World Literature Today最新文献

{"title":"The Cheikh Bookstore: One of Few Still Standing in Algeria","authors":"Saliha Haddad","doi":"10.1353/wlt.2023.a910297","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wlt.2023.a910297","url":null,"abstract":"The Cheikh BookstoreOne of Few Still Standing in Algeria Saliha Haddad (bio) THERE ARE VERY FEW HISTORICAL BOOKSTORES to be found in Algeria, and one of them is the Cheikh Bookstore (Librairie Cheikh) located in Tizi Ouzou. Hosting books and writers, the bookstore's history dates back to the 1930s when it was founded by the grandfather of its present owner, Omar Cheikh. And as it was during the French colonial presence in the country, the avenue on which it was built initially had a colonial name, Ferdinand-Aillaud Avenue, which became the Abane Ramdane Avenue after independence in 1962. Besides my love for books, it is its resilience to survive that makes the bookstore one of my favorite places. Over the decades, it had to navigate very turbulent times and remain open through many rapid changes occurring in the country—from the French occupation to the War of Liberation and subsequent independence, and from the Berbers' protests to the civil war—a feat Omar Cheikh is proud of as he recalls the wave of nationalization initiated by then-Algerian president Houari Boumédiène in the 1970s, a particularly troubling time for him as it was a threat to the bookstore's freedom in the books it acquired and sold. \"Despite the nationalization of Boumédiène, though, my father's library still operated independently,\" he said, as above all he values freedom when it comes to the place he inherited from his father and started running in 1984. Freedom is not the only thing troubling Omar Cheikh's mind, though; he is also anxious about the future of the bookstore after he is gone—and about the difficulties in keeping one open. \"On Abane Ramdane Avenue, unfortunately, so many bookstores shut down,\" he says. \"I don't know what will happen in the future.\" So, to keep up with rising expenses and thinning numbers of new readers, the Cheikh Bookstore opted to sell textbooks in addition to stationery items in the bookstore's ground floor way back in 1986. Click for larger view View full resolution To get inside the bookstore, one must climb a very narrow staircase that leads to an expansive room from which floods an impression of peace and bygone days. And that even to someone who did not have prior knowledge of the store's long history, as the walls are generously decorated with old photos of the building, its past owners, and the writers it hosted as well as old newspaper excerpts written about it over the decades. After roving one's eyes over these historical archives on display alongside some ancient Berber items, it is difficult to make a choice from the vast range of books on the shelves and bookstands. There are new, recent, and classic books in the four main languages of the country: Tamazight, Arabic, French, and English. Click for larger view View full resolution Photos courtesy of the Cheikh Bookstore These rich offerings are not the only things book lovers can expect. Deeply committed to the Algerian literary world, the bookstore often hosts both debut and ren","PeriodicalId":23833,"journal":{"name":"World Literature Today","volume":"144 4","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135161194","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Wednesday's Child: Stories by Yiyun Li (review)","authors":"Elizabeth Fifer","doi":"10.1353/wlt.2023.a910269","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wlt.2023.a910269","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Wednesday's Child: Stories by Yiyun Li Elizabeth Fifer YIYUN LI Wednesday's Child: Stories New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2023. 256 pages. THIS NEW COLLECTION of short stories by Yiyun Li will only enhance her reputation as one of the foremost fiction writers in America. She has won numerous awards for her work, most recently the 2022 PEN/Malamud Award and the 2023 PEN/Faulkner Award. Readers familiar with her work will recognize her signature style of layered, rich detail, stories within stories, and intertextuality in settings from America, China, and Europe. The title story, \"Wednesday's Child,\" and \"When We Were Happy We Had Other Names,\" center on the loss of a child by suicide, a frequent subject in Li's autobiographies. In each, grief gives way to a greater understanding of the meaning of death, \"as an antechamber to other lives,\" beginning in one place but leading elsewhere. Many stories evoke long lives well lived, as with caretaker Min, once a barefoot doctor in China, and elderly Dr. Ditmus, in \"Such Common Life.\" Auntie Mei, the childless nanny of \"A Sheltered Woman,\" has taken care of hundreds of babies. Chinese immigrants like Bella from \"A Small Flame\" and Min from \"A Flawless Silence\" must reinvent themselves. Becky in \"On the Street Where You Live\" redefines the idea of \"normal\" for her child. Everyday situations stimulate opportunities for growth. In \"Hello Goodbye,\" Katie transforms the past to tell her friend Nina better stories. Simply counting angels and animals in the paintings at the Louvre comforts Narantuyaa after her brother Jullian's death in \"Let Mothers Doubt.