by Anna Clark
- USA -

See’s new novel, Shanghai Girls, follows the lives of Pearl and May Chin—two sisters enjoying the glamorous life of “the Paris of Asia”—Shanghai in 1937. Their father owns a prosperous rickshaw business while the sisters, as “Beautiful Girls,” pose in silk dresses for paintings on cigarette and soap ads.

Pearl and May don’t know it yet, but their lives are on the brink. Japan will soon invade China, bringing a world war to their country, and they are about to set off on a terrifying journey that takes them through wartime China, across the Pacific Ocean, and through interrogation and detainment at Angel Island (called the Ellis Island of the West). They find Los Angeles’ China City, experience the odd relationship between Hollywood and Chinese actresses, and brave the Communist witch-hunts that targeted Chinese during the 1950s. Shanghai Girls focuses on the tense and loving relationship of sisters in an epic context of war, immigration, racism, wealth and marriage.

by Anna Clark
- USA -

Who talks about prisoners these days? Certainly not the US presidential candidates or most others up for election in 2008, unless it’s in tangential “get tough on crime” rhetoric. In the media, quality coverage such as Jeff Gerritt’s Pulitzer-nominated series on medical care in Michigan prisons, which appeared last year in The Detroit Free Press, is overshadowed by courtroom dramas and legal thrillers. MSNBC has built something of a franchise in its “To Catch a Predator” series, which lures people to a Dateline set, humiliates them by reading their chat room transcripts with someone they thought was underage, and then calls on a police crew to rather unnecessarily tackle them in an arrest sequence right out of a summer blockbuster.

Authentic communication from and about prisoners exists, but it’s relegated to a niche market outside of most print and online news sources, of influential political blogs, of the catalogues of big publishers, and of the speeches of election year candidates. Presumably, its minimal share of attention is justified because decision makers think their audiences don’t care much about prisons and the people in them.

by Anna Clark
- USA -

There comes a time when a reader is starved for something new.

A lot of tremendous fiction is being published these days, but most people don’t ever hear about it. In a time when big publishers pay to place their titles on the front tables of bookstores like Barnes & Noble and Borders, when book reviews are slashed in most periodicals, when smaller publishers simply don’t have the cash to send their brightest talents out on book tours—then the avid reader tends to hear about the same authors over and over again, while work they might fall in love with slips through the cracks.

I love Cynthia Reeves’ new book, Badlands, winner of the 2006 Miami University Press Novella Contest. Being the work of a debut author and published by a small publisher, I might not have heard of it if I hadn’t attended graduate school with Reeves. The two of us entered the fiction program at Warren Wilson College in Asheville, North Carolina in 2004. Reeves worked on this book as a student, which meant that I was lucky enough to see the beginnings of Badlands. I was drawn to her creative sensibility; her story tells itself not in the traditional “first this, then that” chronology of mainstream fiction. Rather, her characters are developed through the juxtaposition of their dreams and memories with their present lives.

by Anna Clark
USA

Green consciousness is finally hitting that bastion of carbon emissions with a war-inducing appetite for oil: the American automobile.

Between the nationwide Step It Up campaign of community activism and Al Gore’s Academy-Award winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, the clamor for global warming action is forcing U.S. automakers to respond. And they are—if a bit begrudgingly.

Hybrid and fuel-efficient cars are hot; GM’s gone so far as to design a plug-in concept car that may never need gasoline. Tellingly, Detroit’s road-maintenance and salt trucks run on biodiesel. With the U.S. Supreme Court ruling earlier this month that gives the Environmental Protection Agency authority to regulate fuel efficiency—expressly because global warming is a “serious threat”—we might expect a green ethic to become more inherent to American cars.

It marks a significant change for an industry built on the premise of wastefulness. Giles Slade’s illuminating book, Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America, points to Detroit automakers for popularizing the corporate strategy that justifies the nation’s overproduction of goods by creating wants and needs in consumers.