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Beth Karbe, They Came In A White Convertible
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It's a fucking fantastic book. Go read it!
if you ever think that transformative fiction and a focus on representation is only territory for fic, remember that in 2017 Gabriela Cabezón Cámara published a novel centered on the wife of Argentina’s most emblematic literary character, who male writers have been writing about and waxing poetic about and self-inserting through for ages, made it a lesbian romance and, as a side-character, wrote said iconic literary character as a trans woman, while developing also life in communities of native people as well as the cruelty of measures against them and different forms of social abuse that took place at the time. Las Aventuras de la China Iron/The Adventures of China Iron is the book. 
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The past has left us orphans, as it has the rest of the planet, and we must join together in inventing our common future. World history has become everyone’s task, and our own labyrinth is the laby­rinth of all mankind.
The Labyrinth of Solitude, Octavio Paz
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The City We Became by N. K. Jemisin
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Victor Hugo writes like a guy who looked at contemporary academics arguing about what past centuries’ literary works had really meant to say, and decided to include all of the relevant cultural context right there in the text just in case.
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The novel has become a function of the fragmented society, the fragmented consciousness. Human beings are so divided, are becoming more and more divided, and more subdivided in themselves, reflecting the world, that they reach out desperately, not knowing they do it, for information about other groups inside their own country, let alone about groups in other countries. It is a blind grasping out for their own wholeness, and the novel-report is a means towards it. Inside this country, Britain, the middle-class has no knowledge of the lives of the working-people, and vice-versa; and reports and articles and novels are sold across the frontiers, are read as if savage tribes were being investigated. Those fishermen in Scotland were a different species from the coalminers I stayed with in Yorkshire; and both come from a different world than the housing estate outside London.
Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
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“You are talking like a whore,” said Molly; then looked conscious, smiling, because she was surprised she had used the word.
“Oddly enough it’s only by the greatest effort of will I don’t feel like one. They put so much effort—oh unconsciously, of course, and that’s where they win, every time, into making one feel it. Well. Anyway. I said, ‘Good night, Richard, I’m so sleepy, and thank you so much for showing me all that high life.’ He stood there wondering if he shouldn’t say, Oh dear, I’ve got to go home to my dreary wife, for the fourth time. He was wondering why that unimaginative woman Anna was so unsympathetic to him. Then I could see him thinking, of course, she’s nothing but an intellectual, what a pity I didn’t take one of my other girls. So then I waited—you know, for that moment, when they have to pay one back? He said: ‘Anna, you should take more care of yourself, you’re looking ten years older than you should, you are getting positively wizened.’ So I said, ‘But Richard, if I’d said to you, Oh yes, do come into bed, at this very moment you’d be saying how beautiful I was. Surely the truth lies somewhere in between?’ …”
Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
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Anna held herself quiet, with effort. What Molly had said was pure spite: she was saying, I’m glad that you are going to be subjected to the pressures the rest of us have to face. Anna thought, I wish I hadn’t become so conscious of everything, every little nuance. Once I wouldn’t have noticed: now every conversation, every encounter with a person seems like crossing a mined field; and why can’t I accept that one’s closest friends at
Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
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I began to wish I’d already lived my life, because I simply couldn’t bear living it any longer. I dreamed of being an old man with a hoarse voice, a man who had already seen the world, who had loved, hated, and lost, had children and grandchildren, who had sat clapping at their graduations and weddings.
But that’s not how it goes, I told myself when I’d thought about this long enough, so I took my sunglasses out of the drawer, and when I put them on I stepped outside and enrolled in new courses at the university and signed up for membership at a gym. That’s how it works, it’s all about your attitude, I repeated to myself ad infinitum, attitude, that’s what matters, and I told myself it was a beautiful, sunny day, the snow glistening like diamond dust, and I got off the bus not because it was full and I would have to stand up but because I wanted to walk the rest of the journey, and my voice didn’t quiver as I took care of matters on the telephone and I didn’t even hunch my shoulders when I walked past benches full of people.
So I told the cashier at the supermarket that tonight I was going to make a meal for my significant other with eggplant and zucchini, and when I came home I threw the eggplants and zucchinis in the garbage can and wept. I fell into bed, exhausted, and when I woke up the next morning I looked out of the window and said out loud: Today.
Today is an immeasurably beautiful day.
Pajtim Statovci, My Cat Yugoslavia
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We were cut off from two different countries that nonetheless had come to resemble each other more and more, and we no longer belonged in either one. We were vagrants, travelers pushed to the margins of society, people without a homeland, an identity, or a nationality.
