Word: fictional
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...middle-Eastern, the issues the film raises are in no way provincial. Waltz With Bashir should touch all those who see it - both the vast majority who have been raised on gung-ho war movies, and the small minority who find that the truth is the opposite of the fiction. "It's like nothing you've seen in American movies," Forman has said. "No glam, no glory. Just very young men going nowhere, shooting at no one they know, getting shot by no one they know, then going home and trying to forget. Sometimes they can. Most of the time...
...book. "Sick" and "joyless" were two of the milder terms they used. But in the 1960s, amid the general dismantling of all national certainties, The Americans was revisited and then very quickly understood as indispensable. For one thing, it brought to American photography the same tragic dimension that American fiction had arrived at long before. It also paved the way for a new kind of documentary photography, one that was more personal and idiosyncratic and much stranger. Because of The Americans, Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander, virtuosos of the mordant and off-kilter, could take pictures the way they...
...where her father was (and is) a librarian. She went to Barnard, then moved to Boston to work in a bookstore and collect master's degrees and generally figure herself out. "I sometimes wonder, If I'd not gone up to Boston for those years, would I have written fiction?" she says. "In New York I was always so scared of saying that I wrote fiction. It just seemed like, Who am I to dare to do that thing here? The epicenter of publishing and writers? I found all that very intimidating and avoided writing as a response...
...should tell us things about ourselves. Such as: we're way more interested in Bengali immigrants than we thought we were. Lahiri is a miniaturist, a microcosmologist, and she helps us understand what those lives mean without resorting to we-are-the-world multiculturalism. Everyone in Lahiri's fiction is pulled in at least six directions at once. Parents pull characters backward in time; children pull them forward. America pulls them west; India pulls them east. The need to marry pulls them outward; the need for solitude pulls them inward. Lahiri's stories are static, but what looks like stasis...
Lahiri's rise is part of a changing of the guard in American fiction, from a generation in which white American-born men still play a primary role (Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, Michael Chabon) to one in which the principal voices weren't born here, like Lahiri, Edwidge Danticat (born in Haiti), Gary Shteyngart (Russia) and Junot Díaz (the Dominican Republic). They're transnationals, writers for whom displacement and dual cultural citizenship aren't a temporary political accident but the status...