'When All Else Fails', Rely Upon Your Wit
Rayyan Al-Shawaf's When All Else Fails is politically complex, and its humor is razor-sharp.
11 Jul 2019
Rayyan Al-Shawaf's When All Else Fails is politically complex, and its humor is razor-sharp.
In graphic novel Belonging, Nora Krug takes a single idea – her family's involvement in the Second World War and Nazi Germany – and pursues it with relentless, forensic determination.
Rather than moralize, critique, or make grandiose statements about "digital natives", writer-director-wunderkind Bo Burnham brilliantly visualizes what it means to live in a world in which social media is omnipresent.
It's risky to build the success of a genre psychological thriller on the incorporation of psychological therapeutic techniques. But in Cooke's hands, it works.
A sense of bitterness remains for those of us mourning the loss of this final great literary lion of the 20th century.
This collection gives us Ortberg's trademark gender-swapping, flipping of accepted norms of good vs evil even while blurring the line between them, and startling backstories that do not always reveal underlying motivations but definitely add dark, ironic humor.
The isolation of Blade Runner 2049's inhabitants continually reinforces and enlivens their deep need for genuine connection, communal relationships, which the divisive effects of global capitalism actively undermines.
Mostly Straight is a mostly inadequate answer to the question of male sexual fluidity.
"... (I)n a way we are all trans, we are not fixed beings, we are not one thing, we are constantly changing."
The liminal state between immigrant and citizen becomes the permanent experience of undocumented people.
Psychoanalytic theorist and philosopher Alenka Zupančič provides a brief, difficult, yet ultimately rewarding look at the "otherness" of sex as an act, as identity, as communication.
Richard Power Sayeed's fascinating look at the optimism of New Labour and Cool Britannia in 1997, and the subsequent agony which followed.
My Brother's Husband, My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness, and Generations illustrate how comics artists continue to excel at depicting complex, meaningful coming-out narratives.
After Ireland considers the changing culture, the changing identity, and a fast-changing Ireland in the varied voices and languages of its literature.
Julie Lythcott-Haims gives a voice to the internal dialogue—the self-loathing, really—of living a life as a biracial woman who, for most of her life, wasn't quite sure if she was allowed to call herself black.
© 1999-2018 Popmatters.com. All rights reserved.
Popmatters is wholly independently owned and operated.