We are grateful to UMass-Amherst professor Stephen Clingman and TheConversation.com for this personal remembrance of Nadine Gordimer, who passed away Sunday night. The passing of Nadine Gordimer is a tremendous loss, both to South Africa and to the literary world. For me, and others who knew her, it will also be an enormous personal loss. Born . . .
Read MoreThe event in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914 set the course for the twentieth century, yet its story reads like a political thriller straight out of Hollywood. Under the guise of national interest, a brilliant intelligence officer plans to create an international incident. He assembles, arms, and trains a team of outsiders . . .
Read MoreGiven the state of post-Berlusconi Italy today, it was perhaps to be expected. Yet the judge’s decision at Erri De Luca’s preliminary hearing—to proceed to trial—is still, to put it mildly, disappointing. That the trial date is set for January 28th at least gives those of us who still believe in free speech . . .
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May 20, 2014 Dear Erri, First off, I should wish you a very happy birthday! A big day… and, of course, there’s another one looming, just around the corner. I really wish I were in Italy now, so that I could participate more directly and stand together with everyone across the . . .
Read More(Editor’s Note: What follows is a slightly edited version of a talk given at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst on March 28, to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of its Master of Fine Arts for Poets and Writers. As Lorberer comments, his overarching aim in this piece was to let loose “an eros-tipped . . .
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On my computer is a dataset, ICPSR 6399, cataloging every homicide committed in Chicago over a thirty year period, along with all the particulars the police could gather by investigation. The dataset includes nearly 24,000 killings, with murder weapons ranging from ash trays to padlocks to pantyhose. One weapon is preeminent: between . . .
Read MoreIn his fabulous analysis of the death of Luigi Trastulli, Alessandro Portelli opened up a new task for the study of oral history, one that I would like to replicate in this short entry on the death of Gabriel García Márquez (April 17, 2014). Portelli transformed the study of memory from a . . .
Read MoreDear Eric Holder: I write, as one of a growing chorus of voices, to ask you to grant early release to Dicky Joe Jackson, a convicted felon currently serving time in the federal penitentiary in Forrest City, Arkansas. Jackson was sentenced in 1996 of possession with intent to distribute methamphetamine, in addition . . .
Read MoreMany thanks to Jim Hicks of the Massachusetts Review, Amanda Minervini of Salem State University, and Adam Sitze of Amherst College for their very engaging comments about my book, and for the time they took to read it and write about it. I would like to focus on the assertion by Adam Sitze . . .
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Part OnePart Four V. On Torture Warrants and Kill Courts Jim Hicks: We can’t end this conversation without saying something about how Friel ends his book. The gesture of Dershowitz towards the authorization of torture courts is a way to get this discussion, he says, out into the open. The labeling of . . .
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