Apropos of nothing, here are some books to read when your country is invaded by Russians.
Red Dawn
Welcome, Ismail!
The Millions is thrilled to welcome a new staff writer, Ismail Muhammad, whose first piece for the site publishes today. (You may have seen Ismail’s work at Zyzzyva and the Los Angeles Review of Books previously.) He splits his time between Los Angeles and Oakland, where he’s currently working on a dissertation and a novel. Find him on Twitter @trapmotives and Instagram @trapmotifs.
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Recommended Reading: Qiu Miaojin
Remember when I wrote about Bonnie Huie’s translation of Qiu Miaojin’s Notes of a Crocodile? Well here’s some more about Huie’s work. Over at the PEN blog, you can check out the translator’s introduction to Miaojin as well as an additional excerpt from the translation-in-progress.
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Jabberwocky Live
Watch Sir Christopher Lee (aka Lord of the Rings‘ Saruman; Star Wars’ Count Dooku) read Lewis Carroll‘s nonsense poem “Jabberwocky” (from Through The Looking Glass).
Next Step: Skynet Becomes Self-Aware
James Harriman-Smith wants to know what humans can learn from a computer’s reading of Shakespeare’s plays. As it turns out, there’s quite a bit.
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Cather People
For The New Yorker Alex Ross describes the role Nebraska’s prairies played in Willa Cather’s writing, his encounters with Cather people, and how he became one himself. “From this roughshod Europe of the mind, Cather also emerged with a complex understanding of American identity. Her symphonic landscapes are inflected with myriad accents, cultures, personal narratives—all stored away in a prodigious memory. “
Can The Millions (and The Rumpus, and every other somewhat-left-leaning lit site) please not traffic in fearmongering regarding Russia? What Sessions did in his confirmation hearing was a terrible and all-too-telling precedent, and there certainly are a whole lot of stray connections between figures involved in Trump’s campaign (and the right-wing / international nationalist movement more generally) that one can conjecture about. But there is as yet no concrete *evidence* of a Russian “invasion.” In the meantime, there are plenty of terrors in the Trump admin’s regard for immigrants and brown and black people for us all to focus on, educate ourselves about, and resist. Same goes for their stance on government agencies and regulations. How about a deregulation reading list, or one that probes Steve Bannon’s desire to gut the government…?