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Tag: Books and literature

  • Writer Leonardo Padura chronicles life in Cuba as his detective ‘alter ego’ solves gripping crimes

    Writer Leonardo Padura chronicles life in Cuba as his detective ‘alter ego’ solves gripping crimes

    HAVANA — His novels recount gruesome murders, thefts, scams, bribes and humiliating secrets. But those are not even the most important themes in the stories told by award-winning Cuban writer Leonardo Padura.

    For the last four decades, Padura, 68, has managed to turn his series of detective thrillers into a social and political chronicle of Cuba, especially Havana, where he has lived all his life.

    The island he depicts in his books — which have been translated to dozens of languages — is a mix of economic deprivation, Afro-descendant syncretism, corruption, mischief, uplifting music and growing inequality — all seasoned by a revolution that marked the 20th century.

    “I write about the problems of individuals in Cuban society. And often, in my books, more than dramatic conflicts between the characters, you will find a social conflict between the characters and their historical time,” Padura told The Associated Press in a recent interview at his home in Mantilla, the populous Havana neighborhood where he was born, raised and married.

    The scent of freshly brewed coffee is in the air, as well as the chirping sound of the birds that inhabit the patio where his dogs are buried. In a nearby studio, his wife, screenwriter Lucía López Coll, works on a computer.

    It’s also in this house where Mario Conde, the principal character of Padura’s work, was born. The downtrodden, nostalgic, chain-smoking detective has accompanied Padura since 1991, when “Past Perfect” — the first of the “Havana Quartet” series featuring Conde as the main protagonist — was published.

    Keeping track of Detective Conde is almost like taking the pulse of Cuba in the last few years.

    His last appearance was in the 2020 novel “Personas Decentes” (“Decent People”) in which, now over 60 years old, Conde gets involved in the investigation of a homicide — and corruption case — against the backdrop of the 2016 historic visit of former U.S. President Barack Obama and the Rolling Stones to the island.

    “This character comes from a neighborhood similar to mine,” Padura says of Conde. “He is a man of my generation. … His view of reality has evolved because I have evolved, and his feeling of disenchantment has a lot to do with the way we have been living all these years.”

    Reflecting on Cuba’s situation after the tightening of U.S. sanctions during the administration of President Donald Trump and the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, Padura says the island has barely crawled out of the crisis and has not yet been able to get back on its feet.

    He points at the lack of food and medications, rising prices and deteriorating health and education systems, while Cubans grapple with fuel shortages and constant blackouts.

    “There is a historical fatigue,” he says. “People are tired, they have no alternatives and they look for one by emigrating.”

    The soft-spoken chronicler highlights yet another impact of Cuba’s ongoing economic crisis: A wave of popular protests and demonstrations that had not been seen in decades.

    “The main cry was for food and electricity,” Padura recalls about the protests in 2021 and, more recently, in March. “But people also screamed ‘Freedom!’ The lack of food and electricity might have been solved by fixing some thermoelectric plants and with a little rice and sugar … but the other thing has not been talked about — and I think it’s something that should be discussed in depth.”

    Born in 1955, Leonardo de la Caridad Padura Fuentes studied literature at the University of Havana and worked as a journalist for state-owned media in the 1980s.

    He has won a number of important prizes, including the Hammett Prize, awarded by the International Association of Crime Writers, on two occasions (1998 and 2006); Cuba’s National Prize for Literature In 2012, and the Princess of Asturias Award for literature in Spain in 2015.

    In 2016, Netflix released “Four Seasons in Havana,” a miniseries featuring detective Conde.

    Despite the international recognition, only a few of Padura’s books have been published in Cuba, and when they do, only a few copies are printed. Also, because of his critical, sometimes dark view of the island, his work is barely promoted or mentioned in the official media.

    Unlike many writers and intellectuals who in recent years decided to leave Cuba, Padura — who travels extensively — is determined to stay.

    “I have many reasons for living outside of Cuba but I think the ones that keep me here weigh more heavily. One of them is my sense of belonging,” he says. “I have a strong sense of belonging to a reality, to a culture, to a way of seeing life, to a way of expressing myself.”

    ___

    Follow AP’s coverage of Latin America and the Caribbean at https://apnews.com/hub/latin-america

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  • Faith Ringgold, pioneering Black quilt artist and author, dies at 93

    Faith Ringgold, pioneering Black quilt artist and author, dies at 93

    NEW YORK — Faith Ringgold, an award-winning author and artist who broke down barriers for Black female artists and became famous for her richly colored and detailed quilts combining painting, textiles and storytelling, has died. She was 93.

    The artist’s assistant, Grace Matthews, told The Associated Press that Ringgold died Friday night at her home in Englewood, New Jersey. Matthews said Ringgold had been in failing health.

    Ringgold’s highly personal works of art can be found in private and public collections around the country and beyond, from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American Art to New York’s Museum of Modern Art and Atlanta’s High Museum of Fine Art. But her rise to prominence as a Black artist wasn’t easy in an art world dominated by white males and in a political cultural where Black men were the leading voices for civil rights. A founder in 1971 of the Where We At artists collective for Black women, Ringgold became a social activist, frequently protesting the lack of representation of Black and female artists in American museums.

    “I became a feminist out of disgust for the manner in which women were marginalized in the art world,” she told The New York Times in 2019. “I began to incorporate this perspective into my work, with a particular focus on Black women as slaves and their sexual exploitation.”

    In her first illustrated children’s book, “Tar Beach,” the spirited heroine takes flight over the George Washington Bridge. The story symbolized women’s self-realization and freedom to confront “this huge masculine icon — the bridge,” she explained.

    The story is based on her narrative quilt of the same name now in the permanent collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.

    While her works often deal with issues of race and gender, their folk-like style is vibrant, optimistic and lighthearted and often reminiscent of her warm memories of her life in Harlem.

    Ringgold introduced quilting into her work in the 1970s after seeing brocaded Tibetan paintings called thangkas. They inspired her to create patchwork fabric borders, or frames, with handwritten narrative around her canvas acrylic paintings. For her 1982 story quilt, “Who’s Afraid of Aunt Jemina,” Ringgold confronted the struggles of women by undermining the Black “mammy” stereotype and telling the story of a successful African American businesswoman called Jemima Blakey.

    “Aunt Jemima conveys the same negative connotation as Uncle Tom, simply because of her looks,” she told The New York Times in a 1990 interview.

    Soon after, Ringgold produced a series of 12 quilt paintings titled “The French Collection,” again weaving narrative, biographical and African American cultural references and Western art.

    One of the works in the series, “Dancing at the Louvre,” depicts Ringgold’s daughters dancing in the Paris museum, seemingly oblivious to the “Mona Lisa” and other European masterpieces on the walls. In other works in the series Ringgold depicts giants of Black culture like poet Langston Hughes alongside Pablo Picasso and other European masters.

    Among her socially conscious works is a three-panel “9/11 Peace Story Quilt” that Ringgold designed and constructed in collaboration with New York City students for the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. Each of the panels contains 12 squares with pictures and words that address the question “what will you do for peace?” It was exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

    In 2014, her “Groovin High,” a depiction of a crowded energetic dance hall evocative of Harlem’s famous Savoy Ballroom, was featured on a billboard along New York City’s High Line park.

    Ringgold also created a number of public works. “People Portraits,” comprised of 52 individual glass mosaics representing figures in sports, performance and music, adorns the Los Angeles Civic Center subway station. “Flying Home: Harlem Heroes and Heroines” are two mosaic murals in a Harlem subway station that feature figures like Dinah Washington, Sugar Ray Robinson and Malcolm X.

    In one of her recent books, “Harlem Renaissance Party,” Ringgold introduces young readers to Hughes and other Black artists of the 1920s. Other children’s books have featured Rosa Parks, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Underground Railroad.

    Born in Harlem in 1930, Ringgold was the daughter of a seamstress and dress designer with whom she collaborated often. She attended City College of New York where she earned bachelor and master’s degrees in art. She was a professor of art at the University of California in San Diego from 1987 until 2002.

    Ringgold’s motto, posted on her website, states: “If one can, anyone can, all you gotta do is try.”

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  • Laurent de Brunhoff, ‘Babar’ heir and author, dies at age 98

    Laurent de Brunhoff, ‘Babar’ heir and author, dies at age 98

    NEW YORK — NEW YORK (AP) — “Babar” author Laurent de Brunhoff, who revived his father’s popular picture book series about an elephant-king and presided over its rise to a global, multimedia franchise, has died. He was 98.

    De Brunhoff, a Paris native who moved to the U.S. in the 1980s, died Friday at his home in Key West, Florida, after being in hospice care for two weeks, according to his widow, Phyllis Rose.

    Just 12 years old when his father, Jean de Brunhoff, died of tuberculosis, Laurent was an adult when he drew upon his own gifts as a painter and storyteller and released dozens of books about the elephant who reigns over Celesteville, among them “Babar at the Circus” and “Babar’s Yoga for Elephants.” He preferred using fewer words than his father did, but his illustrations faithfully mimicked Jean’s gentle, understated style.

    “Together, father and son have woven a fictive world so seamless that it is nearly impossible to detect where one stopped and the other started,” author Ann S. Haskell wrote in The New York Times in 1981.

    The series has sold millions of copies worldwide and was adapted for a television program and such animated features as “Babar: The Movie” and “Babar: King of the Elephants.” Fans ranged from Charles de Gaulle to Maurice Sendak, who once wrote, “If he had come my way, how I would have welcomed that little elephant and smothered him with affection.”

    De Brunhoff would say of his creation, “Babar, c’est moi” (“that’s me”), telling National Geographic in 2014 that “he’s been my whole life, for years and years, drawing the elephant.”

