Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick

The Adjustment Bureau
Walt Giersbach ‘61

The release Mar. 4 of The Adjustment Bureau, starring Matt Damon and Emily Blunt, will send some movie-goers back to their sources to review author Philip K. Dick’s oeuvre.  They should.  This seminal author’s 46 books and 121 short stories have been adapted to 10 films.  (Confession: I have 13 Dick books on my shelves and one e-book collection of stories.) 

It wasn’t always this way, in the 1950s and ‘60s when Dick was writing for pulp science fiction magazines.  Jonathan Lethem notes in the foreword to The Stories of Philip K. Dick that Dick worked to gain recognition and usually failed.  He also takes note of Dick’s “remarkably personal vision of paranoia and dislocation.”  
Laura Miller, an editor at Salon.com, wrote, “Dick has his share of champions, ranging from rock musicians to French postmodernists.  Since his best work was published as pulp science fiction, they've had their hands full just trying to win him a little credibility.  Meanwhile, almost unremarked, Dick's sensibility has seeped wide and deep into contemporary life.” 

Some writers rise like Roman candles before fading, their books relegated to flea markets.  Fortunately, Dick has heirs and a literary executor maintaining his reputation, and I presume merchandising his work beyond his death in 1982.  In lieu of a seeing his works reissued, there are always new and used bookstores, and his official site, http://www.philipkdick.com/, to keep his work alive.

The plot of The Adjustment Bureau isn’t material here.  (A man confronts the fact that he doesn’t have free will in the face of the Bureau that guides his decision-making process.)  In any case, it was extensively rewritten by Screenwriter-Director George Nolfi.  Key to the storyline of both book and film, however, is Dick’s existential question of what is human and real.

The other films were adaptations as well, often surpassing the original story.  You’ll remember Blade Runner (based on "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?"), Screamers (based on "Second Variety"), Total Recall (based on "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale"), Confessions d'un Barjo (French, based on "Confessions of a Crap Artist"), Impostor, Minority Report, Paycheck, and A Scanner Darkly.  King of the Elves is set for movie release in 2012.  Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick includes “The Adjustment Bureau” and 21 other short stories including “Paycheck” and “The Minority Report.”

Dick wrote of made-up worlds – of a farmer on Mars, a police agency that arrests criminals before they commit a crime, and an alternative history in which the Axis powers win World War II.  Often, he posed those questions of what is human and what is real.  This might also have been Dick’s own cri de coeur for never being recognized as a “real” literary writer.

Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick, 2000, Pantheon Book, ISBN-13: 978-0-307-49777-2
[on order for Burling Library]

Featuring Asian American Authors: Theresa Cha

Submitted by Kelly Musselman '11

Theresa Cha was born in 1951 in Korea.  She moved around a lot in Korea as a child because of the war and then her family immigrated to America.  She received her B.A., M.A., and M.F.A. from University of California, Berkeley.  She also moved to Paris for her Post-Graduate study.  She began studying films and collected a number of essays on the subject entitled Apparatus, Cinematographic Apparatus: Selected Writings (1981).

Cha published her only book, Dictee, in the same year she was murdered.  The book is a semi-autobiographical work composed in many genres.

"The story contained in [Dictee] is of several women. First there is a Korean revolutionary, Yu guan Soon; then Joan of Arc and St. Theresa of Lisieuz make an appearance, as well as Cha's mother and Cha, herself; also included are the Greek goddesses Demeter and Persephone; and Hyung Soon Huo, a Korean born first-generation immigrant.[...]

Dictee is divided into nine parts, each part dedicated to one of the nine Greek muses, and it focuses on developing metaphors for loss and dislocation. The book has also been described as a collage, as it contains not only various styles of writing, such as poetry, handwritten drafts, historical documents, biographical excerpts, letters, and translation exercises, it also incorporates maps, charts, and photographs."  -- From Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2004. From Literature Resource Center.

For more information about Theresa Cha, please see the articles in Literature Resource Center. Or check out Dictee from Burling Library:

Dictee
Burling 3rd Floor  PS3553.H13 D5 1995

Featuring Asian American Authors: Monique Truong

Submitted by Kelly Musselman '11

Monique Truong was born in Vietnam in 1968 and immigrated to the United States in 1975.  She graduated from Yale University in 1990 and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.  She won the Bard Fiction Prize in 2003 and the Young Lions Fiction Award in 2004, both for her first book, The Book of Salt.  Her second novel, Bitter in the Mouth, was semi-autobiographical in nature and focused on an outsider in the town where Monique lived for four years as a child in the U.S.  Linda, the main character, has synesthesia and the story details her life and her interactions with the other residents of Boiling Springs.

