War Story Gwen Edelman 176pp, Bloomsbury, £12.99 A short, well-made novel, Gwen Edelman's War Story takes on huge, messy topics - the Holocaust, romantic love, the seductive power of stories - and tailors them to the human scale.
In the countless emails, Zoey and I exchanged, when it came to first discussing the murders, and then this piece and her on-going journey, at one point she thanked me for my efforts, saying, "It's a messy, shitty topic, but at the bottom of it is so much light and love".
They grow up trying to one-up each other with baseball statistics, and as adults they're more likely than women to converse about topics in the news -- anything to avoid messy emotional topics that might actually be personally important.
Playwrights have tackled the messy subject of war at least since the Greek tragedians did, and if their dramatic pleas for peace have gone largely unheeded, the dramatist's compulsion to write about the topic has hardly waned.
Women's bodies, women's lives, women's rights: those are messy, incendiary topics, best avoided.
He thought the address "fairly messy", with various topics "strangely absent, such as why Labour lost the last election, and how Labour would win the next election".
Physical intimidation was one of the topics Messier addressed while standing near the door to the coach's room for a news conference.
But Mr. Schwartz added: "It's complicated, it's messy, it's a scary topic.
In some areas, we regularly have no option but to close threads earlier than anticipated when the conversation has ranged far off topic or descended into a messy flame war.
