In honor of all of the breathless praise accompanying the release of HBO’s new crime noir series True Detective, The Atlantic is urging readers to revisit two short stories by Nicolas Pizzolatto, the show’s creator. The stories appeared in the magazine ten years ago, when Pizzolatto was an MFA student at the University of Arkansas, and they explore themes that would later mark the HBO series. Chief among those is gender and the relationship between men and women. Pizzolatto is a radically … [Read more...] about Things American: Nic Pizzolatto’s Women Before True Detective
Maurice Chammah
Things American: Egyptian Revolution Reading
While the current crisis in Egypt makes the front pages of our papers on an almost-daily basis, the country's complex, hopeful, and conflicted revolutionary history has also been written in its fiction. This week at ASF, we're featuring two essays that explore the political climate and events that shaped region - through the filter of literature. There was something slightly unsatisfying about the classes on the politics and history of the Middle East that I took as an undergraduate. … [Read more...] about Things American: Egyptian Revolution Reading