"Monique Truong's novel The Book of Salt is set in the household of writers Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in 1920s Paris. Revolving around a Vietnamese cook the lesbian couple have hired, a man named Binh, the novel mixes reality with fiction. While Binh is a fictional character, Stein and Toklas did indeed have a Vietnamese cook in Paris, a cook mentioned only in passing in several of their writings.

Truong was born in Vietnam and was taken out of the country as a child just before the communist takeover in 1975. Her own experience as a refugee who journeyed far from her homeland, led her to wonder about the circumstances that prompted Stein and Toklas to leave America to live in France, and why their cook left Vietnam behind to move to Europe. Through the character of Binh, who narrates The Book of Salt, she explores these questions. "The book," according to Christopher Benfey in the New York Times Book Review, "is about exile: both Binh's aching distance from his native Saigon and his two Mesdames' cheerful distance from America."

In Troung's novel Binh leaves Vietnam because his father disapproved of his homosexuality and forced him out of the house. After spending several years at sea, he arrives in France, where he works for several families before joining Stein and Toklas. Binh also enjoys the pleasures of Paris's indulgent sexual underground, even having a tryst with a young Ho Chi Minh. While describing both Binh's life in Vietnam and his new life in the Stein household, The Book of Salt also includes much information about Binh's Vietnamese cooking.

"The novel is in fact largely a meditation on the senses and sensuality," a critic for Kirkus Reviews wrote. By "interweaving the narrative with suggestions of ingredients, recipes, and exotic dishes, Truong provides a savory debut novel of unexpected depth and emotion," Margaret Flanagan stated in Booklist. Shirley N. Quan in Library Journal concluded of The Book of Salt that "Truong is able to create Asian characters and blend them with historical elements to create a work that will appeal to a broad audience." -- From Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2004. From Literature Resource Center.

For more information about Monique Truong, please see the articles in Literature Resource Center, visit her Web site, or check out one of her books from Burling Library (or your local library!):

The Book of Salt
 Burling 3rd Floor  PS3620.R86 B66 2003
Bitter in the Mouth 
Burling 3rd Floor PS3620.R86 B57 2010


What are you reading? Let us know by emailing bookreview@grinnell.edu

La Belle Vie: Embedded, Tenured, and Intellectually Lazy – or - Why My Contempt for Corporate Media Continues to Sprout Like a Weed

Review of Essay of the Following Titles:


Myra MacPherson. “All Governments Lie”: The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I.F. Stone. New York: Scribner, 2006 [On order for Burling Library]

Ahmed Mansour. Inside Fallujah: The Unembedded Story. Northampton Massachusetts: Olive Branch Books, 2009. [On order for Burling Library]

Nir Rosen. Aftermath: Following the Bloodshed of America's Wars in the Muslim World. New York: Nation Books, 2010. [On order for Burling Library]


Chris Hedges.  Death of the Liberal Class. New York: Nation Books, 2010. [On order for Burling Library].

213.251.145.96 (WikiLeaks)

Reviewed by T. Hatch

Teddy Roosevelt coined the term “muckraker” as a pejorative way of referring to troublesome reporters.  I.F. Stone was firmly from this tradition and was proud to be nudnik number one pestering those exercising power inside the establishment. Myra MacPherson's "All Governments Lie”: The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I.F. Stone, chronicles his career which spanned from the 1920s until 1989.  Unlike the majority of journalists, both then and now, Stone was uncorrupted by an unchaste desire for access (as well as celebrity and fortune) that continues to plague the fourth estate. 

Stone was a mainstream member of the press until he was blacklisted in 1950.  He responded to forced unemployment by becoming an entrepreneur and publishing  I.F. Stone's Weekly for the next twenty-three years. In a sense, Stone was the godfather of alternative U.S. media. It is tempting then to play a game of what would Izzy do (WWID) when viewing the behavior of mainstream media types in our own time.  It seems unlikely, for example, that Stone would have said “I just want you to know I think Navy SEALS rock” like Katie Couric did, nor would he have been paid $15 million dollars a year to say it.  And, certainly no one would have ever referred to him as “America's sweetheart.”