    The books’ appeal was far from universal. Some parents shied from the passage in the debut, “The Story of Babar, the Little Elephant,” about Babar’s mother being shot and killed by hunters. Numerous critics called the series racist and colonialist, citing Babar’s education in Paris and its influence on his (presumed) Africa-based regime. In 1983, Chilean author Ariel Dorfman would call the books an “implicit history that justifies and rationalizes the motives behind an international situation in which some countries have everything and other countries almost nothing.”

    “Babar’s history,” Dorfman wrote, “is none other than the fulfillment of the dominant countries’ colonial dream.”

    Adam Gopnik, a Paris-based correspondent for The New Yorker, defended “Babar,” writing in 2008 that it “is not an unconscious expression of the French colonial imagination; it is a self-conscious comedy about the French colonial imagination and its close relation to the French domestic imagination.”

    De Brunhoff himself acknowledged finding it “a little embarrassing to see Babar fighting with Black people in Africa. He especially regretted “Babar’s Picnic,” a 1949 publication that included crude caricatures of Blacks and American Indians, and asked his publisher to withdraw it.

    De Brunhoff was the eldest of three sons born to Jean de Brunhoff and Cecile de Brunhoff, a painter. Babar was created when Cecile de Brunhoff, the namesake for the elephant’s kingdom and Babar’s wife, improvised a story for her kids.

    “My mother started to tell us a story to distract us,” de Brunhoff told National Geographic in 2014. “We loved it, and the next day we ran to our father’s study, which was in the corner of the garden, to tell him about it. He was very amused and started to draw. And that was how the story of Babar was born. My mother called him Bebe elephant (French for baby). It was my father who changed the name to Babar. But the first pages of the first book, with the elephant killed by a hunter and the escape to the city, was her story.”

    The debut was released in 1931 through the family-run publisher Le Jardin Des Modes. Babar was immediately well received and Jean de Brunhoff completed four more Babar books before dying six years later, at age 37. Laurent’s uncle, Michael, helped publish two additional works, but no one else added to the series until after World War II, when Laurent, a painter by then, decided to bring it back.

    “Gradually I began to feel strongly that a Babar tradition existed and that it ought to be perpetuated,” he wrote in The New York Times in 1952.

    De Brunhoff was married twice, most recently to the critic and biographer Phyllis Rose, who wrote the text to many of the recent “Babar” publications, including the 2017 release billed as the finale, “Babar’s Guide to Paris.” He had two children, Anne and Antoine, but the author did not consciously write for young people.

    “I never really think of children when I do my books,” he told the Wall Street Journal in 2017. “Babar was my friend and I invented stories with him, but not with kids in a corner of my mind. I write it for myself.”

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  • Lorrie Moore wins National Book Critics Circle award for fiction, Judy Blume also honored

    Lorrie Moore wins National Book Critics Circle award for fiction, Judy Blume also honored

    NEW YORK — Lorrie Moore won the prize for fiction on Thursday, while Judy Blume and her longtime ally in the fight against book bans, the American Library Association were given honorary prizes by the National Book Critics Circle.

    Moore, best known as a short-story writer, won the fiction prize for her novel, “I Am Homeless if This Is Not My Home.”

    Committee chair David Varno said in a statement that the book is a heartbreaking and hilarious ghost story about a man who considers what it means to be human in a world infected by, as Moore puts it, ‘voluntary insanity.’ It’s an unforgettable achievement from a landmark American author.”

    Blume was the recipient of the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award.

    The committee cited the way her novels including “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” have “inspired generations of young readers by tackling the emotional turbulence of girlhood and adolescence with authenticity, candor and courage.”

    It also praised her role as “a relentless opponent of censorship and an iconic champion of literary freedom.”

    The American Library Association was given the Toni Morrison Achievement Award, established to honor institutions for their contributions to book culture. The committee said the group had a “longstanding commitment to equity, including its 20th century campaigns against library segregation and for LGBT+ literature, and its perennial stance as a bulwark against those regressive and illiberal supporters of book bans.”

    Blume, who accepted her award remotely from a bookstore she runs in Key West, Florida, thanked the ALA for “their tireless work in protecting our intellectual freedoms.”

    The awards were handed out at a Thursday night ceremony at the New School in New York.

    Other winners included poet Safiya Sinclair, who took the autobiography prize for her acclaimed memoir “How to Say Babylon,” about her Jamaican childhood and strict Rastafarian upbringing.

    Jonny Steinberg won the biography award for his “Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage,” about Nelson and Winnie Mandela.

    Kim Hyesoon of South Korea won for poetry for her “Phantom Pain Wings.”

    For translation, an award that honors both translator and book, the winner was Maureen Freely for her translation from the Turkish of the late Tezer Özlü’s “Cold Nights of Childhood.”

    Tahir Hamut Izgil won the John Leonard Prize for Best First Book for his “Waiting to Be Arrested at Night: : A Uyghur Poet’s Memoir of China’s Genocide.”

    The prize for criticism went to Tina Post for “Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression,” and Roxanna Asgarian won the nonfiction award for We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America.”

    Besides Blume and the library association, honorary awards were presented to Washington Post critic Becca Rothfield for excellence in reviewing and to Marion Winik of NPR’s “All Things Considered” for service to the literary community.

    The book critics circle, founded in 1974, consists of hundreds of reviewers and editors from around the country.

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  • How Chinese science fiction went from underground magazines to a Netflix blockbuster

    How Chinese science fiction went from underground magazines to a Netflix blockbuster

    CHENGDU, China — For a few days in October 2023, the capital of the science fiction world was Chengdu, China. Fans traveled from around the world as Worldcon, sci-fi’s biggest annual event, was held in the country for the first time.

    It was a rare moment when Chinese and international fans could get together without worrying about the increasingly fraught politics of China’s relationship with the West or Beijing’s tightening grip on expression.

    For Chinese fans like Tao Bolin, an influencer who flew from the southern province of Guangdong for the event, it felt like the world finally wanted to read Chinese literature. Fans and authors mingled in a brand new Science Fiction Museum, designed by the prestigious Zaha Hadid Architects in the shape of a huge steel starburst over a lake.

    But three months later, much of that goodwill turned sour as a scandal erupted over allegations that organizers of the Hugo awards — sci-fi’s biggest prize, awarded at Worldcon — disqualified candidates to placate Chinese censors.

    The event embodied the contradictions that Chinese science fiction has faced for decades. In 40 years, it’s gone from a politically suspect niche to one of China’s most successful cultural exports, with author Liu Cixin gaining an international following that includes fans like Barack Obama and Mark Zuckerberg. But it’s had to overcome obstacles created by geopolitics for just as long.

    With a big-budget Netflix adaptation of his “The Three-Body Problem” set to drop in March, produced by the same showrunners as “Game of Thrones,” Chinese sci-fi could reach its biggest audience yet.

    Getting there took decades of work by dedicated authors, editors and cultural bureaucrats who believed that science fiction could bring people together.

    “Sci-fi has always been a bridge between different cultures and countries,” says Yao Haijun, the editor-in-chief of Science Fiction World, China’s oldest sci-fi magazine.

    Chinese sci-fi’s journey abroad started with another convention in Chengdu three decades ago, but politics nearly derailed that one before it could get off the ground.

    Science Fiction World planned to host a writers’ conference in the city in 1991. But as news of the brutal crackdown on student protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square circled the globe in 1989, foreign speakers were dropping out.

    The magazine sent a small delegation to Worldcon 1990, hosted in The Hague, to save the conference.

    Its leader was Shen Zaiwang, an English translator in Sichuan province’s Foreign Affairs Department who fell in love with sci-fi as a child. He packed instant noodles for the weeks-long train journey across China and the fragmenting Soviet Union.

    In The Hague, Shen used toy pandas and postcards of Chengdu to make the case that the city — more than 1,800 kilometers (1,000 miles) from Beijing — was friendly and safe to visit.

    “We tried to introduce our province as a safe place, and that the people in Sichuan really hope the foreign science fiction writers can come and have a look and encourage Chinese young people to read more science fiction novels,” Shen says.

    In the end, a dozen foreign authors attended the conference. It was a small start, but it was more than anyone could have imagined a few years earlier.

    China’s science fiction community faced suspicion at home as well.

    Science fiction magazines such as Chengdu’s Science Fiction World started being launched in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as China began opening to the world after the Mao era.

    But in the early 1980s, Beijing initiated a nationwide “spiritual pollution cleaning” campaign to quash the influence of the decadent West, and sci-fi was accused of being unscientific and out of line with official ideology. Most of the young publications were shuttered.

    Science Fiction World’s editors kept going.

    “They believed if China wanted to develop, it needed to be an innovative country — it needed science fiction,” Yao, the editor, said in a recorded public address in 2017.

    In 1997, the magazine organized another international event in Beijing, headlined by U.S. and Russian astronauts. The conference got attention in the Chinese press, giving sci-fi a cool new aura of innovation, exploration and imagination, Yao says.

    China’s growing sci-fi fandom was devouring translated works from abroad, but few people abroad were reading Chinese stories. Liu Cixin was going to change that.

    A soft-spoken engineer at a power plant in the coal-dominated province of Shanxi, his stories were hits with genre fans.

    But “The Three-Body Problem,” first serialized by Science Fiction World in 2006, reached a new level of popularity, says Yao.

    Authorities took note. The China Educational Publications Import & Export Corporation, the state-owned publications exporter, picked up the novel and its two sequels.

    The translations were intended from the start as “a big cultural export from China to the world, something very highly visible,” says Joel Martinsen, who translated the trilogy’s second volume, “The Dark Forest.”

    But no one could have anticipated the critical and popular success: In 2015, Liu became the first Asian author to win a Hugo Award for a novel.

    “There was something quite fresh and raw and eye-catching, and even sometimes very dark and ruthless in his work,” says Song Mingwei, a professor of Chinese literature at Wellesley College.

    The next year, Beijing-based writer Hao Jingfang beat Stephen King to win a Hugo for short fiction with a story about social inequality in a surreal version of China’s capital.

