Two New Releases From Terese Svoboda
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Imaginative Rebels: A Conversation Between Terese Svoboda and Jim Ruland
Jim Ruland and Terese Svoboda in the Los Angeles Review of Books: TERESE SVOBODA: At first, Make It Stop reads like a fast-paced action adventure with a superhero, but the mission fails, people die. Imagine that in a Bond film! So, while the reader’s gliding along in the narrative, lots of plot builds up, people struggle with sadness…
Jennifer Egan and Terese Svoboda on Ghosts, Genre, and ‘Dog on Fire’
Jennifer Egan at The Millions: Terese Svoboda has been a powerhouse of literary production in recent years, publishing five books since 2018, and partaking of a formidable array of genres and approaches. Dog on Fire is structured as an oppositional narrative duet between two bereaved women—the sister and lover of a young man who struggled with epilepsy—who remember…
Terese Svoboda’s “Dog On Fire”: An Interview
Brennie Shoup in Superstition Review: At turns hilariously absurd and gut-wrenchingly heartfelt, Terese Svoboda’s Dog on Fire, published by the University of Nebraska Press, defies genre. Svoboda juggles comedy, mystery, tragedy, horror—and masters them all. The book follows a recently-divorced woman grieving the mysterious and early death of her estranged brother. Her unusual circumstances lead her…
My Lunch with Donald Sutherland
by Terese Svoboda Donald Sutherland was a connoisseur of poetry. In the 80s I knew poetry-quoting doyennes from the glittering parties the Academy of American Poets threw as well as the Sudanese who recited their histories in song, but mostly I knew poets obsessed with competing with dead ones, with an eye toward their next…
Prairie-Style
by Terese Svoboda Built in 1958, the father designed the house along the lines of Frank Lloyd Wright, with a flat roof, lots of full-length glass windows, old brick, patios instead of porches, and a sunken garden with a St. Francis birdbath surrounded by ivy beside the entrance. The door had a starburst handle in…
Two Revolutionary War Proclamations Freeing the Enslaved
by Terese Svoboda The Slavs inspired the word “slave.” Abductions in Eastern Europe began in the ninth century AD conducted by Spanish Muslims, and the area is still plagued by human trafficking (especially children), with a million more victims per year than in the Americas. [1] My surname means freedom in Ukrainian, Russian and Czech.…
From Video Art to Green Cars: Access and Design
by Terese Svoboda The first video portapacks arrived in the 1970s, cameras that skipped the lab and allowed the cameraman to be mobile, but they were so expensive only those who had connections with a TV station could experiment with them. Or if you had a rich aunt who needed to document a wedding, sometimes…
The Vanishing 1909 Solar Panel Inventor
by Terese Svoboda The year 1909 was the first time George H. Cove vanished. He claimed he was kidnapped and threatened with death if he continued developing his patent on solar panels. One story has it that an investor arranged the kidnapping to discredit him, and that instead of death, he was offered a furnished…
The Poison of Tomorrow
by Terese Svoboda How plastic – really plastic – gelatin presents as a food. Not only in the “easily molded” sense of a pliable art material but also its transparency. Walnuts and celery, the “nuts and bolts” of gelatin desserts, defy gravity, floating amidst the cheerful jewel-like plastic-looking splendor of the 1950’s, when gelatin was…
Haunting
by Terese Svoboda What says grief to you? Probably not a sunlit meadow. What about the scent of too many lilies, a blank stone, netting over the eyes, an all-black outfit? So chic, all that black – but nothing says dead better than pavement. The premier Parisian color, it practically insists Dig Here. On the…
My Grandfather’s Ghost
by Barbara Fischkin Again, I thought about changing my name. I dreamed about publishing essays under a new byline. I tried out pseudonyms for my next book. I wrote down alternate names, said them out loud. A name change would make introductions easier. Now, when I extend my hand and say “Fischkin,” people look at…
Invention
by Terese Svoboda I never heard Henry Bull, my father-in-law, claim he invented the Whee-Lo, but his proud sons have on occasion. He manufactured and distributed the toy, and made it into a nationwide sensation in 1953, just before the hula hoop and Frisbee. A curved double metal track that held a spinning plastic wheel,…
London’s Great Fire in Light of Hurricane Maria
by Terese Svoboda Last month I saw the Whitney exhibit “no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria.” As you might remember, Maria was a Category 4 storm that hit Puerto Rico September 20, 2017. According to Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, 4,645 Puerto Ricans died…
Wednesday Poem
And, “so it goes.” . . . . —Kurt Vonnegut Babel Oh, God did cunningly, there at Babel – Not mere togues dividing, but soul from soul, So that never again should men be able To fashion one infinite, towering whole. by Lola Ridge
On Canadians
by Terese Svoboda In my last post, I focused on the 100,000 Loyalists who fled to Canada after the Revolutionary War, and hypothesized that they were fleeing an American war of terror. Otherwise, why move? Now I’m living in Canada as a permanent resident, though for only half the year at a time, wallowing in…
Why Did The Loyalists Flee?
by Terese Svoboda We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately. –Ben Franklin Watching the Oathkeepers cry during the federal court trials under the charge of sedition, I considered the fate of seditious Loyalists during the Revolutionary War whom they most closely resemble in the topsy-turvy world of contemporary politics. The Revolutionary…
Rule of Law
by Terese Svoboda “My account omitted many very serious incidents,” writes Bertrand Roehner, the French historiographer whose analysis on statistics about violence in post-war Japan I used in my Graywolf Nonfiction Prize memoir, Black Glasses Like Clark Kent. He began emailing me at this September about a six-volume, two thousand page report concerning Japanese casualties…
Mayor of Berchtesgaden
by Terese Svoboda Hitler and My Mother-in-Law is a memoir I’m writing about Patricia Lochridge, the only female reporter at both WWII theaters who “identified” Hitler’s ashes. The book is all about those quotes, that is to say, what’s between propaganda, truth and lies in war and family. This excerpt reveals how she appropriated a Cranach.…
Book Review: Why Our Emotions Are So Powerful
Elizabeth Svoboda in Undark: In the fall of 1983, Soviet lieutenant colonel Stanislav Petrov was monitoring his country’s nuclear warning systems when alarm bells suddenly started ringing. The screen in front of him flashed the word “LAUNCH.” The alerts signaled what appeared to be a terrifying reality: The United States had lobbed five intercontinental missiles straight…