A Rising Tide Lifts All the Boats

February 1, 2017
Writers from around the globe weigh in on the theme of home in this wide-ranging anthology from former Granta editor Freeman.Home "can be one place, or it can be many," Freeman writes in the introduction to this third issue of his anthology series. Indeed, many of the finest selections here tell tales of migration, some voluntary and some not. In Gregory Pardlo's wryly observed "Marine Boy," the author remembers himself at 18, when he leaves Willingboro, New Jersey--"this town was beginning to harden around me like a final destination"--for boot camp in South Carolina. A conservative Muslim woman's yearslong fascination with a famous writer spans continents in Leila Aboulela's masterful short story, "Pages of Fruit." Emily Raboteau paints a complicated, empathetic portrait of her Uganda-born mother-in-law, now living in Rosedale, Queens, in "The Curse." And in his poignant and timely essay, "Hope and Home," Rabih Alameddine tells of interviewing Syrian refugees while visiting his mother in Beirut. While many of these tales are about leaving one place for another, others focus on hometown life. Kerri Arsenault contrasts the storybook version of Maine--"red lobsters, rocky beaches"--with the reality of life in the blue-collar town of her youth; after her father retires from the paper mill there, he receives a toolbox, watch, "and asbestosis of the lungs." And in "Fishermen Always Eat Fish Eyes First," Xiaolu Guo recounts growing up under the care of her loving grandmother and mean-spirited grandfather in a fishing village by the East China Sea. Other highlights include essays by Edwidge Danticat and Nir Baram, fiction from Barry Lopez and Pulitzer Prize winner Viet Thanh Nguyen, and the poetry of Danez Smith, Katie Ford, and others. A superb anthology: eclectic and thought-provoking.

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January 9, 2017
Beat biographer Morgan’s (The Beats Abroad) transcript of Ginsberg’s university lectures, given first at Naropa Institute in 1977 and later at Brooklyn College, are a gold mine for anyone interested in beat literature. Ginsberg discusses William Burroughs, Neal Cassady, Gregory Corso, Herbert Huncke, and himself, but Jack Kerouac is the soul of the book, portrayed throughout with admiration and affection, if not always reverence. Citing their influences in everything from jazz to Dostoyevsky, Ginsberg depicts the beats not as criminals, addicts, or delinquents but as restless, beatific seekers after spiritual truth. Covering mainly the years between 1947 and 1957, Ginsberg’s critical technique is to offer a catalogue of breakthroughs, epiphanies, and favorite passages or “big sentences,” interspersed with gossipy anecdotes and revelatory asides. Ginsberg reads and thinks like a poet; interested in language and style, he abandons narrative to leap from image to image, yoking grandiloquent statements with pungent summations and deadpan remarks. Fans of the period will embrace Ginsberg’s raconteur style and insider knowledge about his friends and their achievements; those who need a more comprehensive or linear grounding in beat literature might start with another of Morgan’s works.