Results tagged “americandream”

The Summer Fiction issue of the New Yorker showed up in the mail box yesterday and the Pacific Northwest (ok, Portland, really, but so what) is well represented. Miranda July, of Portland, has two pieces; one a short story called "Roy Spivey" and the other a recollection of summer movies called "Atlanta." It starts:

Remember which pre-Socratic thinker said, "Time keeps on slipping into the future"? In Charles Waxberg's The Equation, time comes in sedimentary layers, a contradictory past unearthed month by month. It works, it doesn't work. But if you're going to see just one play this year -- and you want one that locates the roots of modern-day conspicuous consumption in the hand-to-mouth neediness of the Depression -- dig in.

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Love her, hate her, or wish she'd stop looking down her nose at the people she's writing about, Barbara Ehrenreich knows how lance the zeitgeist and get conversations flowing. She's the oil to Ann Coulter's vinegar. And she's got a new book out: Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream, in which she pretends to be someone else and searches for a white-collar corporate job. She fails, and damns the white-collar world as one of "economic cruelty." (We hope that wasn't too much of a spoiler.)