KNOPF, MAY 2022, 288 PP. Nightcrawling opens with an apartment pool full of dog feces, the cackles of a woman driven mad by life, and a seventeen-year-old protagonist who’s trying to figure out how to pay the rent. Kiara and her barely older brother, Marcus, live in a crumbling East Oakland apartment complex, left alone by parents who have succumbed to death, prison, or grief. Marcus wants to be a rap star and spends
FLATIRON, APRIL 2023, 304 PP. HALFWAY THROUGH MONICA Brashears’s debut House of Cotton, the narrator, Magnolia, observes, “Grief makes people slapstick.” Until then, I wasn’t entirely sure what sort of novel I was reading. The story is told by a young woman who takes a very strange job in a funeral parlor during a down-and-out period of poverty, loss, and sexual compulsion. With its Brothers Grimm epigraphs, leitmotif of fairy tale references, and folksy-profane vernacular,
GRAYWOLF PRESS, AUGUST 2022, 320 PP. A POET AND a psychoanalyst walk into a bar. That sounds like the setup to a joke, but really, it’s a scene from Nuar Alsadir’s enthralling new book, Animal Joy: A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation, and, in this case, the poet and the psychoanalyst are one and the same: Alsadir herself. In this expansive and erudite meditation on the relationship between laughter and basically everything else, Alsadir interweaves
GRAND CENTRAL, APRIL 2022, 144 PP. Born from a deeply resonant New Yorker essay of the same title published during the 2020 racial violence protests, The Trayvon Generation expands like a blanket of rain across a parched horizon. Following her critically acclaimed memoir, The Light of the World, Pulitzer Prize finalist and bestselling author Elizabeth Alexander turns her gaze toward anti-Black violence. Meditating on the persisting problem of the color