Tag
Black Literature
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Deracialized Discos: On “Discomania” and “The Pepsi-Cola Addict”
It’s common for teenage fantasy to find an engine in fiction. But teenage fantasy runs out.
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What Would Undo the Maxim Gun? Magic: P. Djèlí Clark and andré carrington
“You need your heroes to have flaws.”
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It’s on the Illabus: Jean-Christophe Cloutier and John Jennings
“Everything in the comic has to be thought about from front cover to end … How are you going to use all the secret resources of comics?”
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“Black Genius Against the World”
In 1937, a newspaper trumpeted two speculative fiction stories—“Black Internationale” and “Black Empire”— as dramatically as if they were news.
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Failure’s Gifts
Even the most successful authors—like Phillis Wheatley and W. E. B. Du Bois—fail to publish all they’d like. What can that reveal about literature?
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How the “New York Times” Covers Black Writers
There has long been a fear that media only makes room for one Black writer at a time. But that’s always been difficult to prove—until now.
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One More Embrace: Octavia’s Future/Present
Butler’s work helps us see how time is a spiral, how the present moment is always layered with multiple pasts and underlying alternate futures.
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Octavia E. Butler: The Next 75 Years
Rather than politically utopian, Butler’s stories teach us about grief, consolation, hope, and—most of all—how to live in struggle.
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“Keep Your Own Counsel”: Talking Octavia E. Butler with Lynell George
“She wanted people to be curious and take action in their lives. Not be sheep. To find the ways we can work together in crisis.”
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The World Continues to Need Octavia E. Butler
Pandemics, racist violence, climate change, democratic collapse: it’s finally clear that it’s Butler’s world. We’re just living in it.
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Beholding Black Life: A Conversation with Ross Gay, Frank Guridy, & Deborah Paredez
“We have to witness everything… You don’t do it by yourself. That mode of looking is not like any individual feat; it is a feat of joining.”
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“Now Is the Time of Help”: On Claudia Rankine
A new play centers on a Black woman who stops “accommodating white people” and, instead, asks them “about their love affair with my death.”
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“Having to Explain Who You Are”: Caryl Phillips on Baldwin, Fiction, & Sports
“The first thing he said is, ‘Don’t call me Mr. Baldwin. My name is Jimmy.’ I thought, this is ridiculous, at the very least he’s James.”
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“When Harlem Was in Vogue” at 40
The Harlem Renaissance continues to serve as a source of pride and dignity as well as ammunition in the ongoing struggle for civil rights.
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B-Sides: John Keene’s “Annotations”
Annotations isn’t a book you read for the plot. It’s more of a “Notes toward…” that remains just that: always towards, never quite arriving.
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B-Sides: Paule Marshall’s “Brown Girl, Brownstones”
The July 1960 issue of Esquire—dedicated to New York City—included …
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From “Sister Love: The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker”
Reading writers’ letters is the best kind of eavesdropping. It brings the rush and …
