AMERICA LOVES its unconscionable mash-ups. Since the 1990s, a fixture of Thanksgiving Day football coverage has been television anchors’ ritual consumption of a “turducken”: a chicken stuffed in a duck stuffed in a turkey. Following that logic, what would be the apposite coinage for a manifesto slipped into a press release set inside the screenshot of a Gmail message? A manipresscreenmail, or a Gshotleasefesto? Either way, the announcement for “Nobodies New York,” a small group show organized by Josh Kline in 2009, a full one hundred years after the Futurist Manifesto appeared in Le Figaro,
People talk about original novels, but Chi Ta-wei’s (紀大偉) The Membranes (膜) is more than original. It’s extraordinary.
Momo, the protagonist, lives under the sea, for a start. The year is 2200 and she’s 30 years old She was born, if that’s the right word, from inside a peach, and she works as a sort of masseur specializing in attaching membranes to her customers, so that they are completely covered by a new skin, independent of their original one. It’s called “dermo-maintenance.”
She considers having intimate relations with some of her customers but largely refrains. It’s only after several chapters that you
As the year comes to an end, our staff, contributors, and board members look back on their favorite international reads from 2021.
Eric M. B. Becker
Editor
One of my most thought-provoking reads this year came rather late in the year: Natassja Martin's memoir of a harrowing