    Liu’s translations were also a political breakthrough for the genre: In two decades, it had gone from barely tolerated to a flagship export of China’s official cultural machine.

    The government encouraged the growth of an “industry” spanning movies, video games, books, magazines and exhibits, and set up an official research center in 2020 to track its rise.

    Worldcon Chengdu was to be the crowning achievement of these efforts.

    The event itself was seen as a success. But in January, when the Hugo committee disclosed vote totals, the critics’ suspicions seemed to be confirmed. It turned out several candidates had been disqualified, raising censorship concerns. They included New York Times bestselling authors R. F. Kuang and Xiran Jay Zhao, both politically active writers with family ties to China.

    Leaked internal emails — which The Associated Press could not independently verify — appeared to show that the awards committee spent weeks checking nominees’ works and social media profiles for statements that could offend Beijing, and sent reports on these to Chinese counterparts, according to an investigation by two sci-fi authors and journalists. They don’t show how the reports were used or who made the decisions about disqualification.

    The Hugo awards organizers did not respond to requests for comment by the AP.

    Despite the frictions, Chinese sci-fi remains poised to continue its international rise. Netflix’s adaptation of the “The Three-Body Problem” could bring it to a vast new audience, a coming-out orders of magnitude bigger than Shen Zaiwang’s trip to The Hague.

    And insiders like Song and Yao are looking forward to a new generation of Chinese sci-fi authors that’s starting to be translated into English now.

    It’s led by younger, female writers who were educated abroad such as Regina Kanyu Wang and Tang Fei. Their works explore themes that resonate with younger audiences, Song says, such as gender fluidity and climate catastrophes.

    “When doing anything with the endorsement of either the market or the government, imagination can dry up very quickly,” Song says. “I think often the important thing happens on the margin.”

    Yao continues to believe in sci-fi’s role as a bridge between cultures, even in turbulent times.

    “As long as there is communication,” he says, “we’ll be able to find some things in common.”

    ___

    AP researcher Wanqing Chen contributed to this report.

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  • How Chinese science fiction went from underground magazines to a Netflix blockbuster

    How Chinese science fiction went from underground magazines to a Netflix blockbuster

    CHENGDU, China — For a few days in October 2023, the capital of the science fiction world was Chengdu, China. Fans traveled from around the world as Worldcon, sci-fi’s biggest annual event, was held in the country for the first time.

    It was a rare moment when Chinese and international fans could get together without worrying about the increasingly fraught politics of China’s relationship with the West or Beijing’s tightening grip on expression.

    For Chinese fans like Tao Bolin, an influencer who flew from the southern province of Guangdong for the event, it felt like the world finally wanted to read Chinese literature. Fans and authors mingled in a brand new Science Fiction Museum, designed by the prestigious Zaha Hadid Architects in the shape of a huge steel starburst over a lake.

    But three months later, much of that goodwill turned sour as a scandal erupted over allegations that organizers of the Hugo awards — sci-fi’s biggest prize, awarded at Worldcon — disqualified candidates to placate Chinese censors.

    The event embodied the contradictions that Chinese science fiction has faced for decades. In 40 years, it’s gone from a politically suspect niche to one of China’s most successful cultural exports, with author Liu Cixin gaining an international following that includes fans like Barack Obama and Mark Zuckerberg. But it’s had to overcome obstacles created by geopolitics for just as long.

    With a big-budget Netflix adaptation of his “The Three-Body Problem” set to drop in March, produced by the same showrunners as “Game of Thrones,” Chinese sci-fi could reach its biggest audience yet.

    Getting there took decades of work by dedicated authors, editors and cultural bureaucrats who believed that science fiction could bring people together.

    “Sci-fi has always been a bridge between different cultures and countries,” says Yao Haijun, the editor-in-chief of Science Fiction World, China’s oldest sci-fi magazine.

    Chinese sci-fi’s journey abroad started with another convention in Chengdu three decades ago, but politics nearly derailed that one before it could get off the ground.

    Science Fiction World planned to host a writers’ conference in the city in 1991. But as news of the brutal crackdown on student protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square circled the globe in 1989, foreign speakers were dropping out.

    The magazine sent a small delegation to Worldcon 1990, hosted in The Hague, to save the conference.

    Its leader was Shen Zaiwang, an English translator in Sichuan province’s Foreign Affairs Department who fell in love with sci-fi as a child. He packed instant noodles for the weeks-long train journey across China and the fragmenting Soviet Union.

    In The Hague, Shen used toy pandas and postcards of Chengdu to make the case that the city — more than 1,800 kilometers (1,000 miles) from Beijing — was friendly and safe to visit.

    “We tried to introduce our province as a safe place, and that the people in Sichuan really hope the foreign science fiction writers can come and have a look and encourage Chinese young people to read more science fiction novels,” Shen says.

    In the end, a dozen foreign authors attended the conference. It was a small start, but it was more than anyone could have imagined a few years earlier.

    China’s science fiction community faced suspicion at home as well.

    Science fiction magazines such as Chengdu’s Science Fiction World started being launched in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as China began opening to the world after the Mao era.

    But in the early 1980s, Beijing initiated a nationwide “spiritual pollution cleaning” campaign to quash the influence of the decadent West, and sci-fi was accused of being unscientific and out of line with official ideology. Most of the young publications were shuttered.

    Science Fiction World’s editors kept going.

    “They believed if China wanted to develop, it needed to be an innovative country — it needed science fiction,” Yao, the editor, said in a recorded public address in 2017.

    In 1997, the magazine organized another international event in Beijing, headlined by U.S. and Russian astronauts. The conference got attention in the Chinese press, giving sci-fi a cool new aura of innovation, exploration and imagination, Yao says.

    China’s growing sci-fi fandom was devouring translated works from abroad, but few people abroad were reading Chinese stories. Liu Cixin was going to change that.

    A soft-spoken engineer at a power plant in the coal-dominated province of Shanxi, his stories were hits with genre fans.

    But “The Three-Body Problem,” first serialized by Science Fiction World in 2006, reached a new level of popularity, says Yao.

    Authorities took note. The China Educational Publications Import & Export Corporation, the state-owned publications exporter, picked up the novel and its two sequels.

    The translations were intended from the start as “a big cultural export from China to the world, something very highly visible,” says Joel Martinsen, who translated the trilogy’s second volume, “The Dark Forest.”

    But no one could have anticipated the critical and popular success: In 2015, Liu became the first Asian author to win a Hugo Award for a novel.

    “There was something quite fresh and raw and eye-catching, and even sometimes very dark and ruthless in his work,” says Song Mingwei, a professor of Chinese literature at Wellesley College.

    The next year, Beijing-based writer Hao Jingfang beat Stephen King to win a Hugo for short fiction with a story about social inequality in a surreal version of China’s capital.

    Liu’s translations were also a political breakthrough for the genre: In two decades, it had gone from barely tolerated to a flagship export of China’s official cultural machine.

    The government encouraged the growth of an “industry” spanning movies, video games, books, magazines and exhibits, and set up an official research center in 2020 to track its rise.

    Worldcon Chengdu was to be the crowning achievement of these efforts.

    The event itself was seen as a success. But in January, when the Hugo committee disclosed vote totals, the critics’ suspicions seemed to be confirmed. It turned out several candidates had been disqualified, raising censorship concerns. They included New York Times bestselling authors R. F. Kuang and Xiran Jay Zhao, both politically active writers with family ties to China.

    Leaked internal emails — which The Associated Press could not independently verify — appeared to show that the awards committee spent weeks checking nominees’ works and social media profiles for statements that could offend Beijing, and sent reports on these to Chinese counterparts, according to an investigation by two sci-fi authors and journalists. They don’t show how the reports were used or who made the decisions about disqualification.

    The Hugo awards organizers did not respond to requests for comment by the AP.

    Despite the frictions, Chinese sci-fi remains poised to continue its international rise. Netflix’s adaptation of the “The Three-Body Problem” could bring it to a vast new audience, a coming-out orders of magnitude bigger than Shen Zaiwang’s trip to The Hague.

    And insiders like Song and Yao are looking forward to a new generation of Chinese sci-fi authors that’s starting to be translated into English now.

    It’s led by younger, female writers who were educated abroad such as Regina Kanyu Wang and Tang Fei. Their works explore themes that resonate with younger audiences, Song says, such as gender fluidity and climate catastrophes.

    “When doing anything with the endorsement of either the market or the government, imagination can dry up very quickly,” Song says. “I think often the important thing happens on the margin.”

    Yao continues to believe in sci-fi’s role as a bridge between cultures, even in turbulent times.

    “As long as there is communication,” he says, “we’ll be able to find some things in common.”

    ___

    AP researcher Wanqing Chen contributed to this report.

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  • Off to Never Never Land: ‘Peter Pan’ flies again in a new tour after some much needed changes

    Off to Never Never Land: ‘Peter Pan’ flies again in a new tour after some much needed changes

    NEW YORK — A new, inclusive stage production of “Peter Pan” flies out on a U.S. tour this month, telling the classic tale of a boy who refuses to grow up — but without references that, ironically, have aged poorly.

    Gone are elements harmful to Native people, in are a few new songs and the setting of Victorian England has been scrapped in favor of modern America with a multicultural cast.

    “Part of the why I wanted to do this is that it will be kids’ first experience in the theater, and I want them not only to fall in love with “Peter Pan,” but to fall in love with the theater and to come back,” says director Lonny Price.

    The show is based on the 1954 musical version — originally starring Broadway legend Mary Martin — with a score by Morris Charlap, additional lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green and additional music by Jule Styne.

    Playwright Larissa FastHorse, who made history on Broadway in 2023 with her satirical comedy “The Thanksgiving Play,” was tapped to rework the story. She says she found the character of Peter Pan complex, the pirates funny, the music enchanting but the depictions of Indigenous people and women appalling.

    In the previous version, there were references to “redskins” throughout, a dance number with cringy gibberish for lyrics called “Ugg-A-Wugg” and Tiger Lily was described as fending off randy braves “with a hatchet.”

