At the Margins, graphic novelist, painter, and translator Keum Suk Gendry-Kim discusses her newest book, The Waiting, inspired by her mother’s family separation and reunion in the midst of war. “I speak about the violence that took place in Korean history,” she says. “But with these stories, I am able to show the resilience of the people who lived through these hardships. The themes of all my books are connected. My parents lived through these events—sometimes intimately, sometimes just by being alive—and I come from them.”
A History of Resilience, Documented by Keum Suk Gendry-Kim
Introducing/A New Feature
Good news, Twitter poets! The Goddess of 140 Characters decided to let us tweet line breaks. (h/t Slate)
Tuesday New Release Day
The long-awaited follow-up to Yann Martel’s Booker-winner Life of Pi is out: Beatrice and Virgil. Also new, Elegy for April, a thriller by John Banville alter ego Benjamin Black; David Lipsky’s already much discussed interview with David Foster Wallace, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself; and, apparently hitting shelves ahead of its official release date, a book of philosophy by Marilynne Robinson, Absence of Mind.
Not at All Exaggerated
In 1913, Ambrose Bierce, at the age of seventy-one, rode a horse from California to Mexico, where he planned to cover the ongoing Revolutionary War. At some point, he disappeared and died, though accounts vary as to what exactly killed him. At The Paris Review Daily, Forrest Gander recounts the many deaths of the Devil’s Dictionary author, which include a public burning, death by disease and executions at the hands of Mexican soldiers.
Lydia Davis Whistles
TED is Dead
It’s fashionable to hate on TED all of a sudden. In the span of a month, we’ve got this piece by Nathan Jurgenson in The New Inquiry, this one by Benjamin Wallace in New York Magazine, and this one by Megan Garber in The Atlantic.