I often start my MFA courses with a discussion of fairy tales. It seems an obvious place to start, since fairy tales are some of humanity’s oldest stories and likely the first stories that my students remember reading as children. But I also love starting with fairy tales because they violate more or less every single rule of fiction writing that is drilled into us in creative writing classes.
Instead of “show don’t tell,” fairy tales prioritize telling over showing. Instead of demanding “round characters,” fairy tales embrace flat ones. Instead of logical “worldbuilding,” fairy tales operate with a surreal dream logic in abstract settings. Instead of starting “in media res,” they start “once upon a time.” Instead of “telling the story only you can tell,” fairy tales ask you to retell stories that have been told for centuries. So on and so forth.
I was fifteen when I first saw that image, working my way through the fiction section of my home-town library in suburban Wisconsin. I was searching for books that felt older than I was. Nicholson Baker’s 1986 novel “The Mezzanine” looked like no other book I’d ever seen, and it read like no other book I’d ever read. I wrestled with the novel’s deceptively slow pace—it takes place on a single ride up an office escalator, but really it’s set inside the human mind, as it asks questions, produces hypotheses, and makes connections with neuronic quickness.
On the last page of the paperback was a list of other books, most of which I had never heard of. Floating at the top of the list was an unusual logo, a hovering 3-D orb casting a shadow over a parallelogram. Underneath the logo were two words in perfectly justified type: “Vintage Contemporaries.”
Biochemist Martin Gruebele regularly dons a pair of headphones in his lab at the University of Illinois. But instead of music, he listens to a cacophony of clinking, jarring noises — as if a group of robots were having a loud argument.
The payoff for this pain? These sounds help Gruebele understand how proteins in our body interact with water.
Pozole's own, somewhat grisly, origins purportedly date back to the Aztecs of pre-Hispanic Mexico. According to the Mazlatlán Post, it originated as a sacred offering to the Aztec god Xipe Totec in the hopes of a good harvest. Aztec warriors would kill and dismember a rival captive then toss him into the stewpot with salt and dried corn to prepare a ceremonial soup to be eaten by the Aztec priests, the king, and the warriors who — ahem — procured the meat. When the Spanish colonizers came along, they introduced pork, which the Aztecs started using instead.
The aromatic makeup of this simple pork soup changes depending on where you are in Mexico. On the Pacific and Atlantic coasts and in the lush mountains, pozole is often green — seasoned with a salsa of roasted poblanos, spinach, cilantro and tomatillo. The dish tends toward red in the more arid, red pepper-yielding areas of Jalisco and in the northern Chihuahuan desert.
I know I’m not alone. A lot of people are grossed out by the foods on their plate touching. And for years, I would ladle portions of braised greens or buttered corn into separate bowls to keep their juices off my mashed potatoes, a system that is both impractical at my tiny dining table and annoying when it’s time to do dishes. But now, when I’m worried about my brothy beans touching my roast chicken, I simply turn to my stash of divided plates.
That we orientate ourselves with and within stories – and that these stories need to be constantly examined and questioned, as he argued, even within Islam – is undeniable. The claim that stories are what nation, family, religion and community absolutely and completely are, though, is patently not true, an assertion that’s both overweening and inadequate, an absurdity – even if it is what allows Rushdie to write in the distinctive way he does.
What do an experiment in free love, a renowned newspaper editor with a penchant for the occult, and a dour — then murdered — president have in common?
That’s the question that the prolific historian Susan Wels poses in “An Assassin in Utopia,” which explores the interwoven fates of the radical preacher John Humphrey Noyes, the media impresario Horace Greeley and the doomed James A. Garfield, who was shot four months into his tenure as president of the United States and died of infection two months later.