I.F. Stone spent the better part of his career as a determined critic of mainstream media support of the Cold War and later as one who condemned the Vietnam War as an example of the tragic consequences of the arrogance of power in both the government and the media.  Stone was always about journalism from below. He once opined that “Establishment reporters undoubtedly know a lot of things I don't. But a lot of what they know isn't true.” Yet even he would be shocked by the servile nature of corporate media today.

Al Franken in his book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them (2003) answers the charge that the media in this country has a liberal bias by arguing that sure the media suffers from being biased but most notably from the biases of making a lot of money and being lazy. While celebrity embedded journalists where holed up in Baghdad's green zone spending their evenings over cocktails there were actually journalists in the field not acting as government propagandists doing the real work of journalism. 

Ahmed Mansour of al-Jazeera has written of his experiences covering the U.S. assaults (there were actually two separate battles) on Fallujah.  In Inside Fallujah: The Unembedded Story, he recounts how the televised murder of four Blackwater mercenaries on April 2,  2004 outraged the Bush administration to the point that they ordered that revenge be exacted against the city of Fallujah in the Anbar province of Iraq. While the killing of the Blackwater operatives was not an isolated incident the problem was that it was broadcast globally.  The U.S.'s global image had been tarnished and only an act of retribution could restore American honor. “This revenge would be exacted not only on the insurgents who committed the murder, but also on the 300,000 civilian residents of Fallujah.”

Mansour and his al-Jazeera satellite news team remained in Fallujah during the entire battle known as Operation Vigilant Resolve.  The U.S. Marines surrounded the city and set up speakers that could be heard inside the city calling for handing over the “evil doers.”  Mansour and his crew reported live on the campaign that the Marines conducted against the cultural and religious identity of Fallujah by directly targeting mosques.  They recounted how after occupying Fallujah's public hospital and banning its staff and doctors from the premises, the U.S. forces then bombed the emergency hospital that had been established.  They also related stories of Fallujans being shot by snipers as they attempted to bury their dead.  If all of this was not annoying enough to Donald Rumsfeld and L. Paul Bremer, the final straw was al-Jazeera exposing in filmed coverage the lie American officials told when they proclaimed to the world that they had declared a unilateral cease-fire effective at noon April 9, 2004. 

Mansour was accused of propagating lies, cooperating with the insurgents, and actively supporting Saddam Hussein.  As we learned later, George W. Bush went as far as to propose bombing al-Jazeera's headquarter in Doha Qatar to Tony Blair.  When this story broke on November 22, 2004 in the U.K.'s Daily Mirror the headline read “EXCLUSIVE: BUSH PLOT TO BOMB HIS ARAB ALLIES.”  In August of 2004, the compliant Ayad Allawi issued orders to close al-Jazeera's Baghdad bureau.  Meanwhile al-Jazeera cameraman Sami al-Haj was being tortured at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility refusing to bend to U.S. pressure to implicate al-Jazeera as being connected to al-Qaeda. 
The U.S. vendetta against al-Jazeera went as far as to demand that one of the conditions of Sami al-Haj's release from Guantanamo was that the news agency could not be present at the airport when he arrived May 2, 2008 after six plus years in captivity with no charges ever filed replete with “enhanced interrogations.”

On November 7, 2004, days after George W. Bush's re-election, the second attack on Fallujah a.k.a. Operation Phantom fury was launched. With no al-Jazeera to contend with, the Marines attacked a city of 300,000 inhabitants to root out fewer than 2,000 belligerents if fresh recruits and locals with shotguns are included in the total.  The big lie to this operation was that the infamous al-Zarqawi and his al-Qaeda in Iraq forces were present in the city.  Although al-Jazeera was not there, the truth still leaked out (see Italy's RAI network's documentary Fallujah: The Hidden Massacre).

Nir Rosen In Aftermath: Following the Bloodshed of America's Wars in the Muslim World has provided us with the gold standard of independent unembedded reportage.  This book is really about the Bush legacy in the Middle East. The war in Iraq has indeed changed everything in the Muslim World.   Instead of the neoconservative fantasy of democracy spreading throughout the Middle East it was radical Islam that had washed over the region. Aftermath is also the story of the Iraqi diaspora which as a refugee crisis surpasses even 1948. Iraqis fled to anyplace they could: Kurdistan, other neighborhoods in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, Egypt, Yemen, Libya and even Denmark among other places.

