Topic: April 2005
Many thanks to the contributors to MARGIN's fifth anniversary reading event, "A Night of Magic (Realism)" on Thursday March 31 in Vancouver BC. The event was a wonderful success, with lovely works read by Pauline Holdstock, Karen McelMurray, Paulo da Costa, Ewing Campbell, John Briggs, and Bruce Holland Rogers. Stay tuned to MARGIN's main pages: we'll be posting our Report from AWP in a few days!
Magical realist poets, here's a strong critical review and close reading of Sue Kwock Kim's Notes from the Divided Country: Poems by David Koehn, who spends some quality time deconstructing the poet's magical realist techniques. A great study tool for those still trying to wrap their minds around magical realism as a narrative form for poets.
FRANCESCA LIA BLOCK is in hot water again for her book, Dangerous Angels, which is one of several award-winning titles that comprise the popular young adult alternative series better known as Weetzie Bat. The series, described by Block as "postmodern, magic-realist tales for all ages" and "contemporary fairy tales with an edge," has come under fire again for complaints that the book "has sexual themes, at least one gay character, and nontraditional families."
TONI MORRISON fans who also appreciate opera are in for a real treat: the 74-year-old author of such acclaimed novels as Sula and Song of Solomon has written the libretto for the opera "Margaret Garner," composed by Richard Danielpour, which will premiere in May at the Detroit Opera House in May and will star Denyce Graves, mezzo-sopramo, in the title role. Morrison based her text on the same slave story context which was the focus of Beloved, which won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
Steve Weinstein of New York Blade gives raves to one of the latest gay independent films to be released on DVD: Cowboys and Angels. The film, set in Ireland in what Weinstein characterizes as a "post-gay" perspective, is a sensitive magical realist undertaking with a classic plot: gay man helps confused small-town boy find himself. Writes Weinstein: "The whole thing has the good-natured air of a modern, grown-up fairy tale (take that however you want). In the end, the princes end up with their princesses, the queens with their ? queens, the sky is blue, and all?s right with the world. ?But there?s not a word of this film that doesn?t ring true."
Here's a thoughtful essay on prodigious literary celebrity which focuses on Everything is
Illuminated and Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer, written by Vivian Gornick of The Nation. Writes Gornick: "If Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is as popular with readers as Everything Is Illuminated, it will be because Foer is indeed the wunderkind the country needs and therefore
deserves: a writer of talent who exploits holocaust to mythicize the most aggressive self-pity in modern
American history, the kind that feeds relentlessly on a nostalgia that seriously reduces whatever chance we have of understanding what we are living through."