No one these days can be unaware of the complex problems of water degradation, toxic waste, species extinction, soil and forest depletion, desertification, acid rain, and the “greenhouse” effect. As Rebecca Solnit has remarked, “the landscape itself is no longer an aesthetic refuge, but a battle ground.”
The Ecological Imperative: Making Art as if the World Mattered Read More »
My father doesn’t say, “Don’t tell.” He doesn’t say much at all. The way to end the silence he gave me was to write this sentence: “I’ll tell you what I suppose from your silences and few words, and you can tell me that I’m mistaken.”
He knew how to be eleven years old. He took joy in the moment—in the good slice of pizza, the trip to the arcade, the tickle fight. As part of a big family he was happy to be in company with lots of people. To his relatives I must have seemed like the strange one: quiet, introverted, demanding of difficult pleasures that were a long time in coming. I never talked to him, or to them, about love.
Immigrants are a special breed. Whether migrating because of political, economic, or other circumstances or simply because of a desire for change, an immigrant is thought to be uprooted from one culture and transplanted into another. However, neither the uprooting nor the transplantation is usually a complete process. For a voluntary immigrant as well as
Displaced Entities, Shattered Identities, and the Loss of Paradise Read More »
I must have been about ten when my mother and I were called into a cubicle at the American embassy in India, where we had traveled from Iran as part of our visa application, and in light of the absence of diplomatic relations between Tehran and Washington. The official, whom I only recall to have
The End of Romanticism in Tehran Read More »
There are public pools in Tehran, Shiraz, and Isfahan, no doubt elsewhere in Iran, too, but those are the cities I visited at the end of 2015. Before I left for Khomeini Airport, I had discovered the existence of a Jewish sports center in Tehran, a place to swim where my last name might gain
It’s arguable that in 1971 the Shah of Iran himself ignited the revolution that overthrew his regime eight years later. In a week-long series of ostentatious, garish festivities, the Shah celebrated the 2,500th year of the Foundation of the Imperial State of Iran, an event no one thought relevant except himself. He commissioned the building
A Note From the Editor Read More »
Professor James Winn, who taught in the University of Michigan’s English Department from 1983-1998, passed away yesterday. MQR Editor Emeritus Laurence Goldstein remembers James as “a complex, provocative figure and a brilliant conversationalist,” and describes his essay, “The Beatles as Artists,” as a “standard reference work for anyone writing about popular culture and the recent
The Beatles as Artists Read More »
“The Funeral Tourist,” by Andrew J. Skerritt, appears in the Winter 2019 Issue of MQR. Everyone who leaves home and visits another place or country for any purpose other than business is considered a tourist. If you are a native of a Caribbean island but live in New York or London, when you return to your
The Funeral Tourist Read More »
With the news arriving today, on Gabriel García Márquez’s birthday, that 100 Years of Solitude is coming to Netflix, we visited our Archives to read Ilan Stavans on Gabriel García Márquez, the filmmaker. This essay appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review in 1995. __________________________________________________________________________________________ The publication in English of Strange Pilgrims, Gabriel García Márquez’s latest collection
The Master of Aracataca Read More »