Rosen is remarkable for an American journalist in that he mingles among the people he covers and is actually curious enough to learn their language and something about their culture [essentially] operating without a safety net in an Arab country where people get shot on a regular basis. He is rightfully critical of the Iraq and terrorism “experts” who are largely pundits who have catered to the American administration and the occupation while never bothering to learn how to speak or read Arabic.  Many of the “experts” have never set foot in Iraq and if they have they derive lessons such as Thomas L. Friedman's comment that the American occupation of Iraq was actually “a million acts of kindness.”

This may be one of the most comprehensive and important books on the U.S. in the Middle East to date. The reader gets a view of how Nouri Maliki has now firmly established Iraqi independence albeit in an authoritarian way and at a tremendous cost.  Maybe the most valuable thing this book does is to expose the mainstream media myth that the General David Petraeus led surge was a victory.  Rosen, in graphic detail, describes the deeply flawed naked emperor of counterinsurgency doctrine (COIN). What is truly dangerous about the lessons derived by the corporate media is that COIN was not the decisive factor in Iraq they erroneously believed it to be.  Further, the mistake is compounded when the doctrine is mindlessly applied to an entirely different situation in Afghanistan.  If one is interested, Rosen did an hour and fifteen-minute program on C Span Book TV recently, which discusses this particular issue.

Chris Hedges has given us an explanation of why the media has failed so ignominiously in Death of the Liberal Class.  The media, like the other liberal institutions of the church, university, arts, labor unions, and Democratic Party, have sold their souls to cling to what little privilege is still left to them.  Because liberalism refuses to acknowledge the corporate domination of politics, a weakened liberal class seeks comfort in denouncing Islamic radicalism, just as they did communism, rather than fight the structural abuses of the corporate state.  In Hedges' view if one is not actively resisting the corporate domination of the economy and the culture of permanent war then one is part of the problem and not the solution.

Hedges argues that the beginning of the end for moribund liberalism came during the First World War. It was then that modernity in war first reared its ugly head.  Industrial production and vast wartime bureaucracies were in play and mass propaganda was utilized.  More importantly the template for the next century was set as intellectuals, seduced by war, eagerly embraced the original sin of crushing radicals so as not to be labeled unpatriotic.  After a century of corporate Uncle Tomism the liberal class defends the power elite because “it is a full member of the club.”  Hedges, following C. Wright Mills, concludes that this is so because the commercial media faithfully plays their part as essential tools for conformity in society.

The most encouraging development in the alternative media, doing their part to subvert conformity, has been the massive release of government documents through WikiLeaks. Julian Assange has angered the government and mainstream media in the U.S. in the same way al-Jazeera has infuriated the Mubarak regime in Egypt.  In both instances the veracity of what is being reported is not questioned but the messenger is attacked and smeared.  Maybe it should not come as a surprise but the most aggrieved party in the recent wave of WikiLeaks releases seems to be the corporate media itself.  Rather than rightfully hanging their heads in shame at being massively outperformed by a small group of journalistic anarchists operating on meager funding, the response instead is one of indignation.  The recent 60 minutes interview of Julian Assange is an example of this phenomenon.  Steve Kroft seemed personally offended by Assange's temerity in exposing the falsehoods of the powerful with whom Kroft – allegedly an investigative journalist himself – rubs shoulders in a world of celebrity access.

The recent WikiLeaks release of over 250,000 documents makes for fascinating reading.  Despite the authorities initially attempting to prevent the reading of this material by forcing WikiLeaks to change servers a couple of times, the address 213.251.145.96 is on my bookmarks. Reading these is like swimming against a swift current because there is never an end to it.  But two themes come up over and over again.  In the first instance the contempt that those in power have for those whom they supposedly serve is immense.  Secondly, considering the nature of their sleazy business it is understandable that they wish to operate under the veil of secrecy.

When Daniel Ellsberg spoke at Grinnell College in 2005 he proposed then that events like the invasion of Iraq might be stopped by providing a place on the Internet where somebody – such as Colin Powell for instance – could leak documents.  It seemed far-fetched to me at the time, and now as well, that the Secretary of State leaking documents to an Internet site would derail an imperial war. Ellsberg took the position that while seemingly futile it is was still worth a try. Better to have blown the whistle and lost than to never have blown the whistle at all was his position.  In retrospect the Internet might be the proper medium, but the leaks are going to have to come from below, e.g., the case of PFC Bradley Manning. 

