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A Synthesizer of Complexities Within the American Medical-Industrial Complex

an open book

A Synthesizer of Complexities Within the American Medical-Industrial Complex: on The Paregoric Realism of Anna DeForest

In a piece on the craft of writing published by LitHub, novelist, palliative-care physician, and neurologist Anna DeForest proffers their literary position. “The writing I admire and aim to produce works in a language that is entirely without artifice. This means, to be direct, short blunt words without flourish, minimal description, limited internality, and a lot of direct observation of the external world. I prefer to write in the first person, for the same reason, an atheist stance—there is no one outside of the story, there is no place outside from which to tell it.” Now maybe I’m just an opponent of the intentional fallacy or maybe I’m one of those ‘even documentaries aren’t capital-R “Real”’ guys reminding you that it’s all in the framing, that ‘realism’ is both the greatest and the most basic writing trick there is, that of course anything/everything within the pages of a book is invented, fabricated, subjectivized, and debatable, that even nonfiction is fiction, yet still I marvel at the miniaturist word sculptures in DeForest’s first two novels, each pocketsized hardcovers of around 200 pages —A History of Present Illness (2022) and Our Long Marvelous Dying (2024).

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Lives Upended In an Election’s Wake: On “Quarterlife” by Devika Rege

"Quarterlife"

Devika Rege begins her timely, layered, and inquisitive debut novel Quarterlife with an epigraph by Kabir, a 15th century Indian poet. The inscription carries urgency, especially in Hindi. At a literal level, Kabir describes a lover’s red as so intense that the narrator sees the color wherever they look, and in the narrator’s search for redness, they take on the hue. Visually, the verses impart images of sweeping, suffusive scarlet, foreshadowing Quarterlife’s experimental, ever-expanding structure. Thematically, Kabir’s lines convey Rege’s rigor as she reckons with democracy. 

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AWP Day 3: The Party

PARTY BEAR!!!!!!!!

I once heard someone describe being a writer is essentially being someone who didn’t get invited to the party. And I’ve always resonated with that. There was actually a time in middle school when everyone in my class was invited to one girl’s birthday party, except me. I had no idea why. And what made it worse was my teacher, Mrs. Brookman, noticed this and spoke to the girl’s mom, and then that girl’s mother made her invite me. And I was embarrassed the whole time I was there. This is my life in a nutshell. 

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Sunday Stories: “The Sickness That Healed Me”

TV set

The Sickness That Healed Me
by Rola Elnaggar

I was three years old, white as a sheet, heart racing in my ears and hiding between two twin beds, all alone in the apartment with the only source of light coming from the mute TV, when the front door creaked open, and two pairs of footsteps pattered against the carpet—instilling more fear into my frail toddler heart—and stepped into my childhood room. It was my grandma and my uncle. I was relieved it was them and not a stranger coming to kidnap me, but it was so short-lived because the clock was ticking on my days as an only child.

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AWP Day 2: Witches, Impressions, & a Fight at a Reading

Book

At the Rose Books table on Thursday Chelsea Hodson let me know of a reading Archway Editions was holding on Friday night. And I’ve wanted to see Geoff Rickly read.

Google Maps has its shit together today. I went up Crenshaw then left, then up, then left, then up, did that six more times like tacking a sailboat to Sepulveda. And on to 110, to the 10, another vortex, then Sunset Boulevard. 

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