The question of justice just out of reach, the play settles for a question of empathy.
Emily Yang
Daily Arts Writer
Books
At a slim 48 pages, Sally Rooney’s “Mr Salary” delivers a deliciously illicit and poignant love story.
Rooney, who came of age with the 2008 crash and austerity politics as a central event in her life, is skillful at teasing out the social mythologies of the present moment, where everything is in flux and precarity reigns.
There was some jealousy of my past self and the first, traumatic slog through the book, too, mixed also with a bit of love for the characters in the story.
“Game of Thrones” is unforgiving, and that’s something those of us who watch the show seem to love about it. All these recent conversations about season 8 have carried a similar trend of excitement that verges on betting: Who will live? Who will die?
That’s not to say this book works on universal experiences, though. Langsdorf’s book is most accessible to the exact people she is writing about: Sexually-repressed suburbia-dwellers with the time and money to care about trees and hosting guests. Langsdorf’s characters don’t have too many problems — an overbearing mother here, a bratty daughter there — but the way they deal with these first-world issues is too chaotic to pass up.
In spite of that, it was hard to abandon “Someone Knows.” It was like watching a car-crash in action. You know that it would end terribly, yet you still can’t peel your eyes away.
I recently had a chance to interview Michael DeForge over email about social media, solitude and his new graphic novel, among other things.
It is also a precarious match: Charlotte’s art centers on the Black experience and its nuances, trying to offer a lens into the space where few are allowed. Charles and Virginia are white, both with a near-obsessive desire to do good politically, collecting art pieces on the experience of Black suffering. By the time the Spencer’s activist son, Alex, joins the dinner a quarter of the way into the play, the tension is choking.
Gretchen Primack’s “Visiting Days” is a collection of persona poetry taking on the perspective of people who have been or are incarcerated. This is a tricky theme to explore for an author who has never been behind bars, but Primack, whose career is in prison education programs, manages to create a coherent body of work that illuminates without exploiting.