The State of Things

Camille and Caleb Fang love to put people in uncomfortable situations. They're performance artists who think nothing of making a scene by stealing candy at a mall or heckling a pair of young street performers. But the Fang’s greatest works are their damaged children who they traumatize in the name of art. For example, they dress their son as a girl and enter him in a beauty pageant. In The Family Fang" (Ecco/2011), first time novelist Kevin Wilson explores the dependent and often twisted relationship between parents and children.

Novelist and short story author Doris Betts' enduring characters have won her favorable comparisons to Flannery O'Connor and William Faulkner throughout her long career. Among those characters is Violet, the scarred heroine of "The Ugliest Pilgrim" and “Violet,” the musical that short story inspired. Hot Summer Nights at the Kennedy at the Progress Energy Center in Raleigh presents "Violet" this weekend. As part of our continuing series, North Carolina Literary Lights, host Frank Stasio talks about the play with director Eric Woodall and about Betts' literary legacy with Marianne Gingher, professor of English and comparative literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Joe Flora, professor emeritus of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; and Lynn Veach Sadler, a Betts scholar and former vice president of Methodist University in Fayetteville.

Duke University has named its first Hindu chaplain. Usha Rajagopalan's peripatetic young life in India exposed her to diverse forms of Hinduism, and for the past decade she's been educating Triangle residents about her faith through workshops, discussions – and puppets. 

Filmmaker Kelley Katzenmeyer, a recent graduate of the University of North Carolina School of the Arts in Winston-Salem, deferred her admission to Columbia University to study abroad in Seoul, South Korea last year. She took her camera and immediately went to work documenting the rigorous Korean education system. Katzenmeyer planned to make a film about the pressures placed on Korean students to succeed, but she discovered that the pressure of attaining cosmetic beauty rivals academics. The forthcoming film is Katzenmeyer’s first documentary project.

The last time Durham-based photographer Sed Miles was on “The State of Things,” he was preparing to pack up and leave the country, headed out on a dream assignment to see the world. Since then, he’s been to Mexico, Brazil, several European countries and West Africa. Miles has been documenting his travels on a photography blog he calls “The Wanderlust Files.”

Celia Rivenbark, one of our favorite humor columnists, is out with a new collection of essays, "You Don't Sweat Much for a Fat Girl" (St. Martin's Griffin, 2011). In it, she riffs on yoga, Twitter, sleeping hip-hop stars, cinema and, of course, Aunt Verlie.