I don’t know what to say about a 900 page collection of essays that represent the 50 year career of Ralph Ellison. What I can talk about are some of the various interests, ghosts, and other throughlines that make their way through these essays. He’s a writer who’s very concerned about the racialized criticism of language, of the experiences of Blackness, of literature, and of music. And I guess I mean by that that he’s concerned about each of those items on their own, as […]
When there is no equality there can not be equivalency.
This is ultimately an essay collection that more or less reads like a memoir. This is also the audiobook and it’s read by Morgan Jerkins herself, and given how intimate some of the essays in this collection are, that is the best version of things. She talks about her sex life, her physical body, and her experience within that body and while an accomplished reader could bring a lot of life to it, it would feel strangely off. In addition, the unfortunate effect of that […]
She sounded just like my mother, and I knew that if I didn’t interrupt, the lecture would escalate until I wanted to slit my wrists just to give her something to mop so she would. Stop. Talking.
This is another very good story collection that came out last year, by the writer Lesley Nneka Arimah who grew up in both the United Kingdom and Nigeria. It’s going to be very hard to not compare her to Chimamanda Adichie, but why they have some similarities in background and biography, I think the comparison is at best problematic. Instead what we have here is a handful of really interesting stories that sometimes are short and impactful and other times are longer and feel […]
I wanted what we all want: everything.
I am not sure that having a story to tell is enough. This is a strange book, and my take on it is decidedly cynical. This is a long article that has been artificially extended to a book, and the same issues that would be true about the shorter article is true about the book, but it’s more watered down now, and more additionally fluffed out. There is no narrative through-line that makes a lot of sense, and if you are a writer and in […]
These kids have death wishes. It’s always the ones born with the right to live who want to die.
This story collection has a lot going against it in terms of me liking it. For one, it’s a whole New Kid in Town, NYC scene, heavy promotion by writers who I DO NOT TRUST (eg Lena Dunham, but she’s not alone on this one). It’s possibly topical. So for example, I read no fewer than three novels last year about trans-racial adoption especially by Asian-American writers. And so sometimes, the hop new thing and topical writing forces young/up and coming writers into a kind […]
One should go easy on smashing other people’s lies.
Iris Murdoch writes strange novels. There’s an element of the grotesque in them that is not quite the same as say a Gothic novel or especially an American novel, but her characters are often quite capable of true horrors and awfulness without the kind of severity and cruelty of a Heathcliff but also not with the kind of detached irony of a parodic or satirical one. On the other hand, characters like Charles Arrowby might just be the most cruelly ironic evil character I can […]
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