    “My goal for doing it was to make it not cause harm,” FastHorse says. “Because the music is so beautiful. The story is complicated and beautiful. It makes you laugh, it makes you cry, it does all those things and has so much magic.”

    The tour kicks off in Maryland this week and travels to North Carolina, Ohio, Illinois, Washington, D.C., South Carolina, Florida, Arizona, Nevada, California, Missouri, Texas and Georgia.

    “Ugg-A-Wugg” has been cut, replaced by the melody from a tune from the little-known 1961 Comden-Green-Styne musical “Subways Are for Sleeping,” married with new lyrics from Amanda Green, Adolph Green’s Tony Award-nominated daughter.

    Price also found in the original creators’ papers a “haunting, beautiful” song called “I Went Home,” which tells of a time when Peter returned home and found his window barred and another kid sleeping in his bed. Martin had asked for it to be cut before the premiere, fearing it was too sad. Price put it back in, arguing audiences are more mature these days.

    “I think kids can be a little upset now,” he says. “I don’t think it’s upsetting. I think it’s moving. I think it’s just a very moving piece. I don’t think anyone’s heard that song since 1954.” There’s also a reprise of “I Won’t Grow Up” for the second act curtain raiser called “We Hate Those Kinds,” sung by the pirates with lyrics by Green.

    FastHorse widened the concept of Native in the musical’s Neverland to encompass several members of under-pressure Indigenous cultures from all over the globe — Africa, Japan and Eastern Europe, among them — who have retreated to Neverland to preserve their culture until they can find a way back. Price hails it as an “elegant solution,” adding FastHorse “ was just the perfect writer for us.”

    FastHorse is the first ever Indigenous artist to revise the story, and she has done more than correct the perceptions of Native culture. She’s also deepened the women characters: Tiger Lily and Wendy both sing now, they both dance, they both fight and they speak to each other without Peter.

    FastHorse and Price’s version takes place in a modern day, middle class United States not Victorian England. The cast includes children of various races and ethnicities.

    “I want every child in this nation to look out their window of the national tour, to look out the window and believe Peter can fly by their window,” says FastHorse. “Our cast looks like America.”

    Price stresses that despite the changes, the fabric of the show has been maintained, especially the beautiful language lifted from James M. Barrie’s classic tale, like the notion that the birth of fairies comes from a child’s first laugh.

    “Peter Pan” is a hardy vehicle in any case, with five major Broadway revivals, countless tours, NBC’s 2015 “Peter Pan Live” with Allison Williams, the animated series “Jake and the Never Land Pirates,” the Broadway shows “Peter Pan Goes Wrong” and “Peter and the Starcatcher” and 2023’s live-action “Peter Pan & Wendy,” which added girls to the Lost Boys and featured a Black actor as Tinker Bell.

    Price says the appeal of Barrie’s work is intergenerational, grounded in notions of freedom, motherhood, innocence and a very human ambivalence about growing up.

    “Kids are afraid of growing up. Some of them want to grow up really fast. I think all adults have this conflicted relationship with growing up. So I think it’s a meditation on that and mortality as well,” says Price. “If you look at all of the themes of it, they’re very primal to us all.”

    ___

    Mark Kennedy is at http://twitter.com/KennedyTwits

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  • Ellen Gilchrist, 1984 National Book Award winner for ‘Victory Over Japan,’ dies at 88

    Ellen Gilchrist, 1984 National Book Award winner for ‘Victory Over Japan,’ dies at 88


    JACKSON, Miss. — Ellen Gilchrist, a National Book Award winner whose short stories and novels drew on the complexities of people and places in the American South, has died. She was 88.

    An obituary from her family said Gilchrist died Tuesday in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, where she had lived in her final years.

    Gilchrist published more than two dozen books, including novels and volumes of poetry, short stories and essays. “Victory Over Japan,” a collection of short stories set in Mississippi and Arkansas, was awarded the National Book Award for fiction in 1984.

    Gilchrist said during an interview at the Mississippi Book Festival in 2022 that when she started writing in the mid-1970s, reviewers would ridicule authors for drawing on their own life experiences.

    “Why?” she said. “That’s what you have. That’s where the real heart and soul of it is.”

    Gilchrist was born in 1935 in Vicksburg, Mississippi, and spent part of her childhood on a remote plantation in the flatlands of the Mississippi Delta. She said she grew up loving reading and writing because that’s what she saw adults doing in their household.

    Gilchrist said she was comfortable reading William Faulkner and Eudora Welty because their characters spoke in the Southern cadence that was familiar to her.

    Gilchrist married before completing her bachelor’s degree, and she said that as a young mother she took writing classes from Welty at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi. She said Welty would gently edit her students’ work, returning manuscripts with handwritten remarks.

    “Here was a real writer with an editor and an agent,” Gilchrist said of Welty. “And she was just like my mother and my mother’s friends, except she was a genius.”

    During a 1994 interview with KUAF Public Radio in Arkansas, Gilchrist said she had visited New Orleans most of her life but lived there 12 years before writing about it.

    “I have to experience a place and a time and a people for a long time before I naturally wish to write about it. Because I don’t understand it. I don’t have enough deep knowledge of it to write about it,” she said.

    She said she also needed the same long-term connection with Fayetteville, Arkansas, before setting stories there. Gilchrist taught graduate-level English courses at the University of Arkansas.

    Her 1983 novel “The Annunciation” had characters connected to the Mississippi Delta, New Orleans and Fayetteville. She said at the Mississippi Book Festival that she wrote the story at a time when she and her friends were having conversations about abortion versus adoption.

    “It wasn’t so much about pro or con abortion,” Gilchrist said. “It was about whether a 15-year-old girl should be forced to have a baby and give her away, because I had a friend who that happened to.”

    Her family did not immediately announce plans for a funeral but said a private burial will be held.

    Gilchrist’s survivors include her sons Marshall Peteet Walker, Jr., Garth Gilchrist Walker and Pierre Gautier Walker; her brother Robert Alford Gilchrist; 18 grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren.



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  • Hal Buell, who led AP’s photo operations from darkroom era into the digital age, dies at 92

    Hal Buell, who led AP’s photo operations from darkroom era into the digital age, dies at 92


    SUNNYVALE, Calif. — Hal Buell, who led The Associated Press’ photo operations from the darkroom era into the age of digital photography over a four-decade career with the news organization that included 12 Pulitzer Prizes and some of the defining images of the Vietnam War, has died. He was 92.

    Buell died Monday in Sunnyvale, California, after battling pneumonia, his daughter Barbara Buell said in an email. His final two months were spent with her and her husband, and he died in their home with his daughter at his side.

    “He was a great father, friend, mentor, and driver of important transitions in visual media during his long AP career,” Barbara Buell said. “When asked by the numerous doctors, PT, and medical personnel he met over the last six months what he had done during his working life, he always said the same thing: ‘I had the greatest job in the whole world.’”

    Colleagues described Buell as a visionary who encouraged photographers to try new ways of covering hard news. As the editor in charge of AP’s photo operations from the late 1960s to the 1990s, he supervised a staff that won a dozen Pulitzers on his watch and he worked in 33 countries, with legendary AP photographers including Eddie Adams, Horst Faas and Nick Ut.

    “Hal pushed us an extra step,” Adams said in an internal AP newsletter at the time of Buell’s retirement in 1997. “The AP had always been cautious, or seemed to be, about covering hard news. But that was the very thing Buell encouraged.”

    Buell made the crucial decision in 1972 to run Ut’s photo of a naked young girl fleeing her burning village after napalm was dropped on it by South Vietnamese Air Force aircraft. The image of Kim Phuc became one of the most haunting images of the Vietnam War and came to define for many all that was misguided about the war.

    After the image was transmitted from Saigon to AP headquarters in New York, Buell examined it closely and discussed it with other editors for about 10 minutes before deciding to run it.

    “We didn’t have any objection to the picture because it was not prurient. Yes, nudity but not prurient in any sense of the word,” Buell said in a 2016 interview. “It was the horror of war. It was innocence caught in the crossfire, and it went right out, and of course it became a lasting icon of that war, of any war, of all wars.”

    Ut was just 20 when he made the iconic photo that won him the Pulitzer Prize. Without Buell’s support, he said, the photo might never had become a symbol of the war.

    “He thought it was powerful, and he wanted to get it out right away,” Ut said by phone Tuesday.

    He said he last spoke several weeks ago with Buell, who he called a mentor and a great friend.

    “Hal was the best boss I ever had,” Ut said. “He was very supportive of me.”

    Santiago Lyon, a former vice president and director of photography at AP, called Buell “a giant in the field of news agency photojournalism.”

    “A generous, warm, and affable man, he always made time for photographers,” Lyon said.

    David Ake, who recently retired as AP’s director of photography, said Buell set the standard for that role.

    “I can’t tell you the number of times I would get a pearl of ‘Hal wisdom’ from one staffer or another,” Ake said. “He will be missed both in the AP and by the entire photojournalism community.”

    Buell joined the AP in the Tokyo bureau on a part-time basis after graduating from Northwestern University in 1954 with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in journalism. He was serving with the Army at the time, working on the military newspaper Stars and Stripes.

    Out of the Army two years later, he joined AP’s Chicago bureau as a radio writer, and a year later, in 1957, was promoted to the photo desk in AP’s New York office.

    Buell returned to Tokyo at the end of the decade to be supervisory photo editor for Asia and came back to New York in 1963 to be AP’s photo projects editor. He became executive news photo editor in 1968 and in 1977 he was named assistant general manager for news photos.

    During his decades with AP, technology in news photography took astonishing leaps, going from six hours to six minutes to snap, process and transmit a color photo. Buell implemented the transition from a chemical darkroom where film was developed to digital transmission and digital news cameras. He also helped create AP’s digital photo archive in 1997.

