Archive - June 3, 2010

1
May Books By Peace Corps Writers
2
Writers From the Peace Corps: The Lost Generation, Part Three
3
Writers From the Peace Corps: The Lost Generation, Part Two

May Books By Peace Corps Writers

Farang (Poems) by Peter Blair (Thailand 1975–78) Autumn House Press $14.95 65 pages 2009 • The Verse of the Sword by RJ Huddy (Morocco 1981–83) xpatfiction $17.50 456 pages September 2009 • The Alchemist’s Kitchen by Susan Rich (Niger 1984–86) White Pine Press $16.00 96 pages May 1, 2010 • A Peace Corps Memoir: Answering JFK’s Call by Terry Sack (Bolivia 1963–65) Createspace $15.95 458 pages April 2010 • Click on the book covers or the bold book titles to order from Amazon and Peace Corps Worldwide, an Amazon Associate, will receive a small remittance.

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Writers From the Peace Corps: The Lost Generation, Part Three

More significant than similarities with the Lost Generation is an examination of why writers went overseas in the first place, and how they wrote about their expatriate world. It is generally accepted that many members of the Lost Generation rebelled against what America had become by the 1900s: a business-oriented society where money and a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant work ethic dominated the culture. To these writers, America was not a “success story.” It was a country devoid of a cosmopolitan culture. Following World War I, a segment of American writers sought to escape that rigid style of life and literature. Europe promised them a way out. Lost Generation writers wanted to be apart from America in terms of what they wrote, how they wrote, and where they wrote. These disenfranchised artists packed their bags and traveled to London and Paris in search of literary freedom and a more diverse way . . .

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Writers From the Peace Corps: The Lost Generation, Part Two

Peace Corps writers are like their predecessors in Paris in four ways. 1) Both groups wrote about, and explained to an American audience, the world of an expatriate. Hemingway wrote of Paris and Spain while Mark Brazaitis writes of Guatemala; Hemingway wrote of big game hunting in East Africa and Norm Rush writes of white racists in Southern Africa; Fitzgerald wrote of wealthy, bored Americans on the French Riviera and Simone Zelitch writes of survivors of the Holocaust leaving Hungary for Haifa. Other Peace Corps writers regularly find equally rewarding subject matter. Paul Theroux writes of Indians in Kenya in his first novel set in Africa; Richard Wiley about Korea and Koreans; P. F. Kluge about islands in the sun in the Pacific; and Mark Jacobs, who was a Volunteer in Paraguay and a foreign service officer in his Peace Corps country as well as Turkey and Spain, has written about . . .

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