![]() This is postapocalyptic fiction, a genre that, for all its lamentation over the loss of the world we live in now, often runs on a current of nostalgia for an earlier age. It’s essential that their home, a place they call the Balcony Cliffs, be unidentifiable from above, because their unnamed city is intermittently terrorized by a ravenous giant bear named Mord, and Mord can fly. ![]() Her lover and partner, Wick, remains holed up in their booby-trapped, warrenlike refuge, a former apartment building disguised as a midden. Rachel, the twenty-eight-year-old narrator of Jeff VanderMeer’s new novel, “Borne,” lives in a harrowed, poisoned, semi-ruined city, where she scavenges scraps of food and tradeable detritus from the wreckage, a dangerous enterprise in a landscape haunted by the similarly desperate. ![]() ![]() “Borne” brings an acute intimacy to the tropes of genre fiction. ![]()
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![]() ![]() The question often led Fry and his associates to desperate measures. How does a person make those impossible moral decisions? Given an unlimited number of potential clients and limited time and funds, how do you prioritize? The mandate of Fry’s organization was to save Europe’s most brilliant writers and artists - but how to determine artistic merit among hundreds of refugees, all of them desperate for help? ORRINGER:That was the element of Varian Fry’s experience that I was most fascinated by as a novelist. How did you decide to incorporate this into the story? The characters struggle with their work, which involves choosing whom to save during the Holocaust. ![]() GAZETTE: A key theme in the book involves this question of how you can value one person’s life over another’s. The Gazette spoke with her about the book and how her time on campus helped her shape it. ![]() Orringer worked on the book when she was the Lisa Goldberg Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in 2013–14. The novel tells the story of Harvard graduate Varian Fry ’30, a journalist and editor who was sometimes referred to as the “American Schindler.” While working for the Emergency Rescue Committee in France during World War II, Fry helped save Jewish members of Europe’s cultural elite, including artists, writers, and musicians, from Nazi concentration camps. Author Julie Orringer’s “The Flight Portfolio” is rooted in history. ![]() ![]() ![]() An honest, bleak account of a national tragedy sure to inspire discussion and research.” -Kirkus Reviews “Lamana goes for and achieves realism here, carefully establishing the characters and setting before describing in brutal detail, beyond what is typical in youth literature, the devastating effects of Katrina-loss of multiple family members, reports of attacks in the Superdome, bodies drifting in the current and less-than-ideal shelter conditions. Praise for Upside Down in the Middle of Nowhere But when Hurricane Katrina hits the Lower Nines of New Orleans, Armani realizes that being ten means being brave, watching loved ones die, and mustering all her strength to help her family weather the storm.Ī powerful story of courage and survival, Upside Down in the Middle of Nowhere celebrates the miraculous power of hope and love in the face of the unthinkable. ![]() ![]() It means she’s older, wiser, more responsible. All her friends are coming to her party, her mama is making a big cake, and she has a good feeling about a certain wrapped box. Summary A ten-year-old girl learns the importance of family and community in this tale of love and hope set during the Hurricane Katrina disaster.Īrmani Curtis can think about only one thing: her tenth birthday. ![]() READ Upside Down in the Middle of Nowhere Julie T. ![]() ![]() Anything else is just opera.Ĭaitlin Starling gets that. To really squirm into someone's head, sci-fi says, you gotta get 'em alone against the world. It has a streak of rugged individualism that's been around since the good old days, a vestige of its roots in the westerns, Golden Age sci-fi libertarianism and after-the-bomb freak-outs. Science fiction loves its stripped-down character list like high fantasy does the crowded dramatis personae. The lonely survivor in a ruined world - Last Man Alive. The one who wakes to the flickering light and failing systems of their underground bunker. ![]() Your purchase helps support NPR programming. ![]() Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title The Luminous Dead Author Caitlin Starling ![]() |