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And I’m not talking about the beer, though it may help! (Art by Chitra Ganesh) This is one of these short books that you finish in a few hours and it resonates with you for weeks, maybe years and possibly for the rest of your life. Corona reads like a fascinating collection of journals and fiction mashed together in a backpack and bound as is. It’s quite fitting that author Bushra Rehman was a vagabond poet. Bushra and I met not even a year after after 9/11 and it’s a complete coincidence that I’m posting this on an anniversary of 9/11. 9/11 actually figures into the fabric of Corona, as narrator Razia Mirza, a Pakistani woman from Corona, Queens, travels through the country and through time, through troubled relationships and relationships with trouble. Smoking pot with asshole soon-to-be-ex-boyfriends. Drinking beer with racists in the burbs. It’s funny, it’s sad and, if you hang on long enough like Razia manages to, it’s funny again. The book is a brilliant rendering of life and if it is not always life-affirming, it is always genuine and honest. Are you in New York this Friday Sept. 13? I strongly suggest you come to the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and see Bushra in all her glory. She is a fantastic reader and always a joy to behold. Below is Bushra’s official bio. Below that is a little romp of a Q&A with her. Bushra Rehman’s first novel Corona (Sibling Rivalry Press) is a dark comedy about being South Asian in the United States and was noted among this year’s Best Debut Fiction by Poets & Writers. Rehman’s first book, which she co-edited with Daisy Hernandez, Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism was included in Ms. Magazine’s 100 Best Non-Fiction Books of All Time. Her writing has been featured in numerous anthologies and on BBC Radio 4, WNYC, and KPFA and in Poets & Writers, The New York Times, India Currents, Crab Orchard Review, Sepia Mutiny, Color Lines, The Feminist Wire, and Mizna: Prose, Poetry and Art Exploring Arab America. 1) When we met you were a poet. Did you shift to narrative storytelling or have you been collecting these stories all along? Yes, I remember those crazy tours we did with the Asian American Literary Caravan, hitting unsuspecting Asian-American students all over the country with our insidious literature! My poems were all so heavy and disturbing back then that I started to tell funny stories in the middle about my own personal misadventures to lighten the mood. That way the audience could join me on the emotional rollercoaster of my mind.  The book is composed of some of those funny stories, mixed in with some heavy dark moments. Onwards with the Asian American Literary Caravan! 2) There are so many crazy, dangerous and awful things that happen in Corona, and yet the reader comes away from it in the same way that the narrator Razia does — with a measure of humor. I feel that people who’ve lived tough lives are...
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And I’m not talking about the beer, though it may help! (Art by Chitra Ganesh) This is one of these short books that you finish in a few hours and it resonates with you for weeks, maybe years and possibly for the rest of your life. Corona reads like a fascinating collection of journals and fiction mashed together in a backpack and bound as is. It’s quite fitting that author Bushra Rehman was a vagabond poet. Bushra and I met not even a year after after 9/11 and it’s a complete coincidence that I’m posting this on an anniversary of 9/11. 9/11 actually figures into the fabric of Corona, as narrator Razia Mirza, a Pakistani woman from Corona, Queens, travels through the country and through time, through troubled relationships and relationships with trouble. Smoking pot with asshole soon-to-be-ex-boyfriends. Drinking beer with racists in the burbs. It’s funny, it’s sad and, if you hang on long enough like Razia manages to, it’s funny again. The book is a brilliant rendering of life and if it is not always life-affirming, it is always genuine and honest. Are you in New York this Friday Sept. 13? I strongly suggest you come to the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and see Bushra in all her glory. She is a fantastic reader and always a joy to behold. Below is Bushra’s official bio. Below that is a little romp of a Q&A with her. Bushra Rehman’s first novel Corona (Sibling Rivalry Press) is a dark comedy about being South Asian in the United States and was noted among this year’s Best Debut Fiction by Poets & Writers. Rehman’s first book, which she co-edited with Daisy Hernandez, Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism was included in Ms. Magazine’s 100 Best Non-Fiction Books of All Time. Her writing has been featured in numerous anthologies and on BBC Radio 4, WNYC, and KPFA and in Poets & Writers, The New York Times, India Currents, Crab Orchard Review, Sepia Mutiny, Color Lines, The Feminist Wire, and Mizna: Prose, Poetry and Art Exploring Arab America. 1) When we met you were a poet. Did you shift to narrative storytelling or have you been collecting these stories all along? Yes, I remember those crazy tours we did with the Asian American Literary Caravan, hitting unsuspecting Asian-American students all over the country with our insidious literature! My poems were all so heavy and disturbing back then that I started to tell funny stories in the middle about my own personal misadventures to lighten the mood. That way the audience could join me on the emotional rollercoaster of my mind.  The book is composed of some of those funny stories, mixed in with some heavy dark moments. Onwards with the Asian American Literary Caravan! 2) There are so many crazy, dangerous and awful things that happen in Corona, and yet the reader comes away from it in the same way that the narrator Razia does — with a measure of humor. I feel that people who’ve lived tough lives are...
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OITA  ~ “Skull Reaper Eiji” (transliterated as “Skull Reaper A-ji” by the Western press) was elected to the city council in this city on the southernmost Japanese island of Kyushu back in February promising local folks educational reform and improved social welfare facilities. He managed to garner only 2,828 votes, but that was enough to win him a seat. Eiji, 44, was supposed to attend his first council meeting this week, but his tight-assed council colleagues sucker-punched him by barring him from the meetings until he removed his wrestling mask. The Skull Reaper is the third masked politician elected to public office in Japan.  [TIME ~ Politician Banned for Wearing Wrestling Mask] [youtube]Qid_vhLZPQ4[/youtube]
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Photo by Ken Byrne

