The Smithian

Yano, has moved Hello Kitty into a new light by digging below the surface and giving the pop culture icon her full academic due. If popular culture is prone to disposable (mostly Eastern) heroes and fads (e.g., Pokemon, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, etc.), Hello Kitty is the exception to the rule. She has dominated from East to West, in her native home of Japan all the way to Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Integrated as part of Japan’s “cute” culture (kawaii), Hello Kitty has a history all her own.

more.

…deals with the collision of modernity and traditionalism, through an updated, magical realist take on the first and much loved Tshivenda novel of the same name, written by TN Maumela.

more.

Rohde calls for the United States to scale back its military ambitions and focus instead on supporting moderates and an impatient rising generation of Arabs and Muslims eager to engage with the world. Rohde characterizes his book as “an effort to describe a new, more pragmatic, and more effective American approach to the Islamic world.” Such an approach is sorely needed. But he struggles to carve out a unique set of recommendations on how to do so.

more.

…a…tale, set in Afghanistan, California, Paris and the Greek islands. And The Mountains Echoed is a story about…the siblings Abdullah and Pari, separated at a young age. Early on in the book, a young Abdullah thinks that he would rather forget Pari than be haunted by her memory…

more, plus an audio interview with the author, here. and an excerpt, here.

The Roberts court has aggressively recalibrated the nation’s laws in the areas of race, guns and political speech—three of the four cases that form the core of…Coyle’s “The Roberts Court: The Struggle for the Constitution.”

more.

Darling promises her mother that she will come home for a visit soon, even though she knows she won’t because she doesn’t have the proper paperwork to return to America again. She misses the friends she grew up with, but at the same time feels estranged from them. One of them, Chipo, tells her on a Skype call that she can’t refer to Zimbabwe as her country anymore, since she treated it as a burning house and ran away from it instead of trying to put out the flames: “Darling, my dear, you left the house burning and you have the guts to tell me, in that stupid accent that you were not even born with, that doesn’t even suit you, that this is your country?”

more about this first novel, here.

…Carlos Fuentes is the subject of a small, literary boom on the anniversary of his death. Fuentes died one year ago [and] This week his…publisher…released more than a dozen of his works as e-books for the first time, including the epic and groundbreaking 1962 novel “The Death of Artemio Cruz.”

more.

…a hearse stops. Two men slide out a coffin and a limp body, and they leave. The limp body eventually comes to life: It’s a young man, a black South African who has been transported across the border into Botswana. A refugee, he looks up to see a thin, ghost-like dog sitting next to him. As the man begins to walk, in search of food and a place to sleep, the white dog follows him.

more.

‘…in today’s China, an author can feel a true sense of freedom if he doesn’t pander to the authorities to have his works published. It requires courage, tolerance of isolation, a strong belief of the future and a deep passion for literature—like a pious religious believer. It requires deep belief that the progress of human society is unstoppable and that China will become a truly democratic, free and open country. Freedom of publishing will come one day sooner or later.’ — Yan Lianke

…in which [the author] evokes with mischievousness and emotion his childhood in Pointe-Noire, the Congolese port city on the Atlantic coast…Alain Mabanckou speaks about African identity, his eclectic influences and why it is difficult to define an “African literature”…

more.

…this ideology is a paradoxical fusion of the freewheeling sensibilities exemplified by the New Left hippies and the capitalistic drive of the neoliberal New Right, with digital technologies serving as the binding agent.

more.

In…Rojas’…wildly creative novel…the dead writer watches his last, fateful days replayed in a private theater in the underworld. Decades have passed, and Lorca is aware of his posthumous fame, and how his death torments those who outlived him. All he wants is to sleep, finally and forever, but instead he’s trapped with the memories of his life, and of all the art and literature he created.

more.

“I think I’m ridiculously fortunate. I consider myself a Nigerian—that’s home, my sensibility is Nigerian. But I like America, and I like that I can spend time in America. But, you know, I look at the world through Nigerian eyes, and I am happiest when I am in Nigeria. I feel most—I question myself the least in Nigeria. You know, I don’t think of myself as anything like a ‘global citizen’ or anything of the sort. I am just a Nigerian who’s comfortable in other places.”

more from a conversation (audio and text) with the author, here.

Easy is back, narrating a new novel, “Little Green”…that picks up where “Blonde Faith” left off. He is, if not entirely alive, then at least present, navigating a 1967 Los Angeles he barely recognizes in the wake of both the Watts riots and the Summer of Love.

more.