\" What the stranger Walter shares with Suchen in \"Alone\" may save her. Heroic acts can happen anywhere, on a train or in an email. Every character suggests another as every story encloses another. Li's dense fiction weaves together history, memory, and experience. Her use of flashback and flash-forward eclipses time and space, challenging and delighting at every turn. Elizabeth Fifer Center Valley, Pennsylvania Copyright © 2023 World Literature Today and the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma","PeriodicalId":23833,"journal":{"name":"World Literature Today","volume":"148 4","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135161314","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Crocodile (E Yu) by Mo Yan (review)","authors":"Min Zhang","doi":"10.1353/wlt.2023.a910272","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wlt.2023.a910272","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Crocodile (E Yu) by Mo Yan Zhang Min MO YAN Crocodile (E Yu) Hangzhou. Zhejiang Literature and Art Publishing House. 2023. 197 pages. NOBEL LAUREATE MO YAN once swore in front of the Shakespeare statue in Stratford upon Avon to take advantage of the rest of his life to focus on the transition from novelist to playwright. The publication of his latest drama, E Yu (Crocodile), can be read as a brilliant delivery on that promise. During this process, as a successor to the oral literary tradition, Mo Yan continues to use comic styles in language, sometimes mixed with Chinese limericks and slang, contributing to the black humor of this play. Drama has always played an important role in Mo Yan's writing. Whether his debut work, Divorce (an unpublished play), or the dramatic elements in some novels, such as the interaction between traditional Chinese dramatic structures and novelistic text in Frog, it is no surprise to find that playwriting stems from his interests, rather than an alternate route he has taken in desperation. Just as Mo Yan admitted, \"playwriting has been my dream for years. I do have a distinct understanding toward it. Besides, it is really enjoyable for the playwright to watch his plays performed on the stage.\" Crocodile revolves around a corrupt government official who subverts these legitimate governmental processes, misspends the public's money, and finally escapes to another country. Its anticorruption consciousness not only keeps up to date with social developments but also contains unique cultural connotations, representing a rational reflection of the responsible writer on the cultural values related to government officials. Despite being rarely seen on the contemporary Chinese stage, this theme is familiar to the audience who has read Mo Yan's novel The Republic of Wine. Mo Yan insists that \"writing is not on behalf of ordinary people, but as ordinary people.\" It is worth noting that these down-to-earth experiences of sorting out files in the procuratorate and interviewing prosecutors provides him with much inspiration for this creation. Mo Yan examines many characters like intellectuals, officials, and businessmen through the lens of folk values. Shan Wudan, a dissociated defector, frequently mentions his concern for common people. Due to the fact that he sprang from peasant stock, this former mayor has a clear understanding about where political power comes from, thus frequently emphasizing the significance of the masses, pointing out that \"there are some things unknown to God, but there is nothing unknown to ordinary people.\" The more compelling aspect of the play involves the crocodile being able to talk. Just like Eugène Ionesco's Rhinoceros, the metaphor of animal here serves to highlight the alienation of human nature. As the embodiment of greedy human beings, the crocodile is confined to a tank with the characteristic that, once given enough space, will never stop growing. Over the past ten years, Shan Wuda","PeriodicalId":23833,"journal":{"name":"World Literature Today","volume":"151 2","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135161442","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"They Flew by Night","authors":"Mirja Lanz","doi":"10.1353/wlt.2023.a910254","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wlt.2023.a910254","url":null,"abstract":"They Flew by Night Mirja Lanz (bio) Translated by Catherine Venner (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 26] I. Northward January 2, Arrival By night they flew, korvat kuin korpit, ears like ravens, who hear a bark. They listened to the forest rustling; to the storms in the woods. Crowns of conifers, webs of branches bustling in the dark. Over the continent webs lustred while the earth was asleep. Northward the ravens followed linnunrataa, the pathway of the birds in the night sky. They did not see a skylark in the comet's splattered stream, nor half a finch in the stardust. No whisper of a wagtail in the cosmic whirl, not even a swallow's wing in the galactic sweep. Ears like a raven, who hears a bark. The ravens did not turn back. On the same night, Aava booked a flight in the internet's pale glow. The plane thundered along electronic routes over shores and seas. Aava landed on the runway, and so she traveled directly onward, in a train. Tammikuu, January It was a land of wealds and water through which Aava traveled in a train, on a winter's day so windless that it appeared as if through a liquid lens. The rail lines followed