I. F. Stone worked as a journalist in the days before the Internet.  But the fundamental guiding principles are the same now as they were then.  Real journalism and real change in society occur when those from below refuse to be corrupted and play along any further.     














 

Readings from Poland and Istanbul: Zbigniew Herbert and Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar

Helen Stuhr-Rommereim, Oberlin alumna and occasional contributor to this blog currently headquartered in Istanbul, writes this about Zbigniew Herbert's Collected Poems, 1956-1998:

"I was handed this book of poetry a couple days ago and I love it more than I can really remember loving any book of poetry."

The Collected Poems, 1956-1998. Translated and edited by Alissa Valles with additional translations by Czeslaw Milosz and Peter Dale Scott.

Burling 3rd Floor PG 7167 .E64 A2 2007

Helen is currently reading A Mind at Peace by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar. translated from the Turkish by Erdağ Gökna. Brooklyn, NY: Archipelago Books, 2008.

Burling 3rd Floor PL248.T234 H8913 2008
She summarizes the text:

"A Mind at Peace is divided into three sections, the first of which is called “İsan,” after Mumtaz’s cousin who took Mumtaz in after the death of his parents. İsan is ill, bed-ridden, and very possibly near death. Under these circumstances Mumtaz first begins his ruminating. He wanders from place to place, from Mosque to Mosque, around the Golden Horn and along the Bosphorus."

To read Helen's full review follow this link.

The Novels of Gary Shteyngart

The Russian Debutante’s Handbook. New York: Riverhead Books, 2002. Burling 3rd Floor PS3619.H79 R87 2002

Absurdistan. New York: Random House, 2006 Burling 3rd Floor PS3619.H79 A63 2006

Super Sad True Love Story. New York : Random House, c2010 Smith Memorial PS3619.H79 S87 2010

R. STUHR

Gary Shteyngart has something to say about the human condition in the 21^st century that I find to be very much worth reading. Through the course of writing his first three novels, I believe Shteyngart has honed his message to a very fine and pristine point. I won’t say that he has perfected his art, because, what might be next—I can only hope he has several more novels to go before perfecting it. If you read all of Shteyngart, and I recommend that you do, start with the first novel and work your way through to Super Sad True Love Story. I found Debutante hard to finish, Absurdistan a little truculent until the wild and ferocious ending, and Super Sad True Love Story a delightful and misery inducing read from start to finish—and it has just stayed with me and I want my friends and the President of the United States to read it.

All three novels feature hapless, lovable yet unlovable anti-heroes born of Russian parents with an extended experience in the United States.  This hapless hero wants to be loved and it helps to have adequate funds.

The Russian Debutante’s Handbook: Vladimir Girshkin moved with his parents from Russia as a small boy. As the novel opens, he works for minimum wage (or perhaps slightly higher than minimum wage) at the Emma Lazarus Immigrant Absorption Society. As the novel progresses, he leaves his professional dominatrix (although in real life very un-dominating) girl friend for the well to do and high living Francesca. Becoming short on funds Girshkin falls under the influence of an eccentric though wealthy immigrant with connections to the underworld. Girshkin ends up working for the immigrant's son in an unnamed East European country filled with wealthy and naïve expatriots. A new girlfriend …, Girshkin discovers poetry . .. , starts a literary magazine (or plans to), … mayhem, high jinx, move on to…

Absurdistan (2006) and enter Misha Borisovich Vainberg, the hefty hero and graduate of Occidental College (a thinly disguised Oberlin College which Shteyngart also attended) with a degree in multiculturalism. He lives in Russia craving the love and acceptance of his gangster father who early in the novel meets a violent end.

Misha’s friends include Alyosha Bob and Misha’s true love, Rouenna, both from the United States. Rouenna leaves Misha for (the much hated by Misha) writer Jerry Shteynfarb, author of The Russian Arriviste's Handjob. In his search for consolation Misha ends up by hook and by crook in the country of Absurdistan, a presumably oil rich nation complete with warring religious factions. It turns out that Golly Burton and Kellogg, Brown, and Root are important contractors in this country, everything has a corporate name, and all the corporations have their own private armies. American officials see this country as the opportune place for a manufactured and distracting war. The war gets out of hand and Misha escapes to a remote enclave of Mountain Jews who revere his father and take him in. No summary of this book can do it justice. You need to experience the final chapters to fully appreciate the satire.

