When contemporary novelists address this world, they tend to see it in tragicomic terms, as a ship of fools sailing toward oblivion.
— Art Spiegelman, in NEA Arts Magazine Radical Fiction This week Pankaj Mishra and Jennifer Szalai appear for the first time in our new back-page feature, Bookends, where they take on the question: "How well does contemporary fiction address radical politics?" Mishra is the author of several books, including "The Romantics," a novel, and "From the Ruins of Empire".
And there are contemporary comedies addressing social issues, like the superb shorts of the Burkinabe feminist director Regina Fanta Nacro.
Organized by Nina Felshin, the Zilkha Gallery curator, "Disasters of War" consists mostly of contemporary works addressing recent events.
The show, organized for Independent Curators Inc. by the guest curators Alex Baker and Toby Kamps, contains around 30 artworks by a dozen international contemporary artists addressing space exploration.
In this translation Alter, who previously rendered the Pentateuch and the Psalms into affecting contemporary English, addresses the universal wisdom that the righteous thrive and the wicked suffer in a rational moral order.
But precious little contemporary literature addresses the precursor to apartheid, the Dutch and British race-based system that relied on the forced labor of a steady supply of black Africans, both local and imported from other colonial possessions.
Some discussion of debt reduction is presumably unavoidable in contemporary SOTU addresses.
And they enjoy seeing contemporary issues addressed by recasting them in Star Trek terms and showing how an enlightened human race would/should deal with them.
