In a quiet English town, an old lady resists the questioning of MI5 whilst trying not to alienate her barrister son. (For more on titles, see How to Choose a Title For Your Novel) Red Joan: Logline Using the name of the Protagonist in the title is a classic title archetype. The title is a reference to the name of the Protagonist of the story, Joan Stanley, and that she’s working for the Soviets (‘Reds’ is a nickname for communists). In Red Joan, Rooney explores the journey of a realistic female spy, who uses her ‘invisibility’ as a low-ranking female to her advantage. The British government only exposed her activities in 1999, when she was 87.īlending fact and fiction, Rooney brings to life the Communist circles of Cambridge in the late 1930s and Russian spying on the British nuclear weapons project. Red Joan, written by Jennie Rooney and published by Chatto and Windus in 2013, is loosely based on the story of Melita Norwood, a British civil servant who supplied intelligence to the Russians for forty years. This is a guest post by Sarah Jasmon– author, journalist and copywriter.
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She began working as a nanny in the 1950s, a profession she would continue for over 40 years. Vivian Maier was born in New York City in 1926 and spent part of her childhood in France before returning to the United States in the late 1930s. Although she worked as a nanny for most of her life, Maier's passion for photography resulted in a remarkable and largely unknown archive of over 100,000 negatives, which have since gained widespread recognition and acclaim. Maier's striking black and white photographs capture the essence of mid-20th century urban life in America, depicting everyday scenes with a keen eye for detail, humanity, and humor. Vivian Maier was an enigmatic American street photographer whose work was discovered posthumously, revealing a stunning and extensive body of work that has captivated the photography world. Ozeki is very much in tune with other theorists, including Teresa Brennan, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and the novelist Gish Jen, who have all argued in different ways for a theory of the interdependent self as a critique of possessive individualism-not to mention works such as Arjun Appadurai’s Modernity at Large or Wai-chee Dimock’s Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time that identify complex global cultural flows shaping “local” identity and history. It also asks these fascinating questions: in what ways do both Buddhist ethics and quantum physics model such an “entangled” sense of readerly and textual identity? What would it be like for a reader to experience a truly quantum/Taoist narrative? In Time Being Ozeki offers both Buddhism and quantum physics as counter-models to global capitalism’s pitch that freedom is best realized via market exchanges where self-interest dominates and “access” to others is guaranteed. What if we imagine a text as written for an ideal reader who will involve herself so intensely in the text’s story-world (its diegesis) that she may be driven to cross barriers of space and time in dream to influence its events? Ozeki’s novel presents us with just such a radical ethics of reading. Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being takes an invigoratingly different approach to modeling reading, empathy, and ethical action in a globe dominated by capital flows and information exchange. |