“King Nyx” is a book that understands that the crumbling mansions of gothic fiction merely materialize the minds of their female protagonists. It also understands that they must understand this fact, too, if they are to reclaim what is properly theirs. Or, as Bakis put it to me when I made my way to see her in New York’s Hudson Valley on a snowy day last month, it is about finding your voice again when it has been taken from you — perhaps as much by circumstance as by malice.
By 2001, Morrisseau paintings routinely fetched thousands of dollars on the market. The works he now denied having painted were no exception. The auctioneer had advertised them as being from Morrisseau’s hand and claimed to a reporter writing about the dispute that, though he had obtained the paintings from an obscure seller, he had no reason to doubt their authenticity—he had already sold 800 of them without a single buyer’s complaint.
Morrisseau, though justifiably incensed, wasn’t surprised that imitations of his work were being sold as authentic on the open market. As early as 1991, the Toronto Star reported the artist was complaining about being “ripped off” by fraudsters. But for years Canadian law enforcement did little to investigate the artist’s claims that forgers were imitating his work. Eventually, in the face of this inaction, Morrisseau’s lawyers advised him to notify galleries and auctioneers that they were selling fakes and warn them that they could be the subject of a court injunction, civil action or criminal complaint. Still the sales went on.
Keng enjoyed a distinctly southern childhood — spent “suckling nectar out of honeysuckles, going to country fairs and fishing off the dock of Lake Altoona” — that was flavored with dishes from her parents’ home country, sparking a lifelong interest in global cuisine. As a kid, she worked in several of her parents’ retail stores at the local mall, including one that sold (you guessed it) egg rolls and sweet tea.
“This oddball pairing went ‘viral’ and folks lined up for what at first had seemed more like cultural confusion than culinary fusion,” Keng said.
This is the end. I can’t go any further. I’ve come as far as possible; to the northernmost limit; the same latitude as Russia’s Kamchatka peninsula and parts of Alaska. It’s taken me years to reach here by boat. But in case you wonder, I’m not floating in pack ice in the Arctic; I’m in northern Lancashire, on the border with Cumbria at 54 degrees north, at today’s northernmost limit of the navigable network of inland waterways of England and Wales.
Diane Oliver was a graduate student at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop when she died in a motorcycle crash at age 22. Before her death in 1966, she published four stories in such journals as the Sewanee Review. It’s hard to know what brilliance she might have bestowed on the world had she lived longer, but the newly published collection “Neighbors and Other Stories” provides some inkling. Oliver’s perceptive, insightful work reflects great talent and ambition. The ease and elegance of her prose are striking, as is her faith in her readers’ intelligence — the certainty that they will see glints of subtext without the need for explication.
An examination of adolescence and death and consumption and spectacle, “Big Mall” ponders why the mall makes us feel good, and bad. Much of the book is introspective; some of it looks outward at the cultural forces that spread this particular facet of American commerce across the globe. The motto “No ethical consumption under capitalism” resonates throughout.