    “In the ’80s, when we went from black-and-white to all color, we were doing a good job to send two or three color pictures a day. Now we send 300,” Buell said in the 1997 AP newsletter.

    Former AP CEO Lou Boccardi said in a statement that Buell drove this remarkable period of innovation and transition, but he never forgot, nor did he let his staff forget, that capturing “the” image that told the story was where it all had to start.

    “Fortunately for us, and for news photography, his vision and energy empowered and inspired AP Photos for decades,” Boccardi said.

    After retiring in 1997, Buell wrote books about photography, including “From Hell to Hollywood: The Incredible Journey of AP Photographer Nick Ut;” “Uncommon Valor, Common Virtue: Iwo Jima and the Photograph That Captured America;” and “The Kennedy Brothers: A Legacy in Photographs.” He was the author of more than a dozen other books, produced film documentaries for the History Channel and lectured across the United States.

    “He instilled in me a belief in the critical role of the fourth estate, a curiosity, and the desire to go for a result,” Barbara Buell said. “He was a driver but a forgiving one — always urging a second shot. Although I miss him, he lived a long life and the life he wanted.”

    Buell is survived by his daughter and her husband, Thomas Radcliffe, as well as two grandchildren and a great-grandson. His wife, Angela, died in 2000, and his longtime partner, Claudia DiMartino, died in October.

    ___

    Associated Press writers Mike Schneider in Orlando, Florida, Lisa Baumann in Bellingham, Washington, and the AP Corporate Archives contributed to this report.



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  • N. Scott Momaday, Pulitzer Prize winner and giant of Native American literature, dead at 89

    N. Scott Momaday, Pulitzer Prize winner and giant of Native American literature, dead at 89


    NEW YORK — N. Scott Momaday, a Pulitzer Prize-winning storyteller, poet, educator and folklorist whose debut novel “House Made of Dawn” is widely credited as the starting point for contemporary Native American literature, has died. He was 89.

    Momaday died Wednesday at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, publisher HarperCollins announced. He had been in failing health.

    “Scott was an extraordinary person and an extraordinary poet and writer. He was a singular voice in American literature, and it was an honor and a privilege to work with him,” Momaday’s editor, Jennifer Civiletto, said in a statement. “His Kiowa heritage was deeply meaningful to him and he devoted much of his life to celebrating and preserving Native American culture, especially the oral tradition.”

    “House Made of Dawn,” published in 1968, tells of a World War II soldier who returns home and struggles to fit back in, a story as old as war itself: In this case, home is a Native community in rural New Mexico. Much of the book was based on Momaday’s childhood in Jemez Pueblo, New Mexico, and on his conflicts between the ways of his ancestors and the risks and possibilities of the outside world.

    “I grew up in both worlds and straddle those worlds even now,” Momaday said in a 2019 PBS documentary. “It has made for confusion and a richness in my life.”

    Despite such works as John Joseph Mathews’ 1934 release “Sundown,” novels by American Indians weren’t widely recognized at the time of “House Made of Dawn.” A New York Times reviewer, Marshall Sprague, even contended in an otherwise favorable review that “American Indians do not write novels and poetry as a rule, or teach English in top-ranking universities, either. But we cannot be patronizing. N. Scott Momaday’s book is superb in its own right.”

    Like Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22,” Momaday’s novel was a World War II story that resonated with a generation protesting the Vietnam War. In 1969, Momaday became the first Native American to win the fiction Pulitzer, and his novel helped launch a generation of authors, including Leslie Marmon Silko, James Welch and Louise Erdrich. His other admirers would range from the poet Joy Harjo, the country’s first Native to be named poet laureate, to the film stars Robert Redford and Jeff Bridges.

    “He was a kind of literary father for a lot of us,” Harjo told The Associated Press during a telephone interview Monday. “He showed how potent and powerful language and words were in shaping our very existence.”

    Over the following decades, he taught at Stanford, Princeton and Columbia universities, among other top-ranking schools, was a commentator for NPR, and lectured worldwide. He published more than a dozen books, from “Angle of Geese and Other Poems” to the novels “The Way to Rainy Mountain” and “The Ancient Child,” and became a leading advocate for the beauty and vitality of traditional Native life.

    Addressing a gathering of American Indian scholars in 1970, Momaday said, “Our very existence consists in our imagination of ourselves.” He championed Natives’ reverence for nature, writing that “the American Indian has a unique investment in the American landscape.” He shared stories told to him by his parents and grandparents. He regarded oral culture as the wellspring of language and storytelling, and dated American culture back not to the early English settlers, but also to ancient times, noting the procession of gods depicted in the rock art at Utah’s Barrier Canyon.

    “We do not know what they mean, but we know we are involved in their meaning,” he wrote in the essay “The Native Voice in American Literature.”

    “They persist through time in the imagination, and we cannot doubt that they are invested with the very essence of language, the language of story and myth and primal song. They are 2,000 years old, more or less, and they remark as closely as anything can the origin of American literature.”

    In 2007, President George W. Bush presented Momaday with a National Medal of Arts “for his writings and his work that celebrate and preserve Native American art and oral tradition.” Besides his Pulitzer, his honors included an Academy of American Poets prize and, in 2019, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.

    Momaday was married three times, most recently to Barbara Glenn, who died in 2008. He had four daughters, one of whom, Cael, died in 2017.

    He was born Navarre Scott Mammedaty, in Lawton, Oklahoma, and was a member of the Kiowa Nation. His mother was a writer, and his father an artist who once told his son, “I have never known an Indian child who couldn’t draw,” a talent Momaday demonstrably shared. His artwork, from charcoal sketches to oil paintings, were included in his books and exhibited in museums in Arizona, New Mexico and North Dakota. Audio guides to tours of the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of the American Indian featured Momaday’s avuncular baritone.

    After spending his teens in New Mexico, he studied political science at the University of Mexico and received a master’s and Ph.D. in English from Stanford. Momaday began as a poet, his favorite art form, and the publication of “House Made of Dawn” was an unintentional result of his early reputation. Editor Fran McCullough, of what is now HarperCollins, had met Momaday at Stanford and several years later contacted him and asked whether he would like to submit a book of poems.

    Momaday did not have enough for a book, and instead gave her the first chapter of “House Made of Dawn.”

    Much of his writing was set in the American West and Southwest, whether tributes to bears — the animals he most identified with — or a cycle of poems about the life of Billy the Kid, a childhood obsession. He saw writing as a way of bridging the present with the ancient past and summed up his quest in the poem “If I Could Ascend”:

    Something like a leaf lies here within me; / it wavers almost not at all, / and there is no light to see it by / that it withers upon a black field. / If it could ascend the thousand years into my mouth, / I would make a word of it at last, / and I would speak it into the silence of the sun.

    In 2019, he was the subject of a PBS “American Masters” documentary in which he discussed his belief he was a reincarnation of a bear connected to the Native American origin story around Devils Tower in Wyoming. He told The Associated Press in a rare interview that the documentary allowed him to reflect on his life, saying he was humbled that writers continued to say his work has influenced them.

    “I’m greatly appreciative of that, but it comes a little bit of a surprise every time I hear it,” Momaday said. “I think I have been an influence. It’s not something I take a lot of credit for.”

    ___

    Former Associated Press writer Russell Contreras contributed to this report from Santa Fe, New Mexico.

    ___

    This story has been updated to correct that Momaday was married three times, not twice.



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  • Artist-dissident Ai Weiwei gets 'incorrect' during an appearance at The Town Hall in Manhattan

    Artist-dissident Ai Weiwei gets 'incorrect' during an appearance at The Town Hall in Manhattan

    NEW YORK — NEW YORK (AP) — Ai Weiwei, the Chinese artist and dissident who believes it his job to be “incorrect,” was hard at work Tuesday night during an appearance at The Town Hall in Manhattan.

    “I really like to make trouble,” Ai said during a 50-minute conversation-sparring match with author-interviewer Mira Jacob, during which he was as likely to question the question as he was to answer it. The event was presented by PEN America, part of the literary and free expression organization’s PEN Out Loud series.

    Ai was in New York to discuss his new book, the graphic memoir “Zodiac,” structured around the animals of the Chinese zodiac, with additional references to cats. The zodiac has wide appeal with the public, he said, and it also serves as a useful substitute for asking someone their age; you instead ask for one’s sign.

    “No one would be offended by that,” he said.

    Ai began the night in a thoughtful, self-deprecating mood, joking about when he adopted 40 cats, a luxury forbidden during his childhood, and wondered if one especially attentive cat wasn’t an agent for “the Chinese secret police.” Cats impress him because they barge into rooms without shutting the door behind them, a quality shared by his son, he noted.

    “Zodiac” was published this week by Ten Speed Press and features illustrations by Gianluca Costantini. The book was not initiated by him, Ai said, and he was to let others do most of the work.

    “My art is about losing control,” he said, a theme echoed in “Zodiac.”

    He is a visual artist so renowned that he was asked to design Beijing’s Bird’s Nest stadium for the 2008 Summer Olympics, but so much a critic of the Chinese Communist Party that he was jailed three years later for unspecified crimes and has since lived in Portugal, Germany and Britain.

    The West can be just as censorious as China, he said Tuesday. Last fall, the Lisson Gallery in London indefinitely postponed a planned Ai exhibition after he tweeted, in response to the Israel-Hamas war, that “The sense of guilt around the persecution of the Jewish people has been, at times, transferred to offset the Arab world. Financially, culturally, and in terms of media influence, the Jewish community has had a significant presence in the United States.”

    After Jacobs read the tweet to him, Ai joked, “You sound like an interrogator.”

    Ai has since deleted the tweet, and said Tuesday that he thought only in “authoritarian states” could one get into trouble on the internet.

    “I feel pretty sad,” he said, adding that “we are all different” and that the need for “correctness,” for a single way of expressing ourselves, was out of place in a supposedly free society.

    “Correctness is a bad end,” he said.

