She hadn’t flown for 20 hours to marvel at Angkor Wat, the largest religious monument in the world, or stroll the white-sand beaches of Sihanoukville. Instead, she spent eight sweltering days in the Cambodian capital on a five-figure shopping trip.
Songster works at the Mark Twain Branch of the Long Beach Public Library, home to one of the largest public library collections of Khmer (pronounced Ka-mai) books in the United States. She and fellow librarian Christina Nhek had traveled more than 8,000 miles on a mission that faces libraries across the country: to serve the readers of rapidly changing cities.
Nomenclature in the solar system and beyond remains a complex topic today. Officially coordinated and governed by the IAU, the process of naming things in space extends from newly discovered exoplanets to the surface features of planets and moons in our own solar system. As Herschel’s role in the establishment of this nomenclature shows, despite the best efforts of astronomers to keep space names neutral, they’re always entangled in human affairs – our history, our culture, and sometimes even our politics. And this is how it should be. Herschel’s best attempts to keep names in space transnational still enshrined Eurocentric biases, and his second legacy around the moons of Uranus were even more tightly Anglocentric. Today, instead of a neutrality that is in principle unobtainable, a better goal is inclusion. The things we name in the Universe – which in itself bespeaks a certain hubris – should be named for all of us, and strides that have been taken in recent years to draw upon the mythology of cultures around the world, though they still have far to go, are at least steps in the right direction.
The book’s one-line synopsis might go: A lesbian who’s not a lesbian walks into a bar, and heaven and hell break loose. More specifically, the lesbian who’s not a lesbian — she picked up the appellation in high school, converting an insult into an identity — walks into a bar and instantly becomes the object of obsession to a clutch of characters, most of whom desire her, some of whom scorn her, all of whom cannot stop blabbering about her. Through their voices, Vollmann gives a documentary accounting of life on the margins, riffing on such themes as bigotry, idolatry, gender fluidity, vulnerability, consent, resilience and love.
The lyrical Hong is no less furious, but she’s wryer and sharper, less blunt and more subversive. She sees how she benefits from the model-minority myth even as it traps her, absorbing her accomplishments to fuel a system she doesn’t believe in. American culture might thrive on noise and bombast, but Hong knows that power can accumulate elsewhere: “The circuits of a poetic form are not charged on what you say, but what you hold back.”
There’s a darkness to dystopia: it’s embedded in the very word— the opposite of a utopia, a world gone wrong. The magic of Gish Jen’s latest novel, “The Resisters,” is that, amid a dark and cautionary tale, there’s a story also filled with electricity and humor — and baseball. At its heart, the novel is about the act of resistance and its attendant forces of courage and hope.