Finally, Super Sad True Love Story. Our hero is Lenny Abramov, who came to the United States with his parents at a very young age. They live in an outlying suburb of NY City, and Lenny lives right in the city. He works for a boss who also serves as his father figure.  They are in the business of extending lives—but only for those with the appropriate credit scores and other high social rankings. The novel takes place, disturbingly, in the not too distant future. Everything is corporatized, the dollar is pegged to the Yuan, everyone is Global teening and equipped with apparats that can be used to rank everyone in a room by hotness as well as give you all their important details (including credit score). The streets are lined with credit poles that flash your credit score as you walk by. The country is starting a program of deporting those with low credit scores and loud speakers and video billboards urge you to shop, which is a patriotic duty as well as an absorbing pass time. Lenny is a reader and owns actual books. This, however, sets him apart and makes him a little bit scary. Most students scan texts—nobody reads entire works.

Lenny meets Eunice Park while vacationing in Italy. He falls madly in love with her. The plot revolves around their evolving love affair and the accompanying dissolution of the United States.

All three novels share themes of rampant consumerism, over indulged and over entitled youth, a creeping, controlling, corporate owned, and militaristic government, and a wide gap between the privileged and the underprivileged. Shteyngart’s novels are humorous and sad at the same time (as is all good humor). It is so close to the truth, so close to what is happening that we don’t need to enact any great suspensions of belief to follow the plot lines to their sorrowful finish.  (Read Shteyngart’s third nove to the end to find out about the importance of Italy in future world affairs)

Finally, I found that Shteyngart’s future was not so different than that portrayed by David Mitchell in Cloud Atlas, although much more human and less robotic. AND, for a good interview with Shteyngart check out the podcasts at the Bat Segundo Show and Fresh Air.

Featuring Asian American Authors: Louis Chu

Louis Chu was born in 1915 in China and immigrated to the US when he was seven years old.  He wrote poetry in high school and graduated from Upsala College in New Jersey with a degree in English. He then got his masters degree in sociology from New York University in 1939.  He began writing fiction while he was serving in the U.S. Army Signal Corps.  He only published one novel: Eat a Bowl of Tea.

Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia of American Literature claims that in Eat a Bowl of Tea, Chu "provides a realistic portrayal of life in New York's Chinatown, portraying well the colloquial speech and the tensions of a world in which all the characters are Chinese."

The book met with a lot of criticism at its time of publication (1961) because it dealt with themes not openly talked about in any literature, much less in ethnic American literature.  These themes include extramarital affairs, prostitution, and impotence.  Because of the book's controversial nature and because of a lack of publicity available for literature written by ethnic Americans, the book received very little acknowledgment.  However, in 1974, Frank Chin, along with Jeffery Paul Chan, and Lawson Fusao Inada included it in Aiiieeeee!!! An Anthology of Asian American Writers. Because of its inclusion in this groundbreaking anthology, the book was republished a few times and is now considered an essential text for Asian American and multicultural literature courses.

For more information about Louis Chu, please see the articles in Literature Resource Center including the full text Asian American Writers. Ed. Deborah L. Madsen and part of the Dictionary of Literary Biography series. Or check out Eat a Bowl of Tea from Burling Library:

Eat a Bowl of Tea (1961)
Burling 3rd Floor PS3553 .H776

What are you reading? Let us know by emailing bookreview@grinnell.edu

Featuring Asian American Authors: Frank Chin

Frank Chin was born in 1940 to a Chinese immigrant father and a fourth-generation Chinese American mother. He attended University of California at Berkeley and in 1959 he left Berkeley for a fellowship at the Iowa Writer's Workshop.  He ended up graduating with an English degree from University of California at Santa Barbara.  He also worked as a brakeman on the railroad.  He emerged in the literary scene in 1970 when he was published in the anthology 19 Necromancers from Now (1970).   The criticism he received for his controversial work pushed him to respond with his own substantial body of literary history and criticism.

Chin has written plays, novels, short stories and criticism. He has also been the editor of Asian American literature collections. Here is a selection of titles held at the Grinnell College Libraries:

Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers / edited by Frank Chin ... [et al.]
Burling 3rd Floor  PS508.A8 A4 1991

Born in the USA: A Story of Japanese America, 1889-1947 / edited by Frank Chin
Burling 2nd Floor E184.J3 S84 2002 

Bulletproof Buddhists and Other Essays
Burling 2nd Floor E184.C5 C473 1998

Donald Duk: A Novel
Burling 3rd Floor PS3553.H4897 D66x 1991

Gunga Din Highway: a Novel
Burling 3rd Floor  PS3553.H4897 G86 1994

 Submitted by Kelly Musselman '11

What are you reading? Let us know by emailing bookreview@grinnell.edu

Featuring Asian American Authors: John Okada

John Okada was born in Seattle in 1923.  His family was moved into the internment camps during WWII.  He joined the army and served in army intelligence, broadcasting requests for Japanese soldiers to surrender. He was discharged in 1946 and earned his bachelor's degrees in English and Library Science, and earned his masters from Colombia University in English.  He couldn't find enough time to write while working in libraries, so he worked as a technical writer.  He died of a heart attack in 1971.

