Beginner s Guide to America and 5 other works that illuminate the US immigrant experience
Written by Chantal Da Silva, CNN
Keeping you in the know,
Culture Queue is an ongoing series of recommendations for timely books to read, films to watch and podcasts and music to listen to.
Imagine searching for traces of Americanness as an immigrant first arriving in the US, and four name tags seen in the airport stop you in your tracks.
This was true for author Roya Hakakian, who was 19 when her Persian Jewish family fled Iran in the 1980s. In her new book Beginner s Guide to America: For the Immigrant and the Misinformed, Hakakian paints a picture of what it s like to leave everything you know behind and try to build a life in the US including those earliest moments in airport customs, when she was almost too taken aback by what the agents were wearing to notice their scrutinizing questions.
Girlhood and 6 other unflinching stories about being young and female cnn.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from cnn.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
arts
Updated 1st March 2021
Credit: Seacia Pavao/Netflix
Written by Jacqui Palumbo, CNN
Keeping you in the know,
Culture Queue is an ongoing series of recommendations for timely books to read, films to watch and podcasts and music to listen to.
Fictional male antiheroes like television s crime patriarchs Tony Soprano and Walter White have reigned for some time, but the antiheroine has only more recently had the opportunity to rise up and become the cause of her own downfall.
And while a bad woman may once have meant a period-piece protagonist who prioritized herself over finding a husband, today s antiheroines are more complex, as the Netflix dark comedy I Care a Lot illustrates.
The art of processing our collective grief
Updated 23rd February 2021
The art of processing our collective grief
Written by Oscar Holland, CNN
Keeping you in the know, Culture Queue is an ongoing series of recommendations for timely books to read, films to watch and podcasts and music to listen to.
We have heard the phrase grim milestone so often in the past year that it now falls into the realm of journalistic cliché. Monday s news that the US has surpassed half a million Covid-19 deaths should not, however, be any less poignant for its morbid familiarity.
These are the moments in which individual and shared grief intersect. But as we struggle to take stock of societies losses, what does coming to terms with grief, as a culture, really look like?