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The Lesser-Known Novel of the 1950s That Presaged Queer Liberation
Whenever I recommend Mary Renault’s The Charioteer—something I do with embarrassing frequency—I feel like I ought to offer a list of caveats, some pre-emptive apologies for what you’re going to find...
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Read the first reviews of every James Baldwin novel.
James Baldwin is widely considered to be one of the finest writers and public intellectuals this country has ever produced. A brilliant novelist, essayist, and social critic, his explorations of...
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“Code words to say what can’t be said”: James Hannaham Talks to a Writer in...
James Hannaham’s most recent novel, Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta (2022), opens with Carlotta Mercedes, a Black, Latina trans woman, answering questions at a parole hearing that...
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The Many Lessons from James Baldwin’s Another Country
From the first page, I am immersed in the world of James Baldwin’s Another Country. It is Rufus’s world from the start. Rufus is a flawed character if there ever was one – and yet how deeply...
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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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Why Toni Morrison Left Publishing
Commercial book publishing was (and is) unbearably white. In 1971, when Toni Morrison became a trade editor, about 95 percent of the fiction published by the big commercial houses was by white authors....
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Dwight Garner on the Long History of Writers and America’s Greatest...
I make a martini, Gordon’s or Barr Hill, every night at seven with, in my mind at least, a matador’s formality. I use dense, square ice cubes. Like the pop of a cork exiting a bottle, a martini’s being...
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Black Lives Matter in the Classroom: A Roundtable on Teaching CRT and...
Every first week of December, Catalyst Press celebrates #ReadingAfrica week. I wanted to chat with educators and librarians who celebrate and embrace the philosophy of #ReadingAfrica week year-round....
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Unsurprisingly, George Santos doesn’t know who James Baldwin is.
I’m sorry, but George Santos isn’t going away. In the grand tradition of American chicanery-cum-celebrity, the ousted congressman from Long Island has tapped into this country’s mass cultural id and...
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“What If We Weren’t Afraid to Tell the Hard Truths?” Chris Chalk on Playing...
Chris Chalk may not be a household name just yet, but he’s on the cusp. The North Carolina native burst onto the American theater scene in 2010 when he starred opposite Denzel Washington and Viola...
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There’s a lot more hair than you think stored at the Library of Congress.
On April 24, 1800, President John Adams signed an Act of Congress that moved the U.S. capitol from Philadelphia to Washington, forever denying us the spectacle of Congressmembers being regularly...
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In Honor of Duke Ellington: Here Are 15 Great Books About Jazz
Can a sentence swing and a paragraph bop? Is it possible for prose to be as stripped down and cool as a Miles Davis trumpet solo, or a poem to be as incantatory as John Coltrane’s saxophone? Despite...
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The Annotated Nightstand: What Morgan Talty Is Reading Now, and Next
Before Morgan Talty’s novel begins, he opens with a brief letter to the reader in which he describes how he and friends, as kids, talked about “how much” Penobscot they were. “Blood quantum is a...
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Let Them Be Morally Flawed: In Defense of Queer Villains in Stories
Queerness and villainy have a long history of being conflated by mainstream entertainment, from Peter Lorre’s effeminate and threatening Joel Cairo in The Maltese Falcon to the obsessed and...
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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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