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Aaron Peck
Aaron Peck is the author of The Bewilderments of Bernard Willis and Letters to the Pacific.

Articles Available Online


The Abyss Echoes Back: Judith Schalansky’s ‘An Inventory of Losses’

Book Review

January 2021

Aaron Peck

Book Review

January 2021

Early in Judith Schalansky’s An Inventory of Losses, the narrator describes the way an ancient form of writing survived oblivion. The soft clay tablets...

Book Review

May 2018

Harry Mathews’s ‘The Solitary Twin’

Aaron Peck

Book Review

May 2018

Imagine a small fishing village on the edge of the world. Its inhabitants are progressive and content. The surroundings...

British-Bangladeshi novelist Tahmima Anam’s debut A Golden Age (2007) tracks the early stirrings of revolution in East Bengal from the 1950s to the climax of Bangladesh’s war for independence in 1971 It is told from the perspective of a young widow separated from her children In his 2008 New York Times review the academic Michael Gorra doubts Anam’s commitment to historical accuracy He finds its discussions of sex too frank for the time period in which it is set; its author too entangled in the mind of her protagonist and ‘her own omniscient narrative voice’ Laden with sexist assumptions of how Bangladeshi women ought to be depicted in literature, pretensions about women’s roles in political histories, and prescriptions for how women should write, Gorra’s review is a revelatory case study in how women’s literature, both at large and from Bangladesh in particular, has been received over the past decade ‘If a writer can’t be trusted about small things,’ Gorra asks, ‘can we trust her about large ones?’   It is precisely the small things, told in plainspoken prose, that give insight into larger issues of sexuality, faith and freedom in Hellfire, the debut novel by fellow British-Bangladeshi author Leesa Gazi, newly translated from the Bengali by Shabnam Nadiya A playwright, filmmaker and cultural organizer, Gazi wrote Hellfire while adapting Anam’s A Golden Age from English to Bengali for the stage She drew from her advocacy work with Bangladeshi survivors of wartime rape (who are known as birongona in Bangladesh) to reflect on how women are confined and constricted, their agency stultified, and their fates predestined Hellfire’s brisk pacing hews closely to the textures of a psychological thriller (a vestige, perhaps, of its original format as a weekly serialized story presented on the website artsbdnews24) It is also stylistically innovative, flitting between multiple temporalities and perspectives without the separation of chapters – a formal demonstration of how, as secrets get buried and memories repressed, gendered traumas are cycled through generations   Hellfire opens on the morning of 16 November 2007 in Dhaka Lovely, who lives with her sister Beauty – under the tight watch of their mother Farida

Contributor

May 2017

Aaron Peck

Contributor

May 2017

Aaron Peck is the author of The Bewilderments of Bernard Willis and Letters to the Pacific.

Gloria

fiction

May 2017

Aaron Peck

fiction

May 2017

Bernard, whenever he thought of Geoffrey, would remember his gait on the afternoon of their first meeting. Geoffrey walked with the confidence of a...

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Interview

February 2015

Interview with Eddie Peake

Lily Le Brun

Interview

February 2015

Like many people, I had seen Eddie Peake’s penis long before I met the artist himself. For several years...

fiction

November 2014

The Ovenbird

César Aira

TR. Chris Andrews

fiction

November 2014

The hypothesis underlying this study is that human beings act in strict accordance with an instinctive programme, which governs...

Interview

December 2011

Interview with David Graeber

Ellen Evans & Jon Moses

Interview

December 2011

Six months ago, while preparing to interview David Graeber, I decided to conduct some brief internet research on the...

 

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