shorelines northward. Lakes reposed in tangled bosks. Shores appeared and disappeared. The rail lines steered the train through the afternoon. In the smooth water, a reflection of the woods. World and netherworld met each other on the strand: maa and manala. Janus-faced, about-faced. [End Page 27] In the window glass Aava's face ghosted like a gauze. Veil-like, it glided across the land. Her cheeks sweeping through fir trees. The corners of her mouth sinking into the silent seam of the shores. Aava felt soft as silk on that afternoon, in a train. In H., the cold wrapped itself around her. She yanked her suitcase away, away from the station up the hill to the hotel. The suitcase's rollers rattling. Darkness from the trees penetrated the pools of light from the lamps. The walkway wound in the incline beneath her numb feet, where the night had already sunk its teeth. Aava stabbed a slender key into the room door. She slid the leaden lock. The suitcase swept over the threshold onto the carmine carpet. The carpet swallowing her steps. The window watched her while the furniture withdrew. Aava sat in the seat. For how long? Silence settled over her. I'm seeking the fishing grounds of my elders' eye. The place that drove my grandfathers from their beds at night when the fish were biting. I'm seeking a spot where rings ripple over still water and hooks hang in the deep. I'm not journeying into the unknown. I'm journeying to my ancestors' home. I'm seeking the fishing grounds of my mind's eye, Aava said to the cold twin on the other side of the window. Two nights later, a thin sheet of ice sealed lakes, bays, and shores. The water was gone. The harbormaster recorded the date. The cold spread. Sheet by sheet, it fed the thin ice. The ice thickened and awoke with a snap. It stretched, shivered, and strengthened ag","PeriodicalId":23833,"journal":{"name":"World Literature Today","volume":"142 6","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135160991","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Traveling Mexico City's Body by Metro","authors":"Erik Gleibermann","doi":"10.1353/wlt.2023.a910265","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wlt.2023.a910265","url":null,"abstract":"Traveling Mexico City's Body by Metro Erik Gleibermann (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Photo courtesy of Eve Orea http://Shutterstock.com Speeding on a packed rush-hour Metrobus from La Bombilla (Lightbulb) station for Chilpancingo (Wasp), I suddenly imagined myself as one of countless urban particles carrying this city's vital energies. The Metro lines are indeed Mexico City's neural pathways. Across 195 underground, 270 street-level, and two aerial stations, the Metro unifies twenty-two million Chilangos into a single body, as the subsidized $.29 fare allows them, regardless of income, to freely travel the vast network. As they do, the Metro transmits collective arousal, pain, memory, even messages to heal. The Metro holds consciousness. It preserves memory. In a city world-famous for museums, the Metro is a living museum. When station Pino Suárez was under construction before the system opened in 1969, workers excavated a cylindrical temple dedicated to Ehécatl, the wind god. Many other stations also express ancient history and Indigenous myth. Cuitláhuac portrays the warrior brother of Moctezuma, who briefly held off Spanish subjugators before the fall of Tenochtitlán. Mixiuhca honors the ritual island once located nearby where women gave birth in ancient times. Like Mixiuhca, which is represented by a white pictogram of a woman holding a newborn, every station has its own distinctive white icon telling a tiny cultural story. The graphic symbols appear on station walls, inside the carriages, and on network maps. Together, they comprise a playful cartography of the city's soul. On my first ride to the Roma district I passed through Theater of the Insurgents, represented by a curved, white hand delicately holding [End Page 47] what I first imagined to be a pearl between thumb and forefinger. When I looked up the meaning online, I learned the icon is actually a minimalist rendition of an image in Diego Rivera's mural on the nearby Teatro, a hand cradling the eye of a figure in masquerade. The Obrera (Worker) station icon of a hard hat surrounded by rotating gears presaged one excursion I made that revealed a striking class contrast. After my first week in the city, I'd developed a genteel ritual of riding Metrobús línea 1 from the university district where I was staying to tree-lined Roma. I'd settle in at Cafebrería el Péndulo, a spacious three-story bookstore café, order a mocha, and write longhand in my journal. One morning I scribbled initial impressions for this postcard. Click for larger view View full resolution Photo by Javier Santos Guzmán on Unsplash But on another morning I took a more muscular excursion for a research task in a working-class district out near Benito Juárez airport. At the Pantitlán transfer point around 7am, I found myself in a mass boarding scramble. I girded my forearms at the chest, elbows bent out, and surged in with the urgent crowd of almost all men, the majority of faces bearing strong Indigen","PeriodicalId":23833,"journal":{"name":"World Literature Today","volume":"146 2","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135161327","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Dwell Time: A Memoir of Art, Exile, and Repair by Rosa Lowinger (review)","authors":"Susan Blumberg-Kason","doi":"10.1353/wlt.2023.a910296","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wlt.2023.a910296","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Dwell Time: A Memoir of Art, Exile, and Repair by Rosa Lowinger Susan Blumberg-Kason Rosa Lowinger Dwell Time: A Memoir of Art, Exile, and Repair New York. Row House. 