APA Writer Series | Chen Chen
“Poetry becomes a means to use English in ways that maybe were never intended for someone in my body, with my history, with my family being an immigrant family coming into the United States."
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Book Review
“‘The plot of this is not and will not be obvious.’ So begins Eley Williams’ debut short story collection Attrib. and Other Stories, out today (Anchor Books, May 18, 2021), a declaration that grows increasingly self-referential as the collection unfurls, each of its sixteen stories a successive petal in the work’s burgeoning eccentricity, sensitivity, and wit.” On the blog, Sarah M. Zhou reviews Eley Williams’ Attrib. and Other Stories (Anchor Books, 2021).
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Sticky Notes
“So let’s return to the image of me slouched in front of my whirring laptop at 2:23AM, my Youtube feed filtered to nothing but tarot videos. Is this joy? Where is the undeniable, unstoppable undergoing?”
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Book Review
“The unnamed ‘man of two minds’ from Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Sympathizer returns in The Committed (Grove Atlantic, 2021), now entangled in the criminal side streets of France. No longer a spy or a sleeper, but most certainly a spook, our two-minded narrator is tormented by contradiction, infinitely dialectical in his ability to sympathize with conflicting perspectives.” On the blog, Jonathan Paul reviews Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Committed (Grove Atlantic, 2021).
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Sticky Notes
“Maybe I’ll forget how to write. Maybe ideas will stop coming to me. Maybe I’ll write about everything I know, and then there will be nothing left. So every poem needs to be the best poem yet, I’ll tell myself, because this might be the last one.”
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Sticky Notes
“A friend I love dearly recently told me to think about ways to remind myself of the people in my life. I had just confessed to feeling see-through, like an evil plastic bag on a turbulent day.”
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“Trans people, specifically trans women, live with the default presumption from cis people (and, I would argue indeed the general Zeitgeist) that we are sexually perverse predators whose only intent with gender transition is as a mask for whatever evil we harbor.“
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Book Review
“Joyce grapples with themes of isolation, disillusionment, and cultural confusion in the post-war era, adding a sinister tinge to a story that seeks to establish itself as something more than just ‘touching.’” On the blog, Simone Gulliver reviews Rachel Joyce’s Miss Benson’s Beetle (Penguin Random House, 2020).
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Book Review
“In case you haven’t already heard of Taco Bell Quarterly, I’ll include a quick rundown: it’s the ultimate amalgamation of art and (you guessed it) Taco Bell, the most glorious home that a piece of Taco Bell writing and its Taco Bell writer could ever dream of.”
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“I spent a lot of my life being ‘drilled with words,’ a phrase which here means: the treatment methods I received for my dyslexia unintentionally oriented my relationship with language to be an antagonistic one.”
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Childhood Ruined
“The character of Korra is not meant to liberate. At best, she placates the whiny liberals; at worse, she acts as a magical, approachable Uncle Tom with the intention to reinforce oppressive dominant ideologies in the minds of the very people she claims to represent.”
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Childhood Ruined
“It is important to acknowledge the untapped potential of Lars’ character with respect to representing the Filipinx community — the Filipinx identity is far too complex to be reduced to an ube cake (that only makes a singular appearance, no less!).”
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Childhood Ruined
“A closer look at Johnny Bravo paints the animated series as less an example of hypermasculinity than a parody of it.”
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2020 Best of the Net
Congratulations to Hari Alluri, Philip Schaefer, Threa Almontaser, Isabella Cho, Satya Dash, T. J. Butler, Chidiebube onye Okohia, Kim Merrill, and Sean Enfield for being our 2020 BoN nominees.
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Childhood Ruined
“If I were to describe K-dramas and C-dramas with one word, it would be this: pre-packaged.”
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Childhood Ruined
“Being critical does not mean Canceling™ your favorite program or artist or venue or album. It reflects that you care for art that impacted you because you care how that art could impact someone else.” Without further ado, Woody Woodger introduces the upcoming “Childhood Ruined” article series.
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Book Review
“Poignant, tender, and surprisingly humorous all at once, The Son of Good Fortune is a coming-of-age story that reflects on the often untold Filipinx immigrant experience shared by both Excel and his mother Maxima.” On the blog, Noreen Ocampo reviews Lysley Tenorio’s The Son of Good Fortune (Ecco, 2020).
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Book Review
“Aguila Labra’s candid writing meticulously portrays the extent of the speaker’s layered emotional experience, with the difficulty of moving forward predominating the beginning sections of ‘Natalie.’” On the blog, Noreen Ocampo reviews Keana Aguila Labra’s Natalie (Nightingale & Sparrow Press, 2020).
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“In ‘As Relic, As Remnant,’ Li writes of a city that shifts as it ages, one that has forsaken its former population for the glamor of a newer, richer one, forgotten the ‘chip-toothed lawns / fraying gray / like old boutique lace.’”
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“As I have aged the world has gotten bigger while I have gotten smaller. Things seem to make more and more sense as my need to define them or pin them down has abated.”
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