Apparat-chic: Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story
A review by Rayyan Al-Shawaf
"Oh, dear diary. My youth has passed, but the wisdom of age hardly beckons. Why is it so hard to be a grown-up man in this world?" Bemoaning his fate thus is 39-year-old lovable loser Lenny Abramov, the bookish and neurotic Russian-Jewish-American protagonist of Gary Shteyngart's feverish, boisterous, wildly funny yet also contrived and histrionic new novel: Super Sad True Love Story. And Lenny's philosophical lament, equal parts rueful and self-deprecating, does not begin to encapsulate his troubles. The not-too-distant future world in which he feels himself an anachronism is a place generally negotiated with the aid of an apparat, an electronic communication and data-collecting device with which Lenny hardly feels comfortable. His need for genuine human interaction instead of the apparat-generated classification of humans according to everything from their credit to their "Fuckability" ratings, not to mention his preference for books over text-scanning -- again courtesy of those...
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Mom: The Transformation of Motherhood in Modern America by Rebecca Jo Plant
 The caress of your hair, soft silver
On my cheek how I fain would feel,
And from lips that are soft as roses,
A sweet kiss I would like to steal.
This poem, the full version of which was published in the military newspaper Stars and Stripes in 1918, was written by an American soldier on the...
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