deserve a Reappraisal?
by Simon Keable-Elliott
Briefly celebrated in the 1920s, then consigned to posthumous obscurity, the missionary and novelist, whose experiences encompassed the collision of colonialism, war and racism in the British empire, is overdue for rediscovery.
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SOURCE: New Statesman
10/26/2022
The Moral Corruption of Holocaust Fiction
A popular book for young readers strips the Holocaust of its horror, and its victims of their Jewishness in favor of banal lessons about empathy and kindness.
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SOURCE: The Drift
10/25/2022
Against Queer Presentism—How Literary Studies Neglects the Archive
by Colton Valentine
LGBTQ writers in today's literary world too often operate on the presumption that they are the first to experience queerness openly, making their own experiences of repression seem universal and transhistorical, and effacing older fictional and critical voices.
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SOURCE: New York Times
10/13/2022
Do Documents Clear Chaucer's Name Over Accusations of Rape?
Although the belief that Chaucer was accused of the crime spurred a significant wave of feminist critical studies of sex and power in his writing, scholars have recently argued that the documents used to support the charge have been misinterpreted.
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SOURCE: Religion Dispatches
9/15/2022
"I'm Not Racist, I'm Just Mad Amazon is Destroying Tolkien's Middle Earth with Black Hobbits"
by Mary Rambaran-Olm
Viewer complaints that Amazon Prime has defiled the author's fantasy vision with "wokeness" ignore the historical diversity of the medieval society on which Tolkien based his works.
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SOURCE: Miami Herald
9/12/2022
Cuban-American Playwright Censored by Miami-Dade Schools—Is it over "Don't Say Gay"?
Columnist Fabiola Santiago argues that the censorship of the Cuban-American writer's plays by local schools shows that Cuban Americans can't expect the state's escalating culture wars to leave them alone.
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SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
8/27/2022
Sorry Zoomers, Gen X Invented the "Quiet Quit"
"Strivers, grinders and hustlers hate them, but quiet quitters, slackers and work-to-rulers are treasured antiheroes in American folk culture."
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SOURCE: The New Republic
8/16/2022
Salman Rushdie Changed Everything
by Siva Vaidhyanathan
The novelist's creative brilliance and critical acclaim signaled a moment for south Asian people around the world to see themselves outside the frame of colonialism and to grapple with the subcontinent's ethnic and religious fissures.
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
8/13/2022
Want to Support Salman Rushdie? Read His Books
by Randy Boyagoda
A professor of English literature argues that it would be a shame for the novelist to be known only for the controversy surrounding his novel The Satanic Verses and the threats made against him and others involved in its publication.
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
8/10/2022
Eve Babitz's Archive Reveals the Person Behind the Persona
by Kevin Dettmar
"What could the personal documents of a writer who was so public about her private world teach us about her work? How much of that persona was a performance and how much a reflection of her real anxieties and ambitions?"
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SOURCE: L.A. Progressive
7/23/2022
Can Fiction Like "The Ministry For the Future" Guide Real Action on Climate?
by Walter G. Moss
Kim Stanley Robinson's 2020 novel has impressed readers from Bill McKibben to Barack Obama – does it model a better approach to the global climate crisis?
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SOURCE: Slate
6/6/2022
Reading History for "Lessons" Misses the Point
by Daniel Immerwahr
"We read past authors as a sanity check. They reassure us that we’re not alone in what we see."
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6/5/2022
The Environmental and Humanistic Sensibility of Pasternak and Lessons from Dr. Zhivago for Today
by Walter G. Moss
Boris Pasternak's masterwork exhibited a profound awareness of the onenness of creation – human and natural alike – that should guide the projects of peace and environmental protection.
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SOURCE: Boston Review
4/12/2022
Leo Bersani: Contrarian Critic of Gay Desire
by Jack Parlett
"For Bersani, reading is meant to hurt a little or you’re not doing it right. A preface that preempts what you’ll take away, or paraphrases what is particular, can have, he suggests, a simplifying or even sanitizing effect."
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SOURCE: Austin American-Statesman
3/31/2022
Tom Staley, 86, Built UT's Ransom Center into Key Research Destination
"Staley turned the archives into a global powerhouse that rivals the collecting achievements of Harvard University, Yale University and the British Museum."
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3/20/2022
The Two Russias
by Walter G. Moss
Russia's literary traditions evoke a national character in stark opposition to the belligerent machismo of Putin, but it's unclear which Russia will prevail today.
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