Interrogating Sentimentality with Leslie Jamison
In “In Defense of Saccharin(e),” an essay from her 2014 collection The Empathy Exams that explores the too much-ness and unearned quality of both artificial sweetener and sentimentality, Leslie Jamison...
View ArticleHow My Best Friend Willa Cather Helped Me Beat Stage Fright
I fell for Willa Cather in graduate school—fell so hard that I named my daughter after her. But 20 reading years later, I remembered her like a long-ago crush: something about a big girl, a big...
View ArticleWhere Trans Bodies and Straight Fragility Meet
The second sentence of Garth Greenwell’s novel What Belongs To You tells us where we are and why. “But warning, in places like the bathrooms at the National Palace of Culture, where we met, is like...
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On Superheroes and the Myths of American Power
American superheroes are big business. Emerging in comic books on the eve of World War II, and enjoying a Golden Age during the USA’s post-war boom, superheroes are the cultural product of US military...
View ArticleThe Writer’s Curse, The Writer’s Blessing
Some time ago, a man with whom I had been involved told me he’d erased all of our email correspondence and texts; he advised me to do the same, hailing them as “apocryphal.” It was one thing for it to...
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I Squatted James Baldwin’s House in Order to Save It
To clean the floor of James Baldwin’s guest room would take 32 disposable cleaning wipes. I figured this out on my hands and knees, estimating the square footage of the terra cotta tile surface. There...
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James Baldwin: The World is White No Longer
From all available evidence no black man had ever set foot in this tiny Swiss village before I came. I was told before arriving that I would probably be a “sight” for the village; I took this to mean...
View ArticleThe Fire Next Time is Here: Jesmyn Ward on Race in America
After George Zimmerman shot and killed Trayvon Martin on February 26, 2012, I took to Twitter. I didn’t have anywhere else to go. I wanted to hear what others, black writers and activists, were...
View ArticleBlack Protest Writing, From W.E.B. DuBois to Kendrick Lamar
This past Black History Month, watching the 2016 Grammy Awards provided me with a profound example of just how rich the tradition is of subtext in black protest literature. I sat there awed by the way...
View ArticleIs “Show Don’t Tell” a Universal Truth or a Colonial Relic?
Recently, I transitioned from a world of transnational literary criticism into a predominantly white American creative writing workshop culture. As I moved from one fledgling story draft to another,...
View ArticleFrom Orwell to Trump: When Does Egoism Become Narcissism?
Never before, it seems, has it been so clear that the likeable and the righteous quite possibly shan’t inherit anything, with literature perhaps the least of our worries. In the real world, a...
View ArticleThe Black Boy Literary Survival Kit
Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom. —Walter Benjamin …men jive around with each other instead of dealing for real and later for all the beating-on-the-chest raw gorilla shit, all the...
View ArticleTeju Cole Reminds Us of Life Beyond Politics, and the Beauty of Art
As America chooses its next president today, and we contemplate the end of an awful and grueling two-year campaign season, it is perhaps worth trying to remember that there is life outside and beyond...
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Langston Hughes’ 1958 Review of Notes of a Native Son
“In Notes of a Native Son, James Baldwin surveys in pungent commentary certain phases of the contemporary scene as they relate to the citizenry of the United States, particularly Negroes. Harlem, the...
View ArticleObama: On the End of a Literary Presidency
Tell me: Which is the way I take; Out of what door do I go, Where and to whom? A lively understandable spirit Once entertained you. It will come again. Be still. Wait. –Theodore Roethke, from The lost...
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The Biggest Literary Stories of the Year: 30 to 16
See our picks for 50 to 31 over here. 30. The National Book Awards Become the Oscars of Books The National Book Awards came at a moment of shock and despair for over half the country, just a week after...
View ArticlePaul Auster on Activism, James Baldwin and the Horrors of Trump
Paul Auster talks to Paul Holdengraber about the nature of the unexpected, the nature of the self, and the cruel nature of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. Auster’s new novel, 4 3 2 1 is available January 31...
View ArticleWhen a Promised Land Breaks Its Word
E.B. White once offered up to The New Yorker a short definition of democracy, noting, amongst many items: “…the feeling of privacy in the voting booths, the feeling of communion in the libraries, [and]...
View ArticleTotally, Radically Baldwin: Raoul Peck on I Am Not Your Negro
In 1979, the writer James Baldwin began working on a new project. “Remember This House” was originally conceived as a piece written for The New Yorker that would be a tour through Baldwin’s memory of...
View ArticleBehind the Dedications: James Baldwin
James Baldwin was, undoubtedly, a compassionate man. A Pentecostal junior minister in his teen years, Baldwin eventually left the church, but the Christian ideal of brotherly love suffused his writing....
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