Can Fiction Teach Us How to Live in a World Full of Suffering?

Reading and Writing Can Help Us Understand the Difficult Past and Imagine Better Futures

Any work of fiction is an investigation of aftermath, borne of the world that has already occurred. Fiction offers readers as well as writers the possibility to explore past transgressions and raise complex ethical and intellectual questions about responsibility—and culpability, guilt, betrayal, and remorse.

Patrick Modiano’s The Occupation Trilogy, J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Paradise are three works that dig deeply into these inquiries and grapple with the sins of empire. Each asks: What forces shape the present moment? Who bears responsibility for the suffering and inhumanities of …

How to Treat the ‘Wounds to the Soul’ | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian

How to Treat the ‘Wounds to the Soul’

A Therapist Assembles an Emotional Toolbox to Help Us Grapple With Collective Trauma

he subterranean strata of U.S. wrongdoing run deep—the genocide of Native Americans, the long history of slavery and racism, the effects of xenophobia, the illegal wars of aggression around the …

Theater Understands Your Holiday Dinner Angst

Family Tables, Real and Imagined, Serve Up ‘Birthrights, Grudges, Feuds, Illicit Unions, and Deeply Buried Secrets’

This is the time of year when families come together, crossing county and state lines and national borders, traversing bodies of water and mountain ranges that made cannibals of our …

News Junkies Get Traumatized, Too

Even If You Watch From Thousands of Miles Away, Events Like the Boston Marathon Bombings and 9/11 Can Be Bad For Your Health

On September 11, 2001, I was in sub-Saharan Africa with limited access to news and television. When I visited a home with a working TV that afternoon, I saw a …