    Some questions, submitted by audience members and read by Jacobs, were met with brief, off-hand and often dismissive responses, a test of correctness.

    Who inspires you, and why?

    “You,” he said to Jacobs.

    Why?

    “Because you’re such a beautiful lady.”

    Can one make great art when comfortable?

    “Impossible.”

    Does art have the power to change a country’s politics?

    “That must be crazy to even think about it.”

    Do you even think about change while creating art?

    “You sound like a psychiatrist.”

    What do you wish you had when you were younger?

    “Next question.”

    How are you influenced by creating art in a capitalistic society?

    “I don’t consider it at all. If I’m thirsty, I drink some water. If I’m sleepy, I take a nap. I don’t worry more than that.

    If you weren’t an artist, what would you be?

    “I’d be an artist.”

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  • In the biographical drama ‘Rob Peace,’ Chiwetel Ejiofor reframes a life

    In the biographical drama ‘Rob Peace,’ Chiwetel Ejiofor reframes a life

    PARK CITY, Utah — PARK CITY, Utah (AP) — Chiwetel Ejiofor had read Jeff Hobbs’ “The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace” years before Antoine Fuqua asked if he might consider writing and directing an adaptation.

    The book, which explores the complex life of a brilliant boy who grew up in the crime ridden and blighted East Orange, New Jersey, was written by Peace’s old Yale roommate. His story did not fit neatly into familiar tropes about rough beginnings, incarcerated fathers or overly simplistic ideas about success and “getting out.” This was a person who wanted to remain tied to his community, to his father, and also to succeed in his schooling and athletics (water polo) first at St. Benedict’s Preparatory School in Newark and then at Yale where he studied molecular biochemistry and biophysics.

    Nine years after he graduated from university, in which he spent time teaching at his old prep school, traveled extensively, considered grad school and made money selling marijuana, Peace was killed. Some of the narratives chalked it up to the fact that he went back to where he came from. Ejiofor said Peace’s mother told them that in the aftermath of his death, television crews came and filmed the garbage on the streets instead of the community.

    But Hobbs and, subsequently, Ejiofor saw something more complicated and nuanced about the flawed idea of “social mobility” and about the “confluence of race, housing, education and the criminal justice system.” And, most importantly, he felt like he hadn’t seen these ideas engaged with in film.

    “I thought it was very special and very powerful,” Ejiofor told The Associated Press in a recent interview. “It was sort of coincidental that I had had this big response to the book, but I hadn’t pursued it in any way. I jumped at the opportunity.”

    Fuqua, who had teamed up with Hobbs’ wife, Rebecca, to adapt the film, thought Ejiofor would be the right person after seeing his feature debut, “The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind,” about a 13-year-old boy in Malawi who gets inventive after his family can no longer afford school.

    “I knew it was meant to be a film,” Antoine Fuqua wrote in an email. “It was clear that (Chiwetel’s) humanistic approach to storytelling was a perfect fit to bring Rob’s life to screen.”

    “Rob Peace” is having its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on Monday, where it hopes to find a distributor to get it out to the world.

    “Movies like this need to be loved into existence, and that takes a village,” said producer Alex Kurtzman, who got close to Ejiofor while directing him in “The Man Who Fell to Earth” series. “You don’t make movies like this for money. You don’t make movies like this for any reason other than this is an important story to tell. And some reason, we are lucky enough to be able to tell it.”

    To play Rob, who would have to carry the film and live in the very different worlds he traversed in his life, Ejiofor and his casting director found Jay Will, a recent Juilliard graduate.

    “I never felt that it was a story about somebody who was able to play a role in different places,” Ejiofor said. “It was a story about somebody who very naturally and consistently was all of these things at once. You really had to invest and believe that about him. Jay very naturally did that because that’s part of his experience as well. He’s also just a fabulous actor and has this great charisma and real charm.”

    The performance is a meaty showcase for a fresh face who had done some television, including “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” and Taylor Sheridan’s “Tulsa King,” which had not yet come out.

    Mary J. Blige was already on board to play his mother, Jackie, and Camila Cabello plays an on and off girlfriend Naya. Ejiofor cast himself in the role of the father, Skeet, self-aware enough to know that because it was in his wheelhouse, he’d just be directing another actor to play him as he would.

    “He’s kind of a of mercurial character in a way,” Ejiofor said. “There has to be a sequence of question marks about him, but you also have to be very compelled by him. And Rob’s journey is pulled by that sort of magnetic link he has to this to his father.”

    As with “The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind,” the director-actor, father-son dynamic actually ended up helping the film, too.

    Kurtzman marveled at Ejiofor’s ability to elegantly and calmly navigate three very different roles — writer, director and actor — under the high pressure environment of making a low-budget indie in just 28 days with no money for overtime.

    “I never saw him crack, break, get stressed ever,” Kurtzman said. “That he was able to hold space for all of those three things at the same time and know how to put them in a box while the clock was ticking, that’s a true artist.”

    Equally important to Ejiofor was to make the film look beautiful. He’d been appalled by the story of the TV crews and the garbage and sought out “Beanpole” and “The Last of Us” cinematographer Ksenia Sereda to realize this vision.

    “What she’s done here is elevated this with a real elegance and beauty and a style of telling the story, which doesn’t necessarily feel like we’ve seen before within this kind of cinematic experience,” he said.

    All of these facets work together to upend stereotypes and expectations. Ejiofor wants audiences to have a sense of hope in Rob’s story as well as to feel enriched by knowing him.

    “By the end of the film, you’re not just left with this bleakness. It’s obviously a tragic story, but it’s much, much richer than that,” he said. “Understanding his journey, I think, is profoundly important and enriching and enlightening. It has been for me.”

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  • Lisa Marie Presley's posthumous memoir will be published in October

    Lisa Marie Presley's posthumous memoir will be published in October

    NEW YORK — A memoir that Lisa Marie Presley had been working on at the time of her death will be published this fall. The book, currently untitled, was completed with the help of actor Riley Keough, the eldest of Presley’s four children.

    “Few people had the opportunity to know who my mom really was, other than being Elvis’s daughter,” Keough said in a statement released Thursday by publisher Random House. “I was lucky to have had that opportunity and working on preparing her autobiography for publication has been a privilege, albeit a bittersweet one. I’m so excited to share my mom now, at her most vulnerable and most honest, and in doing so, I do hope that readers come to love my mom as much as I did.”

    Her book is scheduled for release on Oct. 15. Financial terms were not disclosed.

    Lisa Marie Presley, the only child of Elvis and Priscilla Presley and a recording artist in her own right, died almost exactly a year ago at age 54. A coroner’s investigation found that the singer-actor died of complications from bariatric surgery years earlier. Lisa Marie is now buried on the grounds of the Graceland family estate in Memphis, Tennessee, where she had been the day her father died in 1977.

    According to Random House, Lisa Marie had wanted her daughter to assist on her memoir, but Keough had “pushed off the project, feeling that there would be a right time for them to sit down together and finish it.” After Presley’s death, Keough spent hours listening to tapes her mother had made in preparation for her life story.

    “Riley knew that it was time for Lisa Marie’s voice to be heard,” Random House’s announcement reads in part.

    “She listened as Lisa Marie told story after story about the unconditional love she felt from her father, about being upstairs at Graceland, just the two of them, a sanctuary from the chaos of her life. About Lisa Marie’s complicated relationship with her mother Priscilla. About growing up with the clicking cameras perpetually at the door. About her own wild love stories, and her marriages to Michael Jackson and Nicolas Cage. About motherhood and the shattering loss of her son, Riley’s brother Benjamin Keough, to suicide.”

    Random House is calling the book a “raw, riveting, one-of-a-kind memoir,” told mostly through Lisa Marie Presley, “with Riley filling in the blanks from her own memory and those closest to her mother.”

    An audio edition will be read by Keough, along with some excerpts from Lisa Marie’s taped recollections.

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  • Trial postponed for man charged in Salman Rushdie stabbing due to forthcoming memoir

    Trial postponed for man charged in Salman Rushdie stabbing due to forthcoming memoir

    MAYVILLE, N.Y. — The New Jersey man charged with stabbing “The Satanic Verses” author Salman Rushdie is allowed to seek material related to Rushdie’s upcoming memoir about the attack before standing trial, a judge ruled Wednesday.

    Jury selection in Hadi Matar’s attempted murder and assault trial was originally scheduled to start Jan. 8.

    Instead, the trial is on hold, since Matar’s lawyer argued Tuesday that the defendant is entitled by law to see the manuscript, due out in April 2024, and related material before standing trial. Written or recorded statements about the attack made by any witness are considered potential evidence, attorneys said.

    “It will not change the ultimate outcome,” Chautauqua County District Attorney Jason Schmidt said of the postponement. A new date has not yet been set.

    Matar, 26, who lived in Fairview, New Jersey, has been held without bail since prosecutors said he stabbed Rushdie more than a dozen times after rushing the stage at the Chautauqua Institution where the author was about to speak in August 2022.

    Rushdie, 75, was blinded in his right eye and his left hand was damaged in the attack. The author announced in Oct. 2023 that he had written about the attack in a forthcoming memoir: “Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder.”

    With trial preparations under way at the time, the prosecutor said he requested a copy of the manuscript as part of the legal discovery process. The request, he said, was declined by Rushdie’s representatives, who cited intellectual property rights.

    Defense attorney Nathaniel Barone is expected to subpoena the material.

    Rushdie’s literary agent did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment. Penguin Random House, the book’s publisher, also didn’t immediately respond to request for comment.

    The prosecution on Tuesday downplayed the book’s significance to the trial, noting the attack was witnessed — and in some cases recorded — by a large, live audience.

    Onstage with Rushdie at the western New York venue was Henry Reese — 73, the co-founder of Pittsburgh’s City of Asylum — who suffered a gash to his forehead.

