Let’s get this out of the way: I like David Foster Wallace’s writing. I find value in his craft writing, and I love his “nonfiction” (which, yes, of
course it’s not really nonfiction? Did everyone miss the part where writers are encouraged and sometimes even god-willing
paid to lie? It’s not like we’re presidential press secretaries for fucks’ sake) and I love all his wild-eyed theorizing about The State Of American Fiction even though a lot of it is outdated and I wouldn’t have even agreed with it while he was alive.
Why I love it is that he takes meta stuff and finds the truth and emotion in it. The very thing people roll their eyes out now, the whole idea of “New Sincerity” to me the fact that he ties ridiculous imagery and winking and meta jokes about authorship to the idea that fiction is supposed to make you feel something, and specifically to make you less lonely, is why people still read it.
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As Charles Yu wrote “Interior Chinatown,” he worried readers wouldn’t be interested in a satirical novel about how Hollywood and society trap Asian Americans in stereotypical roles.
They almost never get to be the leading man. Instead, they get to be “Generic Asian Man Number Three / Delivery Guy.”
“I wondered if I would run into people who would say, ‘What is the big deal is it really such a big problem?’” recalls Yu, who joins the Los Angeles Times Book Club on May 27. “I thought I’d get skepticism. Does this story really need to be told?”
The author’s self-doubt turned out to be off the mark. “Interior Chinatown” received rave reviews and won the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction in November. And after the pandemic triggered increased anti-Asian harassment and violence, Yu’s witty but pointed indictment of prejudice has resonated with readers in a way he never envisioned.
Reviewed by Lisa Gresham
Wednesday, May 5, 2021
As the former president of the progressive think tank, Demos, Heather McGhee spent 20 years looking for solutions to economic inequality and other big social problems before realizing she was hitting the same wall. That wall came to be defined by the question, “In America, why can’t we just have nice things?” such as reliable and modern infrastructure, universal healthcare, or well-funded, state-of-the-art schools all social components that seem like they would be no-brainers in the wealthiest nation in the world.
Her new book,
The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together, grew from this question and the realization that lasting change was more likely to come from shifts in public opinion rather than policy alone, embarking McGhee (pictured) on a personal journey into the hearts of Americans to reveal the falsehoods of the zero-sum game that has limited our collective vision of what we can be to o
A Short History of Asian American Character Actors vulture.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from vulture.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.