2023. 339 pages. IN THE FIELD OF ART conservation, the term \"dwell time\" describes the time in which it takes for a cleaning product to work on a targeted material. As art conservator Rosa Lowinger writes in her new book, Dwell Time: A Memoir of Art, Exile, and Repair, the term can also refer, for instance, to the duration one lives in a certain place or waits to get into a country. Lowinger covers these issues, namely her early childhood in Havana, her family's exile, and her return to Cuba as an adult, all while recounting her stellar rise in art conservation. Lowinger's family roots in Cuba do not go back very far—about four decades—yet her parents fully embraced Cuban culture. They spoke Spanish at home, even decades after they went into exile in Miami. Lowinger's mother, Hilda, was named after Caridad, the patron saint of Cuba. Her father, Leonardo, was called Lindy and was also born in Cuba. Both sets of grandparents, however, were Romanian Jews born in the old country. In the 1920s, it wasn't unusual for eastern European Jews to yearn for a better life in goldene medinah, the Yiddish term for the golden land of the United States, but restrictive, xenophobic immigration laws made it much more difficult for Jews to enter Ellis Island than had been possible a couple decades earlier around the turn of the century. It was easier in the 1920s to get to Cuba, which was rarely viewed as a final destination and instead a stepping stone to the US as travel between those two countries was frequent and easy. Jews who landed in Havana usually made it to the US within six months. Lowinger's grandfathers on both sides were the exception and stayed in Cuba. Life was not easy, but not because Cuba wasn't a refuge for Jews, both Ashkenazi and Sephardic. Lowinger's maternal grandmother died three weeks after giving birth to her mother, Hilda. Relatives took in Hilda for several years but couldn't take care of her for the long term. They sent young Hilda to a Jewish orphanage in Cuba that was part of an Ashkenazi women's home at a time when she was just old enough to start forming lasting memories. She never got over the abandonment of her deceased mother and the father who could not take care of her. These abandonment issues would affect the way Hilda treated her daughter and husband, often hitting Lowinger in front of friends and threatening to leave her husband, Lindy. Lowinger likens her family drama to the different materials she works with as an art conservator, and she names each chapter in her memoir after one of these materials. As she writes in the beginning of her book, conservation is the art of understanding damage, whether it's in a painting, mural, fresco, statue, or building. In the chapter on plastic, Lowinger points out that this material is unique because it is re","PeriodicalId":23833,"journal":{"name":"World Literature Today","volume":"150 5","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135161445","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Touch of Salt on My Confession","authors":"Abdourahman A. Waberi","doi":"10.1353/wlt.2023.a910263","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wlt.2023.a910263","url":null,"abstract":"A Touch of Salt on My Confession Abdourahman A. Waberi (bio) Translated by Nancy Naomi Carlson (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution They come to see meThey ask me for the seaAlgae and fishUnlike Jesus I have no giftFor self-deprecationI stay hereHead down writing page after pageLonely prophetFor company I haveCats and geraniumsWithout warning they leave with miserybetween their legsAnd for the first timeA blood of ink has me by the throatIn the flux and flow of the coming tomorrowsI've only one thing to doTame the whale of the unknown Not easySince childhood I've limped slightly like OedipusSame eclipse on the pin or is it the contractedAchilles heelThe cavernous tibia bones, the calf thin as a filletmaking meLie down underMy grandmother's boubouI lack muscle and breathAnd pass through the rift of the presentMeet others through a break-inOr by chance, join the danceIgnore the devil going round and round above my headEven as a kidI ran away from the packThe law of tyrantsThe Machiavellis in the sandboxesI often lose myselfSometimes I find myselfAnd this time the naked eye seesThrough the reeds of the thick nightFlesh if cornered too many timesEnds up biting There are daysWhen the voiceless end upSpeaking under the weight of contemptAs we know, no worse torture exists Translation from the French [End Page 43] Abdourahman A. Waberi Abdourahman A. Waberi, from Djibouti, is a major voice in African postcolonial studies. He has received a multitude of honors, including a PEN France prize and a medal from the Académie française. Since 2012, he has been a professor of French and francophone studies at George Washington University in Washington, DC. Nancy Naomi Carlson Nancy Naomi Carlson's