Lapis means “layers” in Bahasa Malaysia, Malaysia’s national language, and Sarawak is a state located on the northwestern coast of Borneo. The kek (cake) is aptly named. Slice off a piece and you’ll find a kaleidoscope of colorful layers, meticulously arranged in distinct geometric patterns. Making it is a long, grueling process that tests even the most seasoned of Sarawak’s bakers.
What an impossibly daring premise for a novel — an act of almost Lucy-level audaciousness: to imagine that you could push your grandfather into the life story of the most famous comedian of the 20th century. Re-creating that TV legend in all her remarkable detail is essential, but not enough. What really keeps “The Queen of Tuesday” flying is that Strauss understands that the private romance enjoyed by the star and his grandfather is equally tragic and poignant.
Last Call on Decatur Street is a preface to the collapse of a city constructed upon unspoken injustices, a flashback to life before Hurricane Katrina tore off the beautiful façade that for years managed to distract many people from the ugly sentiments beneath. It is a story about sufficiently loving what is broken to want to repair it. But it is also the story us allies try not to tell ourselves: the story of how our perception of ourselves as liberal makes no difference.
Melissa Faliveno’s hometown in Wisconsin was nearly destroyed by a tornado when she was a year old. Instead, the neighboring town was all but swept away, its structures and people violently displaced from the geography of Faliveno’s childhood. She herself grew up under the shadow of that tangential loss, and the essays in her debut collection, “Tomboyland,” appropriately twist around the questions of grief, violence, identity and home that the tornado in the opening pages whipped up.
Ngai makes the case that the gimmick, whose value we regularly disparage, is of tremendous critical value. The gimmick, she contends, is the capitalist form par excellence. The book’s argument starts from the simple premise that the gimmick is “simultaneously overperforming and underperforming,” confounding our normal estimations of labor, value, and time. Ngai distinguishes the gimmick from its kin — kitsch, camp, conceptual art — making the case that, although superficial resemblances may bind the gimmick to these categories, the calculations of worth and cheapness it involves us in set the gimmick apart as a specifically capitalist form.
are having a summit –
they chase around the garden
disturbing hens.