Tag Archives: karen-russell

Ayelet Waldman’s Resistance Reading

by GenaShinn413338 Posted on April 30, 2017

Mother Jones

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Claire Lewis

We asked a range of authors, artists, and poets to name books that bring solace or understanding in this age of rancor. Two dozen or so responded. Here are picks from the witty and thoughtful Ayelet Waldman, whose recent book about microdosing with LSD caused a bit of a stir in the straight world.

Latest book: A Really Good Day
Also known for: Bad Mother
Reading recommendations: It was as if Mohsin Hamid knew exactly what would convulse the world when he wrote Exit West. It’s a novel about refugees, about cruelty and empathy and compassion, and in the end—oddly—about the possibility of an odd kind of redemption. I am surely not going to be the only one who recommends George Saunders‘ Lincoln in the Bardo, but listening to the audiobook (something I don’t normally do) was one of the most transporting literary experiences of my life. It was both a refuge (I’d put in my earbuds and hide from the horrors of the news) and an inspiration. Led by a brave, brilliant, and indeed tormented man, this nation rejected slavery. It is at least possible that we will one day reject racism, xenophobia, misogyny and all the various tyrannies of this foul administration and the vicious moron who leads it.
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So far in this series: Kwame Alexander, Margaret Atwood, W. Kamau Bell, Jeff Chang, T Cooper, Dave Eggers, Reza Farazmand, Piper Kerman, Phil Klay, Alex Kotlowitz, Bill McKibben, Rabbi Jack Moline, Siddhartha Mukherjee, Peggy Orenstein, Wendy C. Ortiz, Karen Russell, Tracy K. Smith, Ayelet Waldman, Gene Luen Yang. (New posts daily.)

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Ayelet Waldman’s Resistance Reading

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Alex Kotlowitz’s Resistance Reading

by Conrad3928 Posted on April 29, 2017

Mother Jones

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We asked a range of authors, artists, and poets to name books that bring solace or understanding in this age of rancor. Two dozen or so responded. Here are picks from award-winning long-form journalist and best-selling author Alex Kotlowitz.

Latest book: Never a City So Real
Also known for: There Are No Children Here
Reading recommendations: I’ve been consuming far too much news lately, and so am getting far too agitated with far too much regularity. I need shoring up. I need reassurance that we’ll get through. And so on my night table sit my reinforcements. I’m in the midst of Dutch writer Tommy Wieringa’s These Are the Names, a haunting tale about migration, about faith, and about new beginnings. Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad: Whitehead is a writer of such unflinching honesty and empathy, both of which are in short supply these days. And from someone who knows how deeply the present is informed by the past, Joseph Ellis’ Founding Brothers.

For all the obvious reasons (yes, Mr. Trump, history matters), I’m revisiting former Sen. Paul Simon’s Freedom’s Champion: Elijah Lovejoy. As if we need reminding what happens when good and decent people don’t stand up against the onerous assault on a free press.

And Hanya Yanagihara’s The People in the Trees. Just because.
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So far in this series: Kwame Alexander, Margaret Atwood, W. Kamau Bell, Jeff Chang, T Cooper, Dave Eggers, Reza Farazmand, Piper Kerman, Phil Klay, Alex Kotlowitz, Bill McKibben, Rabbi Jack Moline, Siddhartha Mukherjee, Peggy Orenstein, Wendy C. Ortiz, Karen Russell, Tracy K. Smith, Gene Luen Yang. (New posts daily.)

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Alex Kotlowitz’s Resistance Reading

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Karen Russell’s Resistance Reading

by NoahKessler Posted on April 21, 2017

Mother Jones

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We asked a range of authors, artists, and poets to name books that bring solace or understanding in this age of rancor. Two dozen or so responded. Here are picks from the delightfully evocative wordsmith Karen Russell, whose debut novel was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and whose short-story collection, Vampires in the Lemon Grove, is weird and wonderful.

Illustration by Allegra Lockstadt

Latest book: Sleep Donation
Also known for: Swamplandia!
Reading recommendations: Cosmicomics, by Italo Calvino: Because, if everything we write and read becomes dire and reactionary, Trump will have truly won, here’s a book that celebrates the radical freedom of the imagination. A book brimming with recombinatory energy, play and joy. Light by which to see into many different futures.

Some Say, by Maureen McClane—or anything/everything by McClane, whose vitalizing series of “Dawn School” poems was written, she says, out of “a desire to resist apocalyptic anxiety without denying ‘reality.'”

Ill Nature: Rants and Reflections on Humanity and Other Animals, by Joy Williams: At a time when so many people are feeling impotent, consumed with helpless rage, Williams’ hilarious, furious, and stirring essays remind us rage can be helpful. It can be potent. Let’s put it to use, in the service of our fellow animals.

All Our Names, by Dinaw Mengestu: A book that brings down walls. Overlapping tales of American dislocation and American reinvention.

My last pick would be Late Victorian Holocausts, by Mike Davis. This groundbreaking “political ecology of famines” traces the development of today’s so-called “third world” to wealth inequalities that were shaped in the late 19th century, when non-European peasantries were violently yoked into the world economy. Dozens of examples of “malign interactions between climactic and economic processes” that have a grave resonance with the overlapping crises of our present moment. A challenge to the view of markets as self-regulating automata and an indictment of the human authors of “natural” disasters: “Millions die,” Davis writes, “was ultimately a policy choice.”
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So far in this series: Kwame Alexander, Margaret Atwood, W. Kamau Bell, Jeff Chang, T Cooper, Dave Eggers, Reza Farazmand, Piper Kerman, Karen Russell, Tracy K. Smith. (New posts daily.)

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Karen Russell’s Resistance Reading

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