 

Gina Apostol’s fascinating novel Gun Dealer’s Daughter has just been published in an American edition. This incredible book traces the seduction of Sol, a young privileged girl, by a romantics in a revolutionary group during the heady Marcos era in The Philippines. The first-person narrative is colored with defective memories and unreliable (but sympathetic) narratives. The reader will fall apart with Sol when she realizes too late that she’s sealed the cruel fate of the one person who truly cared about her.

I recently had the pleasure to read Gun Dealer’s Daughter and Gina agreed to a few questions and answers for Giant Robot readers. For those in New York City, Gina will be reading with Sabina Murray at The Asian American Writers’ Workshop on Thursday Sept. 6.

 

Congratulations on writing such a stunner of a book. Has anything changed editorially from its original 2010 publication on Anvil in the Philippines and the American W.W. Norton edition earlier this year?

I cut some sections of the opening, mainly. I had always thought the beginning was too slow. But I was also attached and wanted to keep everything. I did keep most of it, like the carousel ride, etc., minutiae the reader would not remember but I thought were crucial to my design—the book was designed with a circle in mind. My editor helped me cut. It was great to work with an editor who was, to my mind, always on the same page with me, but had a sharp eye for killing, killing, killing all the lice—Flaubert’s term for the incidents and words you can get rid of, but don’t want to, because they have already sucked your blood.

 

 I was once at this coffee shop in Baltimore listening to this incredibly stunning kid go on and on about Salinger and why she loved Catcher in the Rye. She turned out to be Winona Ryder talking to her boyfriend at the time, Johnny Depp

 

I couldn’t help but feel a certain vibe similar to the film Heathers. The feeling of play-revolutionaries mixed in with adolescent infatuation careening into something horribly real. How far would the teenage-girl narrator go in her zeal to impress Jed? On a different day would Sol (the girl) and Soli have changed places?

I just found the novel’s old Mac disks (those cute, colored squares that slide into the 1990s Macintoshes—I still keep that computer in my closet, like a sad robot of things past) and they were labeled Fil CITR —Filipino Catcher in the Rye. Oh, snap. It was only when I had finished the book that I thought—the bookend of carousels is a secret nod—of course!—to Catcher in the Rye. Heathers is a very good reference. All those films and books about adolescent stupor among the beautiful who become the damned. Now if Winona Ryder could also sing the Internationale as well as epater le bourgeois girls, she’d be Sol’s sister. I was once at this coffee shop in Baltimore listening to this incredibly stunning kid go on and on about Salinger and why she loved Catcher in the Rye. She turned out to be Winona Ryder talking to her boyfriend at the time, Johnny Depp. He was in town doing the movie Crybaby. He had a huge pimple on his face because John Waters kept making him eat Cheez Doodles or something during the shoot. What one learns from such models is that it is not good to take your teenage angst seriously. You might come to a bad end. In Winona’s case, she shoplifted; if only Sol had done the same. I always thought if Holden in Catcher had grown up in the Third World, he’d have turned into a good Maoist instead of just wandering drunk on Fifth Avenue and wiping off graffiti from the Egyptians at the Met. For me, of course, the difference between Heathers and Holden and Sol—and Winona—is that in Gun Dealer, adolescent angst is diagnosed as a political matter—even our malaise has consequences beyond the small pool of our local disenchantments. As for Sol’s thing with Jed—it is, I think, a cover for other lusts—above all the lust to be “real.” She has the Velveteen Bunny around her, after all, toys, the illusory world her parents bought, but like the bunny she wants to be real. Jed is a screen for that hunger, but I think even Sol knows she’s fooling herself. If you asked me, I’d have told her to get rid of Jed, from day one. Guy’s a dope. But I am not Sol. The thing about Sol and Soli is that they are meant to be somehow interchangeable, I think, but I am not sure. That Sol has, perhaps, a desire to be that other one, Soli, her ethical self, maybe, but she’s locked in her own merry-go-round of security, her carousel of comfort.

 

I fucking don’t care if Mitt Romney has ever felt alienated in his life

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