No-No Boy is Okada's only published work and it did not become popular until after he had died.  At his death, there were still unsold copies of the 1500 copies in the first edition.  But Jeffry Paul Chan found a copy of No No Boy in a San Francisco bookshop and he and Frank Chin included an excerpt from the book in the first Asian American literature anthology Aiiieeeee!  The entirity of the novel was republished in 1976.

No-No Boy is about a Japanese American man who, when drafted, answered 'No' to two key questions:

--"Are you willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States, on combat duty, wherever ordered?"
--"Will you swear unqualified allegiance to the United States of America and faithfully defend the United States from any or all attack by foreign or domestic forces and forswear any form of allegiance or obedience to the Japanese emperor, to any foreign government, power, or organization?"

The main character doesn't know why he answered "no" but he was put in jail for two years because of it.  No-no Boy begins with Ichiro Yamada's return from prison and the detainment camps at the end of the war and deals with themes centered around family, faith and loyalty. 

For more information about John Okada, please see the articles in Literature Resource Center including the full text   Asian American Writers. Ed. Deborah L. Madsen and part of the Dictionary of Literary Biography series. Or check out  No-No Boy from Burling Library:

No-No Boy (1979)
Burling 3rd Floor PS3565.K33 N6 1979

Submitted by Kelly Musselman '11

What are you reading? Let us know by emailing bookreview@grinnell.edu

Featuring Asian American Authors: Carlos Bulosan

Carlos Bulosan was born in Binalonan, Pangasinan, in northern Luzon in the Philippines in 1911. He came to the United States in 1930 just as California was restricting Chinese and Japanese immigration. Raised attending English language schools with American teachers Bulosan was fluent in English thus becoming one of the first Asian Americans to document his immigrant experience in the language that would allow for a wide audience.

Bulosan authored several important autobiographical works including The Laughter of My Father (1944) a collection of short stories set during the transition from Spanish to U.S. colonialism, and America is in the Heart (1946), in some respects his autobiography, but more broadly a narrative that incorporates the experiences of the Filipino immigrants in California and the Untied States. Bulosan's earliest publishing efforts were as a poet. In the early thirties he published in local Filipino papers, and then later started his own newspaper, The New Tide, a bimonthly radical literary magazine. This effort brought him into a wider circle of writers including William Saroyan, William Carlos Williams, Sonora Babb, and Richard Wright. His first two books of poetry were Letter from America (1942) and Chorus for America (1942). In all of his writing Bulosan brought the attention of the reader to the working class, the poor, the under represented and the marginalized.

Bulosan also worked as a union organizer and was implicated in the "red scare." He may have been a member of the  Communist Party and did write for some periodicals using the vocabulary of Marxism. Bulosan's manuscripts are still being discovered, edited and published.

For more information about Carlos Bulosan, visit Literature Resource Center including the full text   Asian American Writers. Ed. Deborah L. Madsen and part of the Dictionary of Literary Biography series. Or check out one of the books by Carlos Bulosan in Burling Library:

America is in the Heart: A Personal History, 1946
Burling 3rd Floor PS3503.U5627 Z5

"The Story of a Letter" and "How My Stories Were Written," in Bold Words: A Century of Asian American Writing, 2001
Burling 3rd Floor PS508.A8 B65 2001

"Hymn to a Man Who Failed," Portraits with Cities Falling," and "The Romance of Magno Rubio" and more! in Brown River, White Ocean: An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Philippine Literature in English, 1993.

Burling 3rd Floor PR9550.5 .B76 1993

The Cry and the Dedication, 1995
Burling 3rd Floor PR9550.9.B8 C79 1995

On Becoming Filipino: Selected Writings of Carlos Bulosan, 1995
Burling 3rd Floor PR9550.9.B8 A6 1995


Submitted by R. Stuhr