Tag: writing

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Real value of life might lie not in beauty but in ugliness

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Acclaimed author of Outline trilogy (an irresistible novel of fame, power, beauty, and truth- Rachel Cusk’s new novel, is about an unnamed but apparently female author undertakes to write a biographical portrait of her friend, a world  famous actress referred to as M. The film star M is one of the most recognizable faces of our time, and her image is everywhere, which has been like that since she was a child. With such fame, her life has the appearance of freedom: people are instantly obliging, spaces are altered to accommodate her, time can be rearranged. M may live in the … Continue reading Real value of life might lie not in beauty but in ugliness

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Hope, Anger and Exhaustion – lack of despair causes despair

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Two friends meet in an art gallery after decades of silence. The idealism that once bound them together fissured and fractured under the weight of collective and personal griefs. Through their memories of youthful certainty, the antagonism of their conversation and the embers of their enduring kinship, they navigate the wreckage of our world today- the hope, the anger the exhaustion.Jamaican-American poet and playwright Claudia Rankine best known for “Citizen” (2014), her prize-winning work of prose poetry about black experience in the US, which explored microaggressions, police violence and Serena William’s treatment by tennis officials and exposed the depth of … Continue reading Hope, Anger and Exhaustion – lack of despair causes despair

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Survival amid ultimate brutality…

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Paul Yoon’s Etna is set in a fictional country in the present day, this is story told through the eyes of an ex-military dog, Etna. Etna after surviving years of a devastating war,  decides one night to leave the men he has fought alongside for years and returns home- to the place where he has taken from when he was young, in the thin but persistent hope that if a home exists for him, it might be there. This exhilarating odyssey told through the eyes of a war dog in his own battle-weary, gritty voice, as he traverses across ruined landscapes … Continue reading Survival amid ultimate brutality…

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Unconscious desire, and irrational dreams

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Martin Lindstrom’s three-year, seven-million-dollar neuromarketing study in Buyology, with cutting edge experiment that peered inside the brains of over 2,000 volunteers from all around the world as they encountered various adverts, logos, commercials, brands and products.  Lindstrom’s mission to find out why consumers were drawn to a particular brand of clothing, a certain make of car, or a particular type of shaving cream, shampoo or chocolate bar.  He believed that if he could uncover the answer, it would not only help sculpt the future of advertising, but also revolutionise the way all of us think and behave as consumers.  It seems marketers … Continue reading Unconscious desire, and irrational dreams

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Needle in a loop of silent waves, fine-tuning out of Trauma

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Jamaica-born British writer Jacqueline’s new novel “Sky City” set in early 1990s North London, where a young mixed-race woman, Jaycee, lives alone in a sparsely furnished apartment in a block above a shopping centre, with just a DJ on the radio for company. She is isolated, her best friend Ella-G moved to New York, and she never takes time off from her job as a legal secretary because she “craves the order of the workplace”. Music is still crucial, “Walls hummed with overdriven bass lines. Doors bounced in their frames”- but the escape it offers Jaycee is not ecstatic but … Continue reading Needle in a loop of silent waves, fine-tuning out of Trauma

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Engage with the place to tend and to mend

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Amid women facing backlashes across the world, growing dangers for women, as their safety is being threatened and their freedoms are under attack, with authoritarian states, online misogyny and climate breakdown, wildfires burning in Europe and drought ravages harvests and apocalyptic summer of 2026. Academic and activist author Natasha Walter after decades of her advocacy work alongside refugee women: “When heat rises, so does male violence. The ecological crisis is amplifying every threat to women. Women’s bodies and the body of the earth in danger at one on the same time.” She wrote, The New Feminism ( 1998), an upbeat, … Continue reading Engage with the place to tend and to mend

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Jackal and gatekeepers to the world of American literature

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Laura McGrath, assistant professor of English at Temple University and a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow, in Middlemen reveals the critical role in the making of American literature, from the famed three-martini lunch to the Frankfurt Book Fair,  and shows how agents influence what we read and explains why many debut novelists never publish another book, why agents champion short story collections even though they sell poorly, and how agents advocate for writers of colour in a system that values whiteness, and why there are so many New York novels. Middlemen demonstrates that agents-eighty percent of whom are in fact … Continue reading Jackal and gatekeepers to the world of American literature

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Simply dazzling: Peru’s Prince of provocateurs

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Essayist and novelist, Mario Vargas Llosa, Polemicist and politician (a Spanish citizen from 1993),  born in the Peruvian city of Arequipa in 1936, the Nobel Prize-winning literary colossus and debonair provocateur whose contradictory life is considered to be perhaps the greatest contemporary writer and most influential intellectual in the Spanish-speaking world. He was also indisputably the most controversial: He was never out of the headlines in more than six decades of literary and political activity, from the moment he exploded onto the cultural scene in the early 1960s with his first novel, The Time of the Hero, until his last, I … Continue reading Simply dazzling: Peru’s Prince of provocateurs

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Decline of public etiquette

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David Sedaris investigates in The Land and Its People, what it means to be a traveller, a brother, a lifelong friend. Trying on the role of caretaker after his boyfriend Hugh’s hip-replacement surgery. It is a familiar Sedaris set-up: domestic discomfort turned into comic material, with a swipe of competitiveness. “I Know all about kidney stones and gum surgery. I know about broken ribs and urinary tract infections. When it came to hip pain, though, he had me,” he writes. Sedaris approaches with his usual cool composure and flashes of humour. In one essay, he lists the friends he has … Continue reading Decline of public etiquette

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How justice plays out

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UK’s leading forensic anthropologist and pro-vice chancellor of Engagement at Lancaster University, president of St John’s College, Oxford, Professor Dame Sue Black solves the mysteries of harrowing and shocking criminal cases by assessing its triumphs, failures and future. For over forty years, Black has analysed criminal evidence at the highest level. She stood in court as an expert witness, repeatedly putting her research and reputation on the line, all in the name of justice. True crime cases from historic poisonings to modern sexual offences, Sue Black traces the evolution of forensic science from early identification methods to more recent breakthroughs … Continue reading How justice plays out