The in-universe equivalent to Superman, Supercollider, ends up pulverizing her leg and leaving her with months of physical therapy just to walk again. That is until she is caught in a violent rescue by a superhero where she is accidentally disabled. Someone has to file the time sheets, and Anna is that someone for whatever masked megalomaniac is doing well for themselves. I’ve covered this before, but there must be a huge support network for the various supervillains of the world in order to build lairs, run communications, and do other necessary evils. She’s your typical temp office worker except for one wrinkle: the agency that represents her recruits for supervillains. Even while she’s pulling off that unlikely trick with deftness and wit, she also managed to turn out an amazing work of laborpunk that felt more empowering than being gifted with a magic space ring. Natalie Zina Walschots’ debut novel Hench is both a razor-sharp deconstruction of the superhero genre as well as the best example of prose writing on the subject since Austin Grossman’s Soon I Will Be Invincible.
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THELMA GOLDEN: I knew of Lowery before I met her. It was an expansion of what I was doing and gave focus to my work.ĭV: Do you remember the moment you and Thelma met? This was a place, like El Museo del Barrio, Basement Workshop in Chinatown, or the American Indian Community House, where I could meet my peers involved in the arts, people who were like myself, people of color. I once described the Studio Museum as my antidote to my experiences at the Met. So part of my job was to liaise with museums and community organizations around New York City. I was working in the community programs department, which had been established as a vehicle for the Met to deal with the fallout from the “Harlem on My Mind” exhibition and respond to demands that it decentralize its activities. LOWERY STOKES SIMS: When I got my job at Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1972, I started going to Harlem on a regular basis. When did you first encounter the museum? What do you recall from that time? I often think of the Studio Museum’s role in this radiant history, and I’m curious to hear what the museum means to the people who came through it, to those who have led the institution and helped give it new shapes over time. We frequently draw a connection between the protests of that era and the revival of struggles, both in the streets and within institutions, that has come to define the past few years. Jeff Sonhouse, Inauguration of the Solicitor (detail), 2005.ĭAVID VELASCO: The Studio Museum in Harlem opened its doors to the public in 1968. He has risen through the ranks at DMA and is now the cadet who runs the show. Her other brother, Jonathan, is also less than thrilled. Her mother will barely talk to her or look her in the eye she's still reeling from Amos' death and she can't understand why Sam would want anything to do with the lifestyle that killed her brother. After Amos' tragic death, Sam decides to follow through on the dare he gave her to attend DMA. Sam is a military brat who aches to serve her country like her father and older brother, Amos. Like Conroy, Hensley does an amazing job of painting a portrait of the life of a cadet. Rites of Passage is the story of Samantha (aka Sam) McKenna and her quest to be one of the first female cadets at the Denmark Military Academy in Virginia. The most striking difference between the two novels is the gender of the main character. While this novel is set at a military high school and The Lords of Discipline focuses on a military college, I did find that some of the experiences were similar. I was drawn to Rites of Passage because of the military school setting and how it instantly drew my mind back to an old favorite. One of my favorite novels written by Conroy, The Lords of Discipline, follows young cadets at the Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina. As a teen, I as mesmerized by the works of Pat Conroy. In dealing with so controversial a figure, Williams admits to only two predispositions: he regards Long as one of those rare men of power with a potential for great good or great evil or both, who ""appear in response to conditions, but. Long, Huey's son, who provided access to Huey's friends and intimates for interviews which proved frank enough to require occasional anonymous billing as a ""confidential communication."" (Because of a lack of significant Long documents, Williams adopted and became increasingly enchanted with the method of oral history.) Williams spent over ten years accumulating the material for his monumental (896 pages) volume. In 1955 he secured the blessing of (but also a duly contracted free hand from) Senator Russell B. Harry Williams (author of the well-received Lincoln and His Generals, 1952) has made pretty darn sure that his is going to be the definitive biography of Long. They fetch up at a rocky outcrop, the Skellig, inhabited by a mass of shrieking seabirds, but for people as inhospitable a place as you could imagine. They set out on a perilous journey by boat down the river Shannon and out into the Atlantic Ocean. Feeling chosen gives Cormac a new lease of life and for Trian, sent away from the world by his parents, it also seems a blessing.įor Arrt, the dream is everything and God must have a special purpose for the three. Arrt is a scholar and has a charismatic way about him, so he soon convinces the two to throw in their lot with him, even though they each seem an unlikely choice for such a mission. God has shown him which monks to take: Cormac, an elderly, battle scarred monk and the teenage boy Trian. Haven is her latest book and follows a band of three monks who set out with a few provisions to establish a monastery on an island off the south-west coast of Ireland.ĭonoghue takes us back to the seventh century when Arrt, a priest visiting a monastery, has a vision calling him to take with him two monks to set up a retreat on an island. Every time I pick up a novel by Emma Donoghue, I am amazed by the variety of subject matter as well as the deftness of the storytelling. |