    Rushdie, who could testify at the trial, spent years in hiding after the late Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a 1989 edict, a fatwa, calling for his death after publication of the novel “The Satanic Verses,” which some Muslims consider blasphemous. Over the past two decades, Rushdie has traveled freely.

    A motive for the 2022 attack has not been disclosed. Matar, in a jailhouse interview with The New York Post after his arrest, praised Khomeini and said Rushdie “attacked Islam.”

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  • Trial postponed for man charged in 2022 stabbing of author Salman Rushdie due to forthcoming memoir

    Trial postponed for man charged in 2022 stabbing of author Salman Rushdie due to forthcoming memoir

    MAYVILLE, N.Y. — The New Jersey man charged with stabbing “The Satanic Verses” author Salman Rushdie is allowed to seek material related to Rushdie’s upcoming memoir about the attack before standing trial, a judge ruled Wednesday.

    Jury selection in Hadi Matar’s attempted murder and assault trial was originally scheduled to start Jan. 8.

    Instead, the trial is on hold, since Matar’s lawyer argued Tuesday that the defendant is entitled by law to see the manuscript, due out in April 2024, and related material before standing trial. Written or recorded statements about the attack made by any witness are considered potential evidence, attorneys said.

    “It will not change the ultimate outcome,” Chautauqua County District Attorney Jason Schmidt said of the postponement. A new date has not yet been set.

    Matar, 26, who lived in Fairview, New Jersey, has been held without bail since prosecutors said he stabbed Rushdie more than a dozen times after rushing the stage at the Chautauqua Institution where the author was about to speak in August 2022.

    Rushdie, 75, was blinded in his right eye and his left hand was damaged in the attack. The author announced in Oct. 2023 that he had written about the attack in a forthcoming memoir: “Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder.”

    With trial preparations under way at the time, the prosecutor said he requested a copy of the manuscript as part of the legal discovery process. The request, he said, was declined by Rushdie’s representatives, who cited intellectual property rights.

    Defense attorney Nathaniel Barone is expected to subpoena the material.

    Rushdie’s literary agent did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment. Penguin Random House, the book’s publisher, also didn’t immediately respond to request for comment.

    The prosecution on Tuesday downplayed the book’s significance to the trial, noting the attack was witnessed — and in some cases recorded — by a large, live audience.

    Onstage with Rushdie at the western New York venue was Henry Reese — 73, the co-founder of Pittsburgh’s City of Asylum — who suffered a gash to his forehead.

    Rushdie, who could testify at the trial, spent years in hiding after the late Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a 1989 edict, a fatwa, calling for his death after publication of the novel “The Satanic Verses,” which some Muslims consider blasphemous. Over the past two decades, Rushdie has traveled freely.

    A motive for the 2022 attack has not been disclosed. Matar, in a jailhouse interview with The New York Post after his arrest, praised Khomeini and said Rushdie “attacked Islam.”

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  • Book Review: Ralph Nader profiles corporate leaders he sees as role models in 'The Rebellious CEO'

    Book Review: Ralph Nader profiles corporate leaders he sees as role models in 'The Rebellious CEO'

    Consumer advocate Ralph Nader has built his life’s reputation on his fights with corporate America. But it turns out there are some CEOs he actually likes.

    At least that’s the premise of “The Rebellious CEO: 12 Leaders Who Did It Right,” Nader’s look at executives who he says “stood against the gray crowd” by putting a premium on social responsibility as much as they did on profits. The dozen leaders he profiles are presented as models for businesses on how to balance both those needs.

    The brief biographies of the CEOs give Nader a chance to highlight what he sees as the shortcomings of today’s corporations. But, surprisingly, he commends the CEOs profiled for not forgetting the bottom line and notes that all of them insisted “nothing would be possible if they didn’t pay attention to profits.”

    The chapters are sprinkled with Nader’s anecdotes from his interactions with the CEOs profiled, and leans on their own writings as well. The CEOs highlighted include Ray Anderson, the carpet-tile manufacturing executive who was spurred to set sustainability goals for his company, and Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard’s support for conservation efforts.

    Nader also praises CEOs for their work at the consumer level, including Southwest Airlines — though also noting its cancellation of more than 16,000 flights last year over the holidays that eventually led to a multi-million settlement.

    Nader strays into adulation at times, but the book offers an interesting perspective on business leadership from one of the most well known antagonists of corporations.

    ___

    AP book reviews: https://apnews.com/hub/book-reviews

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  • Finding new dimensions, sisterhood, and healing in ‘The Color Purple’

    Finding new dimensions, sisterhood, and healing in ‘The Color Purple’

    It’s not a secret that Fantasia Barrino did not want to play Celie again. The “American Idol” winner hadn’t had the best time doing “The Color Purple” on Broadway.

    The protagonist of Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel tells her story of sexual, physical and psychological abuses in the early 20th century South in a series of letters to God. And it was a character she found it difficult to leave behind at the end of the day. Even the prospect of starring in her first major motion picture didn’t seem worth it.

    But director Blitz Bazawule had a different vision: He wanted to give Celie an imagination. This Barrino found intriguing.

    “Once she understood the assignment, she quickly agreed,” Bazawule said in a recent interview with The Associated Press.

    Now, four decades after “The Color Purple” became a literary sensation and a Steven Spielberg film, the story is on the big screen again. This time it’s a grand, big budget Warner Bros. musical starring Barrino, Taraji P. Henson, as the sultry singer Shug Avery, and Danielle Brooks, reprising her Broadway role as the strong-willed Sofia. It opens in theaters nationwide on Christmas.

    “I’m glad that I didn’t allow my fear of my past experience with Celie, because of where my life was at that time, to hinder me from doing something is great,” Barrino said. “I’m riding on a high right now.”

    Oprah Winfrey is one of several big-name producers on “The Color Purple,” alongside Spielberg, Quincy Jones and Scott Sanders. Winfrey got her acting break and first Oscar nomination playing Sofia in the 1985 adaptation, before helping Sanders turn it into a Broadway musical 20 years later.

    Bazawule was not an obvious candidate to direct this film, however. The multi-hyphenate Ghanaian artist had received acclaim and recognition for co-directing Beyoncé’s visual album “Black is King.” The only other film he had under his belt was the microbudget “The Burial Of Kojo,” which was made for less than $100,000.

    But he had ambitious ideas involving large scale musical numbers that would take audiences on a dazzling journey through the history of Black music in America, from gospel to blues to jazz. And, of course, Celie’s inner life. He wasn’t at all sure he would get it, but he knew the story he wanted to tell.

    “I thought, if I could just find a way to show the audience how this Black woman from the rural South was able to imagine her way out of pain and trauma it will debunk a myth that is that people who have dealt with abusing trauma are docile and passive or waiting to be saved,” Bazawule said. “If we could just imbue in (Celie) that scale, then that’s the version that needed to exist. Thankfully they said yes.”

    They would have to jump through some hoops, however, to secure the kind of budget (reportedly around $100 million) that they needed to support the vision, including auditioning Henson, an Oscar-nominated actor, and Brooks, who already had a Tony nomination for her portrayal of Sofia.

    “We were not the studio’s choices” Henson said. “I just felt some way about having to audition. I’m Academy Award nominated. I had just got finished singing on NBC’s ‘Annie Live.’ But I checked my ego and I did it. I went in as Shug. I found a dress, had a flower in my hair and faux fur stole and I kicked the door down because I didn’t want them to ever second guess me again.”

    For Brooks, it was a six-month process that had her doubting herself. A lot of the people involved in “The Color Purple” felt the exhaustion of both having to prove themselves yet again, but also wanting to rise to the challenge nonetheless because this film was worth it.

    “This is a huge undertaking to be part of,” said Brooks. “This movie is about legacy and it’s what I’ve been calling a cinematic heirloom.”

    Her Broadway production was very minimalist and stripped down, so to be on location in Georgia, around Macon, Savannah, Atlanta and the small town of Grantville, was revelatory.

    “My world really opened up because I got to use all of my senses,” Brooks said. “I got to explore all of Sofia because now I have a juke joint and I have a dinner table. I have a house. We had a white mob attacking me.”

    The juke joint was a real set that required a real swamp to be dredged, where they’d stage Shug’s showstopper, “Push Da Button.”

    “It’s probably the perfect confluence of my amazing technical and creative teams,” Bazawule said.

    The film gives a new boldness to Celie and Shug’s relationship with one another and more dimensions to the male characters, including Colman Domingo’s Mister.

    And all carry the weight of responsibility not only to the material and its predecessors, but also to future films made with primarily Black casts at this level.

    “It’s not the first time I have been in a production of this scale but what matters to me is that it’s a Black production and it’s a production with Black producer, a Black director, predominately Black cast,” Henson said. “It’s like usually we’re supposed to make a dollar out of 15 cents. And after 20+ in the game, it’s like finally the studio trusted us to deliver.”

    The question of awards is a loaded one. Though “The Color Purple” has all the makings of a big Oscar contender (Barrino and Brooks have already been nominated for Golden Globes), it comes with history. Spielberg’s film was nominated for 11 Oscars and infamously won none. And then there is the even stickier subject of Black women and Hollywood awards. Halle Berry remains the only Black best actress Oscar winner.

    Bazawule is not particularly interested in the “dog and pony show” of awards season. It’s hard for him to fathom how anyone can pit one film against another, but he does understand that there are real gains in earning potential and creative freedom that happen if his actors, especially the women, get nominated and win.

    “Our job was to go in and honor Alice Walker’s brilliant book. We did that. We found our healing through it and we’re an amazing group together. Our Q&A’s are out of this world,” he said, before taking a pause. “Now THAT I want and award for.”

    All seem to agree that what they experienced is bigger than any validation from an award.

    “There’s something magical about this story,” Brooks said. “It really does tamper with your heart in the best way. It opens it up. I’ve never experienced anything like what I’ve experienced during the journey of working on ‘The Color Purple.’”