Back in Kosovo, people wondered why we could no longer eat white bread and why we wanted to spread our sliced—not torn—pieces of bread with margarine, why we couldn’t bear the stench of burning rubbish, and why the hot summer days made us feel like we were suffocating. They didn’t understand why we wanted to wash our laundry and dishes in machines and not by hand, why we bought bread from the store when you could bake it yourself. When we picked up a fork, they reminded us that pite was supposed to be eaten by hand. This isn’t a restaurant, you know. Do you think you’re better than us?
In Finland we were outcasts. We had no work, no long-term plans, no idea how long we would be allowed to stay. At one point we stopped talking about the subject altogether. We all knew we couldn’t carry on living the way we had before.
Pajtim Statovci, My Cat Yugoslavia
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When the war ended, the little sympathy we had received from people here ended as abruptly as if it had been shoved from the roof of the building. Right, you got what you wanted. When are you going home? While the war was still raging our presence was somehow justifiable because we were refugees.
Pajtim Statovci, My Cat Yugoslavia
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When the news reported the events in Račak on January 15, 1999, we began to question the existence of God. What had that woman, gunned down, ever done to the Serbs? What had that child done, what had those desperate men done, men who realized their village was surrounded by Serb troops? And when those men saw the soldiers shooting randomly at innocent people, where was God then? Where was he? When men who had been captured were suddenly told, Run away, and when those men ran away up the hill only to be cut down halfway there, where was he? And when after this skirmish they showed video footage of an orphaned little boy weeping, what did God do with that child?
God did nothing with that child because there was no God. There was war, and war was a row of tornadoes tearing up the ground one after the other, and war was a set of tidal waves swallowing up buildings, villages, towns, a tsunami of water kneading them into a paste before finally spitting them out.
Pajtim Statovci, My Cat Yugoslavia
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At times it seemed as though what we saw on television couldn’t really be happening. It was a mirage, an unreal reflection of unreal events. But it was all truly happening, the lives of every single one of those people had ended, and I felt like a coward for refusing to die in the conflict. We will all die one day, I thought, and there will be nothing left of us. Wouldn’t it be nobler to die back home rather than to run away? To die in battle rather than of old age?
Pajtim Statovci, My Cat Yugoslavia
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Oops, wrong blog!
In the room opposite was a family of eight from Somalia. They made a racket night and day and their language was strange. When I saw my children playing with their dark-skinned children it felt as though something was wrong, something had been turned upside down. We had become just like them; we befriended them because we too were oppressed and disliked. We were as rejected as the Gypsies, another group of people who had come from far away and wound up in this country, a place where the people were so white they might as well have been made of snow. I considered us white too, but in their eyes we weren’t white in the same way.
Pajtim Statovci, My Cat Yugoslavia
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Apparently it hadn’t occurred to the cat that I was telling him the first things that came into my head, that I was tailoring my story to what I thought he wanted to hear. The cat wanted a story whose protagonist’s life began from a set of impossible circumstances, a story that would be so heart-wrenching that it might make him shake his head at the state of the world. But he wanted the story to end in such a way that he was able to applaud the protagonist’s ability to take matters into his own hands—despite the fact that the protagonist had learned that skill specifically so that he could shake off the burden of other people’s pity—and in order to reaffirm his own beliefs. Anyone can change the direction of his life, any time at all, if only he has enough motivation: that was the moral of the story. The cat found it easier to believe this than to think about what it actually meant: that the word anyone actually referred to a very small group of people, that time has no direction, and that motivation is rarely the salient difference between people
Pajtim Statovci, My Cat Yugoslavia (trans. David Hackston)
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In the Kingdom of Heaven there is no grandeur to be won, ... there is no possibility of sacrifice, all is rest and joy. For this reason, bowed down by suffering and duties, beautiful in the midst of his misery, capable of loving in the face of afflictions and trials, man finds his greatness, his fullest measure, only in the Kingdom of This World.
Alejo Carpentier, The Kingdom of this World (trans. Harriet de Onís)
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Literary facts:
The premise of the second part of Don Quixote is that the protagonist is on a quest to beat up a guy who wrote an unflattering fanfic about him
The Tale of Genji contains a chapter with no text to reflect the fact that the viewpoint character has just died
At one point the framing narrative of Frankenstein develops into a dude telling a story about a dude telling a story about a dude telling a story
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