"Aarti Shahani’s memoir Here We Are: American Dreams, American Nightmares covers a lot of ground. It traces her family’s journey to a New York City tenement in 1981, travels to elite private schools and suburban neighborhoods, and lands in the criminal justice system. It’s the story of successes, failures, and how unwittingly selling electronics to a Colombian drug cartel shaped the lives of everyone in the Shahani family." -- Publisher
The pursuit of the American Dream, supposedly shaped by the edenic promises of the American land, has engaged our writers from the beginning, and much of our literature has come out of the national literary experience thus expressed. This collection of nineteen original, unpublished essays written for this book is particularly relevant today, when our collective field of vision seems obscured, and when the American Dream seems to have become a cliché, symbolic of the Dream defunct. The nineteen critics here presented include, among others, Leslie Fiedler, Oscar Cargill, Maxwell Geismar, Jules Chametzky, Louis Filler, and Ihab Hassan. Most of them seem to agree with the view expressed by the majority of our best creative writers: that in pursuing the American Dream, America has created a nightmare. Taken together, the nineteen essays provide a comprehensive view of American literature, past and present, as it has dealt with the Dream; but the emphasis is on modern works and present social, cultural, and political problems--poverty, war, and racism. Ten of the essays focus on such key works as Herman Melville's "The Two Temples," F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, William Faulkner's "The Bear," Thomas Wolfe's You Can't Go Home Again, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, and Norman Mailer's Why Are We in Vietnam?
Two decades punctuated by the financial crisis of the Great Recession and the public health crisis of COVID-19 have powerfully reshaped housing in America. By integrating social, economic, intellectual, and cultural histories, this illuminating work shows how powerful forces have both reflected and catalyzed shifts in the way Americans conceptualize what a house is for, in an era that has laid bare the larger structures and inequities of the economy. Daniel Horowitz casts an expansive net over a wide range of materials and sources. He shows how journalists and anthropologists have explored the impact of global economic forces on housing while filmmakers have depicted the home as a theater where danger lurks as elites gamble with the fates of the less fortunate. Real estate workshops and popular TV networks like HGTV teach home buyers how to flip—or flop—while online platforms like Airbnb make it possible to play house in someone else's home. And as the COVID pandemic took hold, many who had never imagined living out every moment at home found themselves cocooned there thanks to corporations like Amazon, Zoom, and Netflix.
In this celebration of contemporary American fiction, Kathryn Hume explores how estrangement from America has shaped the fiction of a literary generation, which she calls the Generation of the Lost Dream. In breaking down the divisions among standard categories of race, religion, ethnicity, and gender, Hume identifies shared core concerns, values, and techniques among seemingly disparate and unconnected writers including T. Coraghessan Boyle, Ralph Ellison, Russell Banks, Gloria Naylor, Tim O'Brien, Maxine Hong Kingston, Walker Percy, N. Scott Momaday, John Updike, Toni Morrison, William Kennedy, Julia Alvarez, Thomas Pynchon, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Don DeLillo. Hume explores fictional treatments of the slippage in the immigrant experience between America's promise and its reality. She exposes the political link between contemporary stories of lost innocence and liberalism's inadequacies. She also invites us to look at the literary challenge to scientific materialism in various searches for a spiritual dimension in life. The expansive future promised by the American Dream has been replaced, Hume finds, by a sense of tarnished morality and a melancholy loss of faith in America's exceptionalism. American Dream, American Nightmare examines the differing critiques of America embedded in nearly a hundred novels and points to the source for recovery that appeals to many of the authors.
In the tradition of Alice Walker, this electrifying new African American voice delivers the verdict on the urban condition in a sensual, propulsive, and prophetic book of poetry and prose. Whether she is writing about an enraged teenager gone "wilding" in Central Park, fifteen-year-old Latasha Harlins gunned down by a Korean grocer, or a brutalized child who grows up to escape her probable fate through the miracle of art, Sapphire's vision in this collection of poetry and prose is unswervingly honest. "Stunning . . . . One of the strongest debut collections of the '90s."--Publishers Weekly
The suburban landscape is inseparable from American culture. Suburbia does not only relate to the geographical concept, but also describes a cultural space incorporating people’s hopes for a safe and prosperous life. Suburbia marks a dynamic ideological space constantly influenced and recreated by both the events of everyday life and artistic discourse. Fictional texts do not merely represent suburbia, but also have a decisive role in the shaping of suburban spaces. The widely held idealized image of suburbia evolved in the 1950s. Today, reality deviates from the concept of suburbs projected back then, due to e.g. high divorce rates and an increase of crime. Nevertheless, the nostalgic view of the suburbs as the “Promised Land" has survived. Postwar critics object to this perception, considering the suburbs rather as depressing landscapes of mass-consumption, conformity and alienation. This book exemplifies the dualistic representation of suburbs in contemporary American cinema by analyzing Pleasantville, The Truman Show and American Beauty. It examines how utopian concepts of suburbia are created culturally and psychologically in the films, and how the underlying anxieties of the suburban experience, visualized by the dystopian narratives, challenge this ideal.
Here We Are is a heart-wrenching memoir about an immigrant family's American Dream, the justice system that took it away, and the daughter who fought to get it back, from NPR correspondent Aarti Namdev Shahani. The Shahanis came to Queens—from India, by way of Casablanca—in the 1980s. They were undocumented for a few unsteady years and then, with the arrival of their green cards, they thought they'd made it. This is the story of how they did, and didn't; the unforeseen obstacles that propelled them into years of disillusionment and heartbreak; and the strength of a family determined to stay together. Here We Are: American Dreams, American Nightmares follows the lives of Aarti, the precocious scholarship kid at one of Manhattan's most elite prep schools, and her dad, the shopkeeper who mistakenly sells watches and calculators to the notorious Cali drug cartel. Together, the two represent the extremes that coexist in our country, even within a single family, and a truth about immigrants that gets lost in the headlines. It isn’t a matter of good or evil; it's complicated. Ultimately, Here We Are is a coming-of-age story, a love letter from an outspoken modern daughter to her soft-spoken Old World father. She never expected they'd become best friends.
