#then the incident with barbara happened & he lost both hope & his religion :')

[un1dentity]

thinking heavily about how barbara's name means strange or foreign which coincides with her being a synth but also how there's a saint figure / martyr (in catholicism) named saint barbara that is called upon for lost souls / those in need .....................

[politicsprose]

2017 Holiday Newsletter

Welcome to the 2017 Politics and Prose Holiday Newsletter. As always, we’re proud to present a selection of some of the year’s most impressive books. Happy holidays to all!

Crossing Borders

Mohsin Hamid has consistently shown his genius for using literature to capture the tensions between Islam and the West that play out globally and in individual lives. His latest novel, Exit West (@riverheadbooks), is another example of his spare, elegant writing, and his fearlessness in treading on uncomfortable political ground. A love story at its core, the novel exposes disquieting truths about secular and fundamentalist interpretations of religion, culture, family, and community. Moments of magical realism provide an imaginative backdrop to the story, much of which takes place in a country never named and with doors that serve as metaphorical entry and exit points. A stunning novel. - Lissa M.

“History has failed us, but no matter.” When a writer opens her second novel with a sardonic statement like that, you hope that she’s up to the task of making it stick. Have no fear, Min Jin Lee is. Starting in the early 20th century, Pachinko (@grandcentralpub) chronicles the fortunes of a Korean family, first in a Korea under Japanese occupation, then as immigrants in Japan. The pachinko parlor that the family runs while in Japan is a perfect symbol of the kinds of hardships Korean immigrants in Japan face. The gambling establishment is their road to a better life. In fact, it’s the only such road. Perhaps this gives you the impression that the novel is only good as social commentary, its characters puppets. Actually, the reverse of is closer to the truth. It’s as if Lee started with the minutest details of her characters’ lives and the commentary grew out of it organically. When she observes how quickly Yangjin and Sunja have to get over Hoonie’s death, “At his burial, Yangjin and her daughter were inconsolable. The next morning, the young widow rose from her pallet and returned to work,” you feel the hardscrabble life of a Korean peasant all the more. One reviewer has aptly compared Lee to Thomas Mann. This is one book you can lose yourself in. - Sharat B.

Winner of the 2016 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Fiction, awarded by Barbara Kingsolver for a novel that addresses issues of social justice, The Leavers, (@algonquinbooks) by Lisa Ko, is an exploration of the lives of a family of Chinese immigrants.  Polly, an undocumented immigrant, is rounded up in a raid on the nail salon where she works, gets caught up in the system, and eventually is repatriated to China.  Her eleven-year-old son doesn’t know where she’s gone or what happened to her. She’s just gone.  Fostering with a kind, intelligent couple (both are professors) in the suburbs, Deming has difficulty recovering from the trauma and confusion of his early life.  The book is timely and the subject important, but the strength of the novel lies in the composition of the principal characters, showing the depth of their humanity, their worthiness of our empathy. - Mark L.

In the Midst of Winter (@atriabooks-blog), by master storyteller Isabel Allende, begins on a cold and snowy day in Brooklyn. After a traffic accident brings them together, Richard Bowmaster and Evelyn Ortega discover they’re connected by a dark secret. This also involves Lucia Maraz, Richard’s tenant and colleague, who he turns to for help after the incident. Owing to circumstances, our three protagonists, plus one dog, find themselves becoming closer while going to extraordinary lengths to hide their secret. As Allende narrates their various pasts, it becomes clear that each of them faces a personal winter, living a life frozen in place. Richard is a professor who believes the great passions of his life have come and gone. He maintains strict order to keep his regrets under control. Lucia, despite the struggles and disappointments she endured in her native Chile, still searches for happiness in the unlikeliest of places. Evelyn is a refugee from the violence in Guatemala, where she was robbed of family and future. Together this trio discovers, as Albert Camus wrote, an “invincible summer” within that slowly melts the frost enshrouding their lives and opens them to renewed hope and love. This is a beautiful story that will see you through all the seasons to come. - Michael T.

When asked, Haris Abadi describes himself as an Iraqi and an American. He means that he was born in Iraq but traded his first identity for American citizenship after working as an interpreter for the occupying American forces. Somewhere in the transaction, the two loyalties canceled each other out and Haris lost track of himself. As Dark at the Crossing (Knopf) opens, Haris is in Antep, Turkey (“a city with two names and three meanings”), hoping to regain a sense of purpose by joining the struggle against the al-Assad regime in Syria. But the border is closed, and Elliot Ackerman’s powerful and poignant second novel follows his protagonist’s efforts to find a way across. As Haris faces the disappearance of his fixer; is betrayed, robbed, and beaten by a guide; and tours the Syrian ward of the local hospital, where both the dying and the dead are stashed in the morgue, his experiences give a close, yet panoramic view of the Syrian civil war and its regional fallout. At the same time, Haris’ recurrent flashbacks of the interrogations and searches he participated in with the Americans in Iraq reflect that he is also stuck at an internal psychological border. So, too, is Daphne, a Syrian refugee Haris befriends. Certain that her daughter is still alive, she wants to return to Aleppo and find her. Incredibly, though the conflict has left Daphne with nothing, she feels that “war can be a blessing… If you’re trapped, its destruction can free you.” Ackerman, a former Marine who served multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and has covered Syria since 2013, is unflinching in his depiction of what war can do. - Laurie G.

Two years after the magical Two Years, Eight Months, and Twenty-Eight Nights, set in Fairyland, Salman Rushdie is back with another, much more realistic novel. The Golden House (@randomhouse) begins on the day of Barack Obama’s inauguration, when an uncrowned seventy- something king, who calls himself Nero Golden, arrives in New York from a faraway country. With his three motherless sons, Nero takes possession of the palace he would call his home. Having arrived under mysterious circumstances, the family also assumes new identities. They take Roman names, trying to reinvent themselves and keep their past hidden, all the while battling their own demons. The youngest son, D, is conflicted over his sexual identity; Apu longs to go back home; and Petya develops agoraphobia. The Goldens’ story is told by their neighbor, René, who becomes fascinated with the family and the various goings-on surrounding them. He gets pulled into their life of mystery, money, intrigue, drama, and crime. Then it all abruptly ends eight years later with the election of “The Joker” as president. Exploring the nature of good and evil and our capacity to change and adapt, Rushdie has loaded this novel with parallels between our world and the one the Goldens live in. “Clowns become kings, old crowns lie in the gutter. Things change. It’s the way of the world.” - Marija D.