BY SHARNITA MIDGETT Today is the 103rd birthday of Rosa Parks, the woman who taught the world that bus seats are colorblind. The iconic story of her refusal to give up her seat on a bus — back in 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama — so white people could sit down has been taught in American history classes for decades. What hasn’t been told, however, is the story of the woman underneath the icon. A new book called Our Auntie Rosa aims to remedy that. Written by Rosa Parks’ niece and nephew, Sheila McCauley Keys and Eddie B. Allen Jr., […]

Illustration by MICHAEL MAHLE BY ALEXEI ARCHER Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, widely regarded as one of the pinnacles of western literature, is a story of three brothers — Ivan, Dmitri, and Alexei — and their reunion in an unnamed provincial town in Russia, and the ensuing murder of their father, Fyodor Pavlovich. It is a novel that seeks to reconcile faith in God and atheism, free will and slavery, compassion and isolation. Although it was written in 1880, The Brothers Karamazov remains current in its approach and construction, utilizing modernist literary devices such as meta-narration, subjective reality and multiple points […]

  BY BEN LEHMAN Set in turn of the century Mississippi, The Sound and the Fury chronicles the decline of the Compsons, a once prominent southern family who have fallen into social disgrace. The Compsons are a family destroyed by alcoholism, patriarchy, and suicide; they represent the decay of the southern aristocracy after the Civil War. Other literary greats like Marcel Proust write about music and wine and society, but Faulkner explores the darkest parts of human nature and showcases our unending selfishness cruelty. Published in 1929 to positive reviews but minimal sales, The Sound and the Fury has remained […]

Illustrations by SHEPARD FAIREY BY MEGAN MATUZAK Patti Smith is a world renowned poet, painter and musician — the high priestess of punk, to be exact — but lately she’s been making her bones as a highly regarded memoirist. Her 2010 memoir, Just Kids, a coming-of-age chronicle of her time in New York City with artist Robert Mapplethorpe in the ‘60s and ‘70s, sold more than a half million copies and won a National Book Award. Her latest, M Train, is one part memoir, one part benediction and one part Homeric odyssey cataloging Smith’s “vagabondia,” a term of art for […]

  LOS ANGELES TIMES: Ahmad Fadil was a high school dropout, a video store clerk and a petty gangster who got tattoos, drank alcohol and sold drugs as a youth in Zarqa, his hometown in northeast Jordan. His mother was so alarmed she sent him to a Muslim self-help class, and he soon found another calling. By the time a U.S. airstrike killed him in 2006, Abu Musab Zarqawi — Fadil’s nom de guerre — had led the Sunni insurgency in Iraq that killed tens of thousands of people and humbled a global superpower by miring it in a vicious […]

  BY BEN LEHMAN Marcel Proust’s, In Search of Lost Time is one of the most celebrated pieces of literature in history. First published in 1913, the story spans across seven volumes, over four thousand pages, and includes some two thousand characters. It chronicles the life of a fictionalized Proust — seen through the subjective lens of his own memories — the novel explores facets of life such as love, society, sexuality, and jealousy. A novelist and critic, Proust was born to a wealthy family in Auteuil, France in 1871.  He was a frail, sickly child, and his ill health […]

Artwork by CHLOE CUSHMAN NATIONAL POST: Jonathan Franzen is the punchline to an ongoing joke. Please forgive me for being the boorish person who attempts to explain the gag. Franzen, with his noted self-seriousness, his ambivalence about modernity, his anger at the world for turning, always turning, stands in for a character type, one frequently dismissed on Twitter with the ironic (but dead serious) nouning of “old.” Franzen, at 56, is an Old. He is chagrined and scandalized by kids today, with our student debt and our start-ups, with our selfies and our Snapchat. In the media, Franzen is all […]

  BY COLE NOWLIN John Kennedy Toole’s picaresque classic, A Confederacy of Dunces, is an absurdist-comic masterstroke of a novel. It is the story of Ignatius Reilly, an educated, layabout medieval scholar, living in New Orleans with his mother. Ignatius is an obese, petulant, eloquent man-elephant who belches Boethius and hot dog gas while promenading around New Orleans’ French Quarter. A Confederacy of Dunces meanders through Ignatius’s stumblings around the Big Easy allowing ample room for comic digression and development of other characters. Toole does a masterful job of capturing the slang and patois of the denizens of the French […]