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An Uzbek trilogy    

The key to commercial success for authors writing mainstream fiction in the West often comes down to their craft in maintaining narrative traction involving psychologically interesting characters.   Sean Sheehan   Emotional empathy is often established with one or more central character or, in the case of villains and psychopaths, […]

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Paper graveyards

“Paper graveyards” is a collection of essays by Eduardo Cadava, a professor at Princeton, that sees photography as invested with a migratory potential, the ability to shift away from itself and form new relations with other media.   Sean Sheehan   Cadava’s approach could be regarded with suspicion, another postmodernist […]

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Trains not planes

The gas emissions from flights make up 2.4% of the world’s total carbon emissions and even a flight of a few hundred miles produces up to 50 times more pollution than a high-speed electric train.   Sean Sheehan   When you consider that some 75% of the world’s population never […]

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The human and the nonhuman

Rebecca Tamás begins her book “Strangers” by recalling the 17th century Levellers and their proto-communist calls for radical democracy and common ownership of land.   Sean Sheehan   She is drawn to their prescient awareness of the need to connect political awareness with ecological concerns, the human and the nonhuman. […]