translation of Khal Torabully's Cargo Hold of Stars: Coolitude (Seagull) won the 2022 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. Her second full-length poetry collection, as well as Delicates, her co-translation of Wendy Guerra, were noted in the New York Times. She serves as the translations editor for On the Seawall. Copyright © 2023 World Literature Today and the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma","PeriodicalId":23833,"journal":{"name":"World Literature Today","volume":"143 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135160990","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Bandit Queens by Parini Shroff (review)","authors":"Colleen Lutz Clemens","doi":"10.1353/wlt.2023.a910280","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wlt.2023.a910280","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: The Bandit Queens by Parini Shroff Colleen Lutz Clemens PARINI SHROFF The Bandit Queens New York. Ballantine Books. 2023. 352 pages. PARINI SHROFF'S DEBUT novel, The Bandit Queens, uses the story of Phoolan Devi (the \"Bandit Queen\") as a vehicle to consider the violence women endure when at the mercy of patriarchal cultural structures—and what means are available to them to resist such violence. The protagonist, Geeta, has been living for years as a perceived \"childless churrel-cum-murderess\" after the disappearance of her husband, Ramesh. The stigma and fear attached to her has allowed her a mobility and invisibility that she has come to appreciate. Societal gender norms are not imposed upon her, a cypher who is not quite cast out of the community. Geeta is part of a community of women who have taken microloans to create their own businesses. The women do not particularly like Geeta, but when Farah, the only Muslim woman in their community, misses her payment, Geeta covers the cost. When Geeta sees Farah's bruises, she knows that the latter's husband has once again physically abused his wife. Farah, assuming Geeta killed her own husband, asks for Geeta's help in ending her abuse by killing her husband. When the local widower Karem invites Geeta into the city with him (little does he know she is there to purchase materials to murder the abusive husband), their encounter with an organized crime family leads to Geeta finding herself in danger and, moreover, the owner of a blind dog she aptly names Bandit in honor of her hero. Geeta and Farah's darkly comedic journey of finding a way to kill the husband successfully begins a Phoolan Devi-esque vendetta against the violent husbands of the women in the microloan group. In their homes, the women have suffered from acid burns, marital rape, financial ruin, and physical abuse—meanwhile, young girls are being assaulted as they use the newly installed public bathrooms. The group of Bandit Queens finds that the only way they can end their terrors is to end the lives of their tormentors, even though they acknowledge that the systemic violence will only change when the patriarchal norms unravel in rural India. The perceived impossibility of women enacting such crimes enables them to do just that. As Saloni, Geeta's childhood friend, reminds her, \"Because we are middle-aged housewives. Who's more invisible than us? We can get away with murder.\" And they do. Shroff is careful to complicate Devi's actions as Geeta continues to wonder about Devi's life and motivations. While Geeta has a simplistic view of the Bandit Queen early in the novel—she has a photo of Devi in her room as inspiration—by the end and through her own journey of being forced to use violence to survive in a patriarchy, Geeta has situated Devi within a larger cultural context that asks the reader to consider what needs to happen at a structural level in order for women to find safety and liberation. Colleen Lutz Clemens Kutztown Uni","PeriodicalId":23833,"journal":{"name":"World Literature Today","volume":"142 5","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135160992","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"7 Questions for Etaf Rum","authors":"Michelle Johnson, Etaf Rum","doi":"10.1353/wlt.2023.a910253","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wlt.2023.a910253","url":null,"abstract":"7 Questions for Etaf Rum Michelle Johnson (bio) and Etaf Rum (bio) In Etaf Rum's second novel, Evil Eye, a young Palestinian American artist and mother of two contends with the effects of intergenerational trauma and her complicated relationship with her mother. While centering mental health, the novel illustrates the value of therapy and the power of having one good friend. Click for larger view View full resolution Photo by Angela Blankenship Q As the owner of Books and Beans in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, you're a bookseller as well as an author. You're also a Book of the Month Club Ambassador. What new books are you most excited about? If you were curating a box of books for our readers, what would be in it? A New releases I'm most excited about include Ann Patchett's Tom Lake, Jean Kwok's The Leftover Woman, Melissa Rivero's Flores and Miss Paula, and Susan Muaddi Darraj's Behind You Is the Sea. If I were curating a box of books for your readers, it would include Toni Morrison's Beloved, Nawal El Saadawi's Woman at Point Zero, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist, and Michael A. Singer's