Southern Sudan is one of the most impoverished places on earth, and this remote town lacks electricity and running water and is 150 miles from the nearest paved road. Yet, thanks to a remarkable young American who grew up here -- and to readers who backed him -- the town has become a magnet for young Sudanese dreaming of an education. From hundreds...
For a literary culture that fears it is on the brink of total annihilation, we are awfully cavalier about the Great Male Novelists of the last century. It has become popular to denounce those authors, and more particularly to deride the sex scenes in their novels. Even the young male writers who, in the scope of their ambition, would appear to be...
WHEN times are hard, people go to the movies to escape. Like most truisms, this sturdy kernel of Hollywood ideology turns out, on closer examination, not to be entirely true. The urge to escape is powerful, but it also has a way of subverting itself. We may flee to the multiplex or the Netflix queue hoping to escape troubles at home or out there in...