Nasdijj's fake magical realist memoir: re-visioning magical realism's relationship with fakery

Examining what might be described as Nasdijj’s "fake magical realist memoir" The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams, this paper is interested in how Nasdijj's text might be useful in contesting our understanding of the postcolonial literature of magical realism. Drawing attention to Nasdijj’s utilization of the “primitivist” conventions of magical realism, this paper will illustrate how fakery might be seen as essential not only to Nasdijj's text but also to magical realism. In fact, this paper argues that magical realist novels might be productively read as hoaxes, mobilizing what Graham Huggan describes as the "postcolonial exotic" in order to engage in a subversive act of “culture jamming”. The objective of the analysis is not to condemn magical realism along with Nasdijj’s opportunistic memoir, but rather to rescue magical realism from ideas about authenticity, celebrating its ironies and its challenges to colonial discourses of identity and history.

Writer-as-narrator: engaging the debate around the (un)reliable narrator in memoir and the personal essay

Subjective and personal forms of nonfiction writing are enjoying exponential popularity in English language publishing currently, as an interested public engages with ‘true’ stories of society and culture. Yet a paradox exists at the centre of this form of writing. As readers, we want to know who the writer is and what she has to tell us. Yet as writers we use a persona, a constructed character, a narrator who is only partially the writer, to deliver the narrative. How is a writer able to convey ‘true’ stories that are inherently reliant on memory, within a constructed narrative persona?We find a ‘gap’ between the writer and the narrator/protagonist on the page, an empowered creative space in which composition occurs, facilitating a balance between the facts and lived experiences from which ‘true’ stories are crafted, and the acknowledged fallibility of human memory. While the gap between writer and writer-as-narrator provides an enabling space for creative composition, it also creates space for the perception of unreliability. The width of this gap, we argue, is crucial. Only if the gap is small, if writer and writer-as-narrator share a set of passionately held values, can the writer-as-narrator become a believable entity, satisfying the reader with the ‘truth’ of their story.

Thomas Spratt Memoir - Accession 50 M23 (34)

The Thomas Spratt Memoir consists of a typescript account titled Recollections of the Spratt Family, detailing the history of the Spratt family of York County, South Carolina from the arrival in America of Thomas Spratt from County Down, Ireland, in 1740 to 1876.

Heinrich Graetz : a memoir

by Philipp Bloch

The Bedford schools and charities of Sir William Harper : history of this celebrated endowment, the Act of Parliament and scheme of rules for its management, and a memoir of Sir William Harper /

Includes index.

The choice works of Dean Swift in prose and verse. Carefully reprinted from the original edition with a memoir.

Mode of access: Internet.

Isobel Burns (Mrs. Begg) a memoir by her grandson.

Mode of access: Internet.

A memoir of the life and labors of Francis Wayland ... late president of Brown University, including selections from his personal reminiscences and correspondence /

Mode of access: Internet.