One year after the end of the world, the remains of humanity are banding back together and the era of reconstruction is about to begin. Rebranded as the American Phoenix (pheenies, for short), earth’s remaining survivors of the plague that brought on the zombie apocalypse are taking advantage of the lull in attacks and stitching together what’s left of society.…
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Motherhood Flawed and the Destabilization of the Suburban Myth: Celeste Ng’s ‘Little Fires Everywhere’
Clad in a thin robe and her son’s sneakers, Elena Richardson stands on the lawn watching as every remnant of her perfectly planned life turns to ash. Her three children contemplatively observe as firemen extinguish the charred remains of their childhood home. Arranged in neat row on the hood of a car, they are acutely aware of the problematic fact…
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Jesmyn Ward’s ‘Sing, Unburied, Sing’: Riding in Cars with Ghosts
Jesmyn Ward is a poet who writes novels. The lyricism of her prose starkly contrasts the gritty realism of her plots, but that is part of the joy of reading her. Her novels hold a gilded mirror to life’s imperfections. Her characters live in a world where murder can be termed as a “hunting accident” so long as the victim…
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Margaret Atwood’s ‘The Blind Assassin’: Novels-Within-Novels-Within-Novels
Written by the renowned Canadian author, Margaret Atwood, at the turn of the millennium, The Blind Assassin won both the Booker and Hammett Prize, despite a lengthy list of harsh criticisms. Atwood is perhaps best known for her 1986 novel, The Handmaid’s Tale. A dystopic nightmare about the loss of a woman’s right to her own body and selfhood, The…
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Colson Whitehead’s ‘The Underground Railroad’: Reimagining the American Slave Narrative
Last November, I attended a reading of The Underground Railroad at Ludwig Maximillian University. Throughout this event, I was struck not only by Colson Whitehead’s personal eloquence, intelligence, and charm but also by his dedication to authenticity. During the interview portion, for instance, he described himself as feeling unprepared to do justice to a subject matter as substantial and serious…