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  • Movie Review: A transformed Zac Efron gives his all in tragic, true-life wrestling tale ‘Iron Claw'

    Movie Review: A transformed Zac Efron gives his all in tragic, true-life wrestling tale ‘Iron Claw'

    It doesn’t take long to understand the level of commitment Zac Efron brings to “The Iron Claw” as Texas wrestling brother Kevin Von Erich. Just one look at the taut mass of muscle and sinew he’s become for the role will do the trick.

    It’s also clear from the get-go how invested writer-director Sean Durkin was in telling the true-life tale of the Von Erich family wrestling dynasty, which — shockingly, to those of us unfamiliar with the story — suffered a set of tragic losses almost too staggering to imagine. It’s hardly a spoiler alert to say that Kevin, by 35, was the only surviving brother of an original six. (He is now 66). Indeed, so devastating is the story that Durkin felt the need to excise brother Chris, one of three lost to suicide, from this retelling entirely.

    Durkin has said he was a committed wrestling fan from his childhood in England, where he scoured magazines to learn more about the exploits of the Von Erichs, who made their name in the colorful, high-flying, entertainment-heavy wrestling world of the ’70s and early ’80s. And from that affection stems perhaps both the strength and weakness of “The Iron Claw.” It’s a film that tells its stunning tale with heart and conviction, yet seems somehow reticent about pointing a truly critical finger at either the brutality of a sport that broke this family, or the man who seemed to give his sons no choice in the matter: family patriarch Fritz Von Erich.

    It is with Fritz that we begin. In a 1950s-era prologue rendered in black-and-white, the eventual patriarch and promoter (an excellent Holt McCallany) is in the ring himself, displaying his famed “Iron Claw” maneuver: a punishing two-handed grip on a doomed opponent’s skull, crushing it like a vice.

    Waiting in the parking lot is Fritz’s wife, Doris (Maura Tierney) and their young kids. Doris is shocked that Fritz has acquired a spiffy new car to attach to their trailer, something they can’t afford, but he tells her it’s all part of the persona he’s building: You need to be the toughest and the strongest, and then nothing will be able to hurt you.

    Flash forward to 1979, and Fritz has passed the dream of becoming heavyweight champion onto his remaining sons. (One of them has died at a young age in a terrible accident.) Kevin is doing his best to be the son who gets there first. Among his exploits in the ring, Kevin climbs up on top of the ropes to attack from the air, leaping onto an opponent. These fight scenes are vivid and exciting, although if you’re like me, eventually you’ll be shouting at the screen, begging for it all to stop, lest one more son get hurt.

    But at the kitchen table, there’s never talk of stopping. Fritz tells Kevin, David and Mike that they all need to work harder to win that coveted championship belt. Mike, the youngest, is interested in music, but Fritz doesn’t care. Privately, Kevin seeks out his mother and asks her to intervene on Mike’s behalf. But Doris relies only on her faith; this wrestling business is between the men, she says. (It is horrifying to watch her, powerless, as the sadness multiplies.)

    Who will achieve Dad’s dream first? Will it be David, who’s a great talker and taunter in the ring? Or Kevin, who possesses great physical strength but is awkward and unable to master the art of self-promotion? Suddenly, brother Kerry, a discus thrower with Olympic hopes, enters the scene. When President Jimmy Carter declares the United States won’t be sending a team to Moscow in 1980, Fritz decrees that Kerry (Jeremy Allen White) will join his brothers in the ring.

    There are a few lovely scenes of the brothers bonding, playing football, doing what brothers do. But the pace of the film, with its wrestling sequences and successive tragedies, doesn’t allow for much relationship development. An exception is Kevin’s relationship with Pam (a lovely and soulful Lily James), who woos the shy Kevin and eventually marries him, their wedding a brief joyful moment (with an infectious family line-dancing scene).

    But tragedy is not far off. For those unfamiliar with the Von Erich tale, we won’t reveal more plot here, other than to say that loss does not soften Fritz. At one funeral, he orders his grieving sons to remove their sunglasses, then forbids them to cry.

    Efron, with his rock-hard physique and ’70s mullet, turns in some of the most affecting work of his career. White, too, is excellent if more inscrutable as Kerry, initially the golden boy until his own brush with disaster sends him into a downward spiral. Harris Dickinson as David and a heartbreaking Stanley Simons as Mike round out the strong ensemble. But the film does not spend a lot of time on the emotional tissue that connects the brothers, who seem more bound by loyalty and mutual hardship than anything else.

    The film’s emotional ending brings well-earned tears, thanks to Efron’s delicate portrayal. But when we’re informed by means of an epilogue that the Von Erich family in 2009 was admitted to the WWE Hall of Fame, it’s hard not to consider a question that the film doesn’t seem to be attacking head-on: Was any of this worth it?

    “The Iron Claw,” an A24 release, has been Rated R by the Motion Picture Association “for language, suicide, some sexuality and drug use. Running time: 130 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four.

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  • Oxford University Press has named 'rizz' as its word of the year

    Oxford University Press has named 'rizz' as its word of the year

    Oxford University Press has named “rizz″ as its word of the year to highlight the popularity of a term used by Generation Z to describe someone’s ability to attract or seduce another person

    ByThe Associated Press

    December 4, 2023, 5:36 AM

    FILE – An Oxford English Dictionary is shown at the headquarters of the Associated Press in New York, Aug. 29, 2010. Oxford University Press has named “rizz″ as its word of the year, highlighting the popularity of a term used by Generation Z to describe someone’s ability to attract or seduce another person. The four finalists were selected by a public vote and the winner was announced on Monday Dec. 4, 2023. (AP Photo/Caleb Jones, File)

    The Associated Press

    LONDON — Oxford University Press has named “rizz″ as its word of the year, highlighting the popularity of a term used by Generation Z to describe someone’s ability to attract or seduce another person.

    It topped “Swiftie” (an enthusiastic fan of Taylor Swift), “situationship” (an informal romantic or sexual relationship) and “prompt” (an instruction given to an artificial intelligence program) in the annual decision by experts at the publisher of the multivolume Oxford English Dictionary.

    The four finalists were selected by a public vote and the winner was announced on Monday.

    Rizz is believed to come from the middle of the word charisma, and can be used as a verb, as in to “rizz up,” or chat someone up, the publisher said.

    “It speaks to how younger generations create spaces — online or in person — where they own and define the language they use,” the publisher said. “From activism to dating and wider culture, as Gen Z comes to have more impact on society, differences in perspectives and lifestyle play out in language, too.”

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  • Writer John Nichols, author of ‘The Milagro Beanfield War’ with a social justice streak, dies at 83

    Writer John Nichols, author of ‘The Milagro Beanfield War’ with a social justice streak, dies at 83

    SANTA FE, N.M. — Writer John Nichols, best known for his populist novel, “The Milagro Beanfield War,” has died. He was 83.

    Nichols died Monday at home in Taos, New Mexico, amid declining health linked to a long-term heart condition, said daughter Tania Harris of Albuquerque.

    Nichols won early recognition with the 1965 publication of his offbeat love story “The Sterile Cuckoo,” later made into a movie starring Liza Minnelli. The coming-of-age book and subsequent movie were set amid private Northeastern colleges that were a familiar milieu to Nichols, who attended boarding school in Connecticut and private college in upstate New York.

    He moved in 1969 with his first wife from New York City to northern New Mexico, where he found inspiration for a trilogy of novels anchored in the success of “The Milagro Beanfield War.”

    That novel — about a fictional Hispanic agricultural community in the mountains of northern New Mexico, a scheme by business interests to usurp the town’s land and water supply, and the spontaneous rebellion that ensues — won widespread recognition for its mix of humor, sense of place and themes of social justice. It was turned into a movie directed by Robert Redford, starring Rubén Blades and Christopher Walken, with scores of local residents on camera in Truchas, New Mexico, as extras.

    “My sense it that he wrote that as a valentine to northern New Mexico. … He really became embedded in Taos and Chama and all the towns in northern New Mexico,” said Stephen Hull, director of the University of New Mexico Press, which last year published Nichols’ memoir under the self-deprecating title, “I Got Mine: Confessions of a Midlist Writer.”

    “He wrote it as a gringo — an ‘Anglo’ — but he wrote it with real life experience and it seems to me with a great deal of authenticity,” Hull said.

    In his memoir, Nichols says he drew in writing “The Milagro Beanfield War” on his involvement with local alternative media outlets and a successful advocacy campaign to ward off construction of a conservation-district dam near Taos, including his notes from uproarious public meetings.

    “New Mexico’s sense of humor, its history and cultures, as well as its poverty and inequalities affected each sentence I crafted,” he wrote. “The novel’s attitude and style had been with me since childhood.”

    Gerald Ortiz y Pino met Nichols in the 1970s while working as a community organizer out of a welfare office in Taos and said the author wrote with humor and sympathy about turbulent times, amid a local movement to reclaim land tracts ceded to the U.S. government in the Mexican American War and tensions over the arrival of communes and “hippies” in Taos.

    “He wrote three novels about Taos in those days, and in all of them was a sense of the absurdity of what was going on,” said Ortiz y Pino, now a state senator. “He captured a point in time.”

    Friends and colleagues trace Nichols’ social justice streak — as a self-described “liberation ecologist” — to his travels in Latin America and Guatemala, starting in the 1960s amid U.S. interventions in the aftermath of the Cuban revolution.

    Nichols would later collaborate as a uncredited screenwriter with film director Costa-Gavras on “Missing” about the search for a missing American writer in Chile in the aftermath of the September 1973 coup against leftist President Salvador Allende.

    Nichols’ published works include at least 13 novels along with nonfiction ranging from collected essays, original photography, nature writing, a chronicle of his parents’ early life and more.

    He lived alone after three marriages in a Taos home lined with books, papers and manuscripts, amid an enduring work routine that involved writing through the night, according to friends and relatives.

    Nichols is survived by son Luke Nichols and daughter Tania from his first marriage to Ruth Wetherell Harding, and three granddaughters.

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