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Agreeing on Fables at 1812.gc.ca
A slick commercial appeared on Canadian television last year, featuring redcoats and period warships, with narrator intoning: “Two hundred years ago, the United States invaded our territory.” It’s 2013 and the invaders are long gone, but our leaders have set to work driving any ambiguity out of our collective memory. As we enter year two…
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Translating Challawa: Pakistani Writing Between Urdu, English, and Lesbian Erotica
A small but vibrant literary scene has emerged in Pakistan over the last decade. After the events of 9/11 pushed their country into the media’s spotlight, many authors wanted to write their own narratives rather than have them transposed from elsewhere. Big names soon garnered global fame. Among multiple other awards and nominations, Mohsin Hamid’s…
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XVII, from The Minutes
Let’s begin: Come man know your span sing wilde curcles with no circumference where even the birds cannot pass an emptiness that contracts to a point no count is sure, there is no point to the act if you already know what will come to pass passes, bird- brained song man you know too well…
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Hokkien Lesson 1: The Granddaughter’s Phrasebook
ang mo red hair jin sui very beautiful wah pah de leao see I will beat you to death wah zaiiyah I know wah gaiigee I can do it myself
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The History Wars in Canada
Jack Granatstein’s 1998 jeremiad Who Killed Canadian History? was the opening shot of the History Wars, a fierce conflict about the meaning and purpose of our nation’s past. Academic historians, he satirically concluded, had abandoned traditional military and political history in order to specialize in topics like “the history of housemaid’s knee in Belleville in…
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A Long Strange Trip: Travels Through The North Coast with Denis Johnson
“This is not a dream, illusion, or metaphor. This is California.” -Denis Johnson, Already Dead: A California Gothic On a bright, sultry afternoon at the tail end of last August, my wife Jill and I sat at a picnic table in the spacious courtyard of the Anderson Valley Brewing Company in Boonville, California. The town…