Members of the Spice Girls generation are the only people in history to have both grown up with the internet and to retain childhood memories that predate it. Born primarily in the mid-to-late 1980s, they are human bridges between two eras, whose anachronistic birth years, with their faraway century, will cause their heirs’ eyes to widen at their obituaries. Their ancestral parallels are the earliest drifters of the Lost Generation, born in the mid-to-late 1880s — people to whom Glenn Miller seemed unbearably young.
When the Food Network debuted in 1993, 30 years after Julia Child prepared her inaugural omelet for an audience of bemused Bostonians watching the French Chef pilot on public television, it wasn't clear how a cable channel could fill an entire schedule with cooking.
Doubting the thrall of food now is laughable. Unscripted TV's fastest growing subgenre, culinary-minded shows occupy the entirety of two cable networks (Food Network and The Cooking Channel), more than 10 percent of the Fox primetime schedule (four offerings starring Gordon Ramsay) and, most tellingly, an increasing number of new shows coming from streamers. Peak TV has wrought Peak Food TV, where camera-friendly chefs are as coveted as seasoned showrunners.
Translated by Ken Liu, Broken Stars is a welcome second collection of 16 Chinese speculative fiction short stories and three short essays recounting the genre’s recent cultural and academic prominence. The volume gives voice to an eclectic group, serving as a who’s who of SF authors, critics, and other anchors in China’s burgeoning SF culture industry brought to Anglophone audiences by Ken Liu’s deft translation. The eclecticism of these works provides testament to the breadth, allure, and challenges of Chinese-language SF as a genre that miraculously thrives even in the repressive atmosphere of the Xi Jinping era.
There has to be an equivalent of Americana in each country; art that digs deep into the culture and history of a place in a way that allows those who consume it to get a sense of what that country's shifting zeitgeist is like.
With that in mind, Hwang Sok-yong's At Dusk is a perfect slice of Koreana; a touching, somewhat depressive narrative full of nostalgia that shows the underbelly of a nation through the life of characters inhabiting society's bottom rung.
Mario Benedetti was a hugely cherished writer in his native Uruguay, amassing a bibliography of some 80 books by the time of his death in 2009, but he was not translated into English until recently. Now Nick Caistor has translated two short, splendid novels, both built around love triangles in which a woman – regretfully, cautiously – leaves her husband for another man.
If you're reading this on your phone, drop it! (Or at least, drop it once you've finished this article.) That little screen of yours won't give you access to some of the wildest, weirdest, most innovative images and words bubbling up into the culture right now. Said miraculous content can only be found — brace yourself — on paper. To be precise, it can only be found in a flood of new periodicals by brave (or perhaps deluded) publishers who've declared war on digital monotony. Where in the world could such a quixotic movement emerge, you ask? Only in alternative comics.
An atom bomb—does it reduce everything
to atoms—to a mist the size of the moon?