I reviewed Against White Feminism by Rafia Zakaria for the Washington Post– and just so happened to be in D.C. the day it was published. Read the whole piece here.
A plan to make feminism better: Make it less White
Category Archives: Writing
Excitement, glamour and occasional gunfire: The life of a Pan Am stewardess
My review of Come Fly the World: The Jet-Age Story of the Women of Pan-Am by Julia Cooke recently ran in the Washington Post. A bit about the book:
In the earliest days of commercial air travel, cabin attendants were exclusively male, but by the 1950s, growing competition among carriers changed that: “Each airline tried to convince customers that it had the highest level of luxury and service, and the women who served a predominantly male clientele became a particular selling point,” Cooke writes. Pan Am — at the time, the only American airline to fly exclusively international routes — had a particular reputation for sophistication to maintain. “We must add to [our excellence] ‘a new dimension’ — that is, emphasis on what pleases people. And I know of nothing that pleases people more,” chief executive Najeeb Halaby would later explain, “than female people.”
In India, the complicated truth behind the killing of two teenagers
I wrote about The Good Girls: An Ordinary Killing by Sonia Faleiro for this weekend’s Washington Post. Here’s a snippet of my review:
As Faleiro probes the case, an extensive supporting cast emerges: meddlesome uncles, drunken police officers, hopelessly unqualified coroners, sensationalizing TV newsmen, a sneering intelligence officer and grandstanding politicians, all with a part — however undignified — to play in this story. … Everyone agrees that the girls’ deaths are a tragedy; no one knows quite whom to blame.
In Secret, a North Korean Writer Protests the Regime
This week on The New Yorker Radio Hour, I interviewed Heinz Insu Fenkl. Fenkl is in the process of translating the poems included in that mysterious manuscript said to have been smuggled out of North Korea. He talked about the unusual, propaganda-inspired poetic devices at work in “The Red Years,” and explained what the poems reveal about the North Korean dream of reunification.
Reading North Korean Poems During the South Korean Olympics
I wrote about the poems of the “The Red Years,” by Bandi, which are being translated by Heinz Insu Fenkl for US publication, for The New Yorker.
“The Accusation: Dissident Fiction from North Korea” at NYPL
Earlier this week, I interviewed South Korean human rights activist Do Hee-yun– the person said to be responsible for helping the manuscript of “The Accusation” escape North Korea– at the New York Public Library. He told me that he hoped to make contact with the author, Bandi again this spring, and– incredibly– that he believed the stories in “The Accusation” may actually have been the work of not just one writer, but a group of writers (!). That conversation was part of an extraordinary evening, with readings from Min Jin Lee and Heinz Insu Fenkl, and a performance from the opera-in-progress based on one of Bandi’s stories. (UPDATE: Audio and video of the event are now online.) Here’s my original piece on “The Accusation” for The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/a-collection-of-north-korean-stories-and-the-mystery-of-their-origins
A Collection of North Korean Short Stories and the Mystery of Their Origin
I wrote about The Accusation: Forbidden Stories from Inside North Korea for The New Yorker. The book and its backstory are pretty fascinating:
The story goes something like this: nearly thirty years ago, a talented North Korean propagandist secretly began writing fiction critical of the North Korean regime. When a catastrophic famine beset North Korea in the mid-nineties, the propagandist’s misgivings about his country’s leadership deepened. Over the next several years, he chronicled the deprivation and disillusionment of his countrymen in a series of stories that he shared with no one. Roughly two decades later, a close relative defected to South Korea, and the writer saw an opportunity to get his work across the border. In 2014, a book of his stories was published in South Korea under the pen name Bandi, which means “firefly.” It is believed to be the first work of dissident fiction by a living North Korean writer ever smuggled out of that country.
‘The Teeth of the Comb’
I profiled Syrian writer Osama Alomar for The New Yorker:
In 2014, Osama Alomar was working as a cab driver in Chicago when he learned that the suburb of Zamalka, just outside the heart of Syria’s capital, Damascus, had been destroyed by the fighting that continues to ravage his country. The apartment house that Alomar had lived in for five years before leaving for the United States, and everything in it—his furniture, clothing, guitar, and, most painfully, his library of old and rare books, including volumes he’d inherited from his father and grandfather—had been reduced to rubble. “I’m homesick, but I cannot go back,” he told me recently. “I would be homeless.”
Before he left Syria, in 2008, Alomar’s fiction and poetry had been published in four collections; he’d won literary prizes and had his work broadcast on the BBC. Now his entire personal archive was lost. “All my published poems, stories, interviews I had done in journals and magazines. Everything. I was completely shocked to learn that it was all gone,” he said. Also lost were the manuscripts of several writing projects in progress, including a completed autobiographical novel, called “The Jagged Years.”
Spoiler alert: Alomar is brilliant and indefatigable. The piece, which centers around the publication of his second collection of translated stories, The Teeth of the Comb, ran on the site’s Page-Turner blog.
UPDATE: I’ll be discussing The Teeth of the Comb with Alomar on Tuesday, June 13th at McNally Jackson Bookstore. Come by! http://www.mcnallyjackson.com/event/teeth-comb-osama-alomar-and-mythili-rao
The Crazy Human Heart
I interviewed Daniel Mendelsohn for Virginia Magazine. It was a treat to sit down with a critic whose work I’ve admired for a long time and talk about how he approaches his work. The headline comes from his take on Love Actually. I’ve always loathed that movie, but on his urging, I’m going to try to let my guard down next Christmas when it’s on TV.
Do you believe in “guilty pleasures” of cultural consumption?
I really do believe that the high-low distinction is more invidious than not. The aesthetic components of “guilt”-inducing pleasures are usually melodrama and sentimentality. I have a great aversion to the aversion to sentimentality. To me, what made Mad Men unbearable was its own incredible overweening need to be cool. And because it was so cool and so cynical about everything, I just didn’t care about it, whereas in the first five minutes of watching Friday Night Lights, I thought I was going to die if I didn’t know those people were going to be okay.
Why not love something like Love Actually? What’s so terrible about just caving into your crazy human heart every now and then? You don’t always have to be armored.
“I Like Calling Myself a Thief”: An Interview with Rabih Alameddine
I recently sat down with Lebanese author Rabih Alameddine to ask him, among other things, why he wished me blue hair when he signed my copy of An Unnecessary Woman at a reading at the Asian American Writers Workshop last year.
His lovely explanation– plus his the rest of our conversation on translation, creativity, appropriation, Crime and Punishment, Kim Kardashian’s butt, and more– is now online at Words Without Borders.
Mythili G. Rao 