An illuminating comparison of Ann Petry s
The Street and Gwendolyn Brooks s
Maud Martha with Cynthia Kadohata s
The Floating World and Chang-rae Lee s
Native Speaker by You-me Park and Gayle Wald ( Native Daughters in the Promised Land: Gender, Race, and the Question of Separate Spheres,
AL 70: 607-33) establishes the extent to which minority literature represents the boundaries between public and private spheres in the United States and how these boundaries reinforce and overlap class and gender lines. The critics conclusion is that both the African American and Asian American groups are feminized (in the sense of being marked under the sign of the feminine).
Jamie Harrison’s
The Center of Everything is forthcoming from Counterpoint on January 12. Harrison talked to old family friend Thomas McGuane about the writer’s life, her father Jim Harrison, avoiding the clichés of the West, writing mysteries, and more.
Tom McGuane: I know that you were not attracted to a writing life at first because of memories of growing up on your father’s $8,000-a-year income, which eventually changed for the much better; but then you budged and have been productive ever since. Is this a legacy? You’re a very different writer.
Jamie Harrison: My father would sometimes read things out loud when I was a teenager I especially remember an early passage about a swan in Neruda’s
Frozen review – Disney s thrilling but occasionally gluggy stage musical won t let audience go Cassie Tongue
Disney unleashed Frozen onto the world in 2013. Inspired by a fairytale – it’s loosely based on The Snow Queen – Jennifer Lee’s script about sisterly love, sacrifice and loneliness (OK, it’s still Disney: there’s also a talking snowman who’s obsessed with summer) was an instant hit. It was lifted higher by spare but affecting songs, the jewel of which is the anthemic Let it Go by Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez. Frozen is the 16th highest-grossing film worldwide; it was the best-selling musical in the United States (now only surpassed by its own sequel and the 2019 live-action remake of Aladdin).
âDo you wanna build a snowman?â
Itâs a resounding yes from Sydney. The Australian premiere of Disneyâs
Frozen opens with a blast of spectacle, storytelling and theatrical magic, made more poignant by the fact that itâs playing to a masked audience. Yes, itâs escapist. Yes, itâs a fairytale. Yes, itâs played with a brassy American twang. But itâs also executed with the kind of professionalism, athleticism, creativity and heart that reminds us how much weâve missed live performance, and how glad we are to have it back.
Jemma Rix as Elsa in Frozen s winter wonderland.
Per Petterson’s “To Siberia”
Graywolf Press, 2008
In 2007 Per Petterson had his second publication in the United States: a short, unostentatious, and penetrating novel entitled
Out Stealing Horses. It was a surprising commercial and critical success, propelled in no small part by Thomas McGuane s feature-length review in the
New York Times Book Review that coincided with the novel s release. McGuane s review is itself a sort of masterpiece, establishing subtle continuities between Petterson s Norway and the American literary landscape. Its opening paragraph ends with a bold statement about Trond Sander, the narrator of
Out Stealing Horses: he is more like us than other Scandinavian protagonists.