As economic realities devolve the broader American Dream, writers are shaping a new U.S. life narrative. This panel collects contemporary authors’ responses to this socioeconomic shift by asking: will class-focused writing replace the American race and ethnicity paradigm? Can such a shift illuminate the differences in income and status and lead to greater understanding? Or will the money gap cut out most socioeconomic classes and usher in a new era of class appropriation in literature?

Under the Rome Statute, which first entered into force in 2002, signatory countries are obligated to prosecute four hard-to-define crimes against peace.

These include genocide, crimes against humanity, crimes of aggression, and war crimes.

Higgins wants ecocide added to the list, as a base for international laws against the destruction of the earth.

I’ll keep my opinions on the proposal to myself — after all, a journalist’s supposed to remain objective — but I will say this: much of the media coverage she’s gotten thus far doesn’t do Higgins any justice. It focuses  a lot on the idealism this proposal reflects and not enough on the hard facts of it (how this proposal would actually fit into existing international law), which Higgins knows extremely well. Only wish I’d been able to include more of my Q&A with her in this piece.

Germany has long been home to some of the world’s leading electronic music producers – from the Dusseldorf-based electro pioneers Kraftwerk to the techno immigrants now flocking to Berlin.

But as music sales shrink around the world as a result of illegal downloads, those responsible for the sounds once considered “underground” have had to come out into the light to get help. In search of ways to earn a living as musicians without the sales revenues they once knew, artists and industry professionals have had to change their way of thinking about the way the music industry works.

“There’s so much wonderful literature being published every year in the German speaking countries and just a tiny fraction of it gets translated into English,” said Susan Bernofsky, an award-winning writer and translator of books in German.

With large publishers moving away from printing translations, Bernofsky said, subsidies from the German, Austrian, and Swiss governments have made it possible for independent publishers to pick up some of the slack and keep that small fraction from shrinking further.

“There is a rising community of smaller presses devoted exclusively to translation,” said Bernofsky, citing publishing houses like Open Letter and Ugly Duckling Presse as small players helping bring the words of other cultures to the United States.

“That shifts the position of German literature in the American context,” she added.

It also brought up a lot of questions about the narrative of Germany that is shaped by our bestsellers. I wrote on my other blog about that here and here, and have come to the conclusion that more needs to be said on the matter. So where the Deutsche Welle article ends, research on a new one — Notes Toward a Master Narrative on Germany — begins.

Haunted by the untouchable closeness of this death, the invisible but forceful barrier that is thence drawn between father and son, the narrator Stephen sets out to tell his family’s story, retelling the lives of his father and his father’s father. Reflecting from a vantage point thirty years after his father’s death, Stephen recalls the yarns spun over the years, recounting the hand-me-down narratives and family mythologies as fact.

When his grandfather, the teenaged Jeannot set out in search of gold in the late nineteenth century, he bedded down one night along the Sawgamet River after his dog was spooked by a mythical man-beast. The unexpected overnight stay leads to a gold strike and so the tale — of a town’s development, of a family’s creation — has begun. Or has it?