Adnan Mahmutovic's Blog, page 3

"Tender Graces" by Kathryn Magendie

Tender Graces is about memory and what Tony Morrison called thick love, which is both present and past, both filling Virginia Kate Carey's today and dissipating like ashes of yesterdays. The protagonist, Virginia Kate returns to her old house in the Smokey Mountains to find it empty and yet pregnant with the past.

Although the setting of Tender Graces is local, its appeal blows the borders of the South to such an extent that even a double foreigner like me (to the place and the local lingo...

Taqwacores by Michael Muhammad Knight

The Taqwacores is a novel about a strange community, to put it mildly. To even try and come up with a single word or a sentence that could capture even the gist of the crew of Muslim punk artists is mindwrecking.

The title, "Taqwacores", combines taqwa, the Arabic word for "piety," with "hardcore," used to describe many genres of angry Western music (and also adult movies). So the protagonist Yusuf Ali experiences "taqwacores" as deep Muslim piety mixed with angry hardcore music (played in...

"Sarajevo Rose / War Rhymes" by Melika Salihbeg Bosnawi

Background: On 1 March, Bosnians celebrated something of an Independence Day. I say something because it still does not feel like there is an independent Bosnia, rather a creature with a couple of heads knocking each other unconscious from time to time. I am speaking of course of the head called the Federation in which all constitutive peoples are legitimate citizens. The other head is so-called Serbian republic stretching from the North and deep down almost to Sarajevo. It is very much...

"Woman Inside Out" by Kathryn Magendie

The new literary magazine Sotto Voce, which is available online and soon in print as well, features in its second issue a short story by Kathryn Magendie, a North Carolina author and editor of The Rose & Thorn E-Zine.

Magendie's story is one of those rare pieces that use smooth and graceful style to strip characters, and I'd say humanity itself, to the bones. Unlike many intellectual writers, Magendie carves her well-thought, deep, and witty prose with exquisite poetics that balance out her...

"Lars von Trier's Gift" By Adnan Mahmutovic

Note: this essay was published by Literary Magic Magazine in January 2009.

Originating in diverse religious thought, the problematic of "gift" has for centuries been present in art as well as in philosophical discourse. Most recently the question of gift was taken up by the continental philosopher Jacques Derrida in his book Given Time I: Counterfeit Money. Basing his argument on the century old work by the anthropologist Marcel Mauss, Derrida went on to stress the "poisonous" nature of any...