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A Painful, Urgent Reimagining: Emily van Duyne on Writing a New History of...
I met Emily Van Duyne, as used to be so common, on Twitter. It was the start of the pandemic and I had just published this story in the New York Times, and she reached out to say that she’d had a...
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Politics and Grace in Early Modern Literature
For tens of thousands of years, human beings have been using fictional devices to shape their worlds and communicate with one another. Four thousand years ago they began writing down these stories, and...
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Towards Universality: On Reading—and Rereading—James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues”
I can’t recall with certainty when I first read James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” but I had it well in mind in 1984 when Raymond Carver and I were selecting stories for our American Short Story...
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A Century of James Baldwin
100 years ago, on August 2, 1924 James Baldwin, né James Arthur Jones, was born in New York City. Needless to say, he would grow to become one of America’s most important and beloved writers, thinkers,...
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10 reasons to love James Baldwin, in honor of his 100th birthday.
James Baldwin would have turned a hundred years old today. There are far more than a hundred reasons to celebrate the man. A brilliant, complicated author and one of our most fearsome public...
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James Baldwin and the Roots of Black-Palestinian Solidarity
Few writers can be considered as poignantly relevant decades after their passing as James Baldwin. The Harlem-born writer was often considered ahead of his time, a figure who managed to cut through the...
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The Hidden Story of Black History and Black Lives Before the Civil Rights...
In April 1976, my twenty-seven-year-old uncle, Craig Baskerville, made a tape recording of his great-uncle, Thomas Holcomb. The tape is scratchy, and Lady, the family dog, keeps barking in the...
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Inside James Baldwin’s Fraught Relationship With His Stepfather
Baldwin describes how his father’s illness led to him “hating and fearing every living soul including his children who had betrayed him, too, by reaching towards the world which had despised him.” As...
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Did You Know That James Baldwin Wrote for Children, Too?
In rare archival footage, James Baldwin strolls down the sidewalk of 71st Street, surrounded by a band of close-knit family members. Baldwin is gleaming with his classic, wide-open, toothy smile as his...
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Farid Matuk on Mirroring, Poetic Artifice, and Complicating Sensuality in Verse
Lit Hub is excited to feature another entry in a new series from Poets.org: “enjambments,” a monthly interview series with new and established poets. This month, they spoke to Farid Matuk. Farid Matuk...
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