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Stolen Children, Part II
Thursday March 11, 2010
Having read the author’s bio of Peg Kehret’s Stolen Children before I even turned to page one, my original intention—to ferret out the book’s nefarious underbelly on behalf of my nine year-old pen pal—felt thwarted at the start. And despite the kind of prose that has the protagonist Amy and her babysitting charge kidnapped at the end of chapter two a mere....
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Stolen Children, Part I
Wednesday March 10, 2010
Of all the solicitations that come my way on any given day—be it fundraising letters from Doctors Without Borders, UNICEF, and the like, or take-out menus from neighborhood restaurants strewn like confetti in the vestibule of our brownstone—there has been one that grabbed me in a way that even the most urgent mass appeals couldn’t: a pen pal program pairing members like me of the Writers Guild of America with local schoolchildren in Queens....
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Kingsolver’s Lacuna
Tuesday March 9, 2010
I can tell that a novel is top-rate when I start praying for the characters. And when, on finishing the book, I sit immobilized, loathe to break the spell of the world it has brought me into. A world drawn from our own but given a shape and meaning that allows us to see something new about our own world. So it was with Barbara Kingsolver’s latest....
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The Ways to Dusty Death
Monday March 8, 2010
At this point, most everyone has seen the evolutionist’s response to the iconic fish symbol, often glued to the back of car trunks: the fish, in the “pure science” retort, has sprouted legs. As if that weren’t enough to send the message, the word “Darwin” appears inside the body. The Ichthys folks have answered....
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Joining the Chinese Heavy Metal Band
Friday March 5, 2010
I knew that there was rock music in China, and I was determined to get as involved in it as I could—which turned out to be not very much, since I have the Chinese vocabulary of a three-year-old child. It doesn’t help that Chinese people are, as a rule, very polite and complimentary to foreigners, so if you....
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Issue 64
Art by Gerhard Richter, Jeremy Begbie on Orthodoxy, Interview with Les Murray, Fiction by Scott Russell Sanders.
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