I agree. I want more from fiction than some collectivized "Indian American" experience. This is why I don't do sensitivity reads. I feel like to the extent someone is bold and deviates from the collectivized vision of what a character is supposed to be, then that is the extent to which the book is attempting something. I want characters who are in some sense ideals, rather than types, no matter how truthfully the latter are drawn.
Agree about the universality and about Wallace as spiritual gen xer. I don’t particularly want to defend what Piskor was accused of *but* the end he chose has been the implicitly desired telos of that sort of online swarming behavior going back to something like the stalking of Chris chan by (fwiw in that case crypto-rw) anons in the oughts, and it’s interesting to see the responses to that being that made explicit.
Because he never wrote a GAN (though I sometimes wonder if he left an attempt behind) James Alan McPherson is almost never mentioned alongside Ellison and Morrison, and that’s a pity (and passing strange, given his being the first African-American to win the Pulitzer). His story “Elbow Room” almost on its own should give him runner-up status.
I agree. I want more from fiction than some collectivized "Indian American" experience. This is why I don't do sensitivity reads. I feel like to the extent someone is bold and deviates from the collectivized vision of what a character is supposed to be, then that is the extent to which the book is attempting something. I want characters who are in some sense ideals, rather than types, no matter how truthfully the latter are drawn.
Agree about the universality and about Wallace as spiritual gen xer. I don’t particularly want to defend what Piskor was accused of *but* the end he chose has been the implicitly desired telos of that sort of online swarming behavior going back to something like the stalking of Chris chan by (fwiw in that case crypto-rw) anons in the oughts, and it’s interesting to see the responses to that being that made explicit.
Because he never wrote a GAN (though I sometimes wonder if he left an attempt behind) James Alan McPherson is almost never mentioned alongside Ellison and Morrison, and that’s a pity (and passing strange, given his being the first African-American to win the Pulitzer). His story “Elbow Room” almost on its own should give him runner-up status.