Set between the muddy paddy fields of Taiwan and a cold college room in California, this story weaves together Taiwanese bird ecology , traditional Taiwanese street delicacies and a linguistic misunderstanding. It explores how food, nature, and intergenerational love can cross geographical and historical oceans when words fail.
At its core, criticism asks a fundamental question: how do artistic works produce meaning?
The Blazing World — via a dizzy mix of animal-human hybrids, Immaterial Spirits, and burning foes — tells of a woman’s absolute rule as Empress over a parallel planet. Emily Lord Fransee reflects on what the book and its author Margaret Cavendish can teach us about empire, gender, and imagination in the 17th century.
“Langston Hughes’ words sent chills down my spine. It gave me the wherewithal to truly understand that fascism is not at all a foreign term, nor is it strictly related to Europe or even novel in twenty-first century American life.”
“Taken together, these examples challenge the idea that the past disappears once it is no longer actively remembered. The past often remains present in quieter and less obvious ways. It stays in what is unsaid, in the places people move through, and in the physical traces of those who came before them.”
“You cannot command the oceans, nor can you dictate the trajectory of the winds. But the mastery of the helm—the art of adjusting the sails—is, and forever remains, your sovereign right.”
2 short short stories from Alfred D Searls
The supernatural does not require foggy graveyards; it is closer and far more mundane. It manifests in a midnight kitchen, a crowded yet silent subway car, or a house where silence moves between rooms like an uninvited guest.
It’s a strange but probably not-so-strange thing that a beautifully-written account of the baking of bread, of illness and worry, of the beauty of the light on flying crows, the wind on the water, the glow through the mountains, would have such an enduring power to move us.
“She sees herself as a tool for social activism and what she does with this tool is to shape into images of self-affirmation.”
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