The Untethered Soul. Q Yara, the protagonist of Evil Eye, is teaching a class called Responding to Art at a college in North Carolina and attempting, against some resistance, to expand the syllabus beyond the European impressionists. Would you share an artist or two who should be better known? A Palestinian artist Raeda Saadeh, whose work often focuses on issues of displacement and identity, particularly how the lives of Palestinian women have been impacted by the Israeli occupation. Moroccan photographer Lalla Essaydi, whose work focuses on Arab female identity, commenting on the way women are frequently seen as merely decorative objects (see WLT, March 2013, 62). Q In Evil Eye, you paint a beautiful picture of fall in North Carolina. Where are your favorite spots in the state for inspiration? A Thank you. Some of my favorite spots in the state to get lost in include driving along Blue Ridge Parkway, which is truly one of the most scenic and breathtaking drives in the country; hiking along the trails, waterfalls, and peaks of Hanging Rock State Park; and (my favorite) walking along the miles and miles of pristine, undeveloped, and quaint beaches of Ocracoke Island in the Outer Banks. [End Page 24] Q Evil Eye is rich in food description, and the pictures of food from @booksandbeans make me hungry (that lentil soup looks amazing). Are you a foodie? If you're having a dinner party, what does that look like? A Yes, I'm definitely a foodie. Hosting and cooking for friends and family helps me feel closer to my roots as a Palestinian woman. To honor my heritage at a dinner party, I would include stuffed grape leaves, beef kebabs, cheese and zaatar pastries, homemade hummus, tabbouleh, baked eggplant with tahini and pine nuts, and, of course, spiced basmati rice with toasted almonds and a generous dollop of tzatz","PeriodicalId":23833,"journal":{"name":"World Literature Today","volume":"145 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135161191","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Weekend House","authors":"Lana Spendl","doi":"10.1353/wlt.2023.a910256","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wlt.2023.a910256","url":null,"abstract":"Weekend House Lana Spendl (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution A refugee from the Bosnian War, Lana Spendl recalls family weekends in the country outside of Sarajevo: her friend with one cow, her grandmother's garden, butterflies, and her father's Bosanski lonac. Some weekends we escaped our apartment in Sarajevo for our vikendica in the country. The white, red-roofed house stood on a long concrete slab, with one end serving as the driveway. Periodically, we'd fill the partitions of the driveway with fresh tar and my head would swim with pleasure. My dad taught me that in some places on the globe—a globe that expanded with sights and colors and lights the more I learned about it—people would get tarred and feathered in punishment. This was confirmed to me by cartoons, and although I loved lying on my stomach on the stone to smell the dark substance or press my nails into its freshness to create crescents, I imagined that being covered in it would be too much. To the other side of the house stood a water pump as tall as I was. To fill the watering can, you'd have to pump with all your might and then carry the thing with both hands, body leaning away for balance, to the garden behind the house. There, my grandmother grew potatoes and tomatoes, carrots and green beans and parsley—they grew only when you weren't looking—and propped peas on sticks so they could reach for the sun. We'd walk the rows and pluck pea pods into bowls and carry them to the driveway, which sat shaded by that hour, and shuck them with our fingers into a pot. I could only do this for minutes at a time before my eyes wandered the grounds for what to do next. But my grandmother or my parents stayed on task. They'd take the peas and other vegetables [End Page 31] into the kitchen and set them to cook in a pressure cooker with beef and lamb. Dough that had been rising for hours under a kitchen towel would slide into the oven. And the warm scents of Bosanski lonac would fill the house, permeating the walls, saturating them through, and drifting into the garden where I played outside. I would walk inside slowly as the sun was coming down. And then there was my friend, who lived permanently in the village. Sadly, I cannot recall his name, nor do I know what befell his family in the war. They owned the fenced-in plot across the road, with one permanently chewing cow. My dad taught me that cows had multiple stomachs, and I envisioned the creature's insides to be cartoon sausage links from one end to the other. My friend, one summer, heard from another kid that when butterflies soaked their wings, they could no longer fly. So, one afternoon, armed with a plan to catch one, we filled glasses at the pump and walked the village's dirt paths. When a butterfly flapped onto a flower or onto a blackberry bush lining the path, we tossed our overeager water in its direction, and it fluttered this way and that and ascended toward the sky. Our stomachs dropped and we ran again to the pu","PeriodicalId":23833,"journal":{"name":"World Literature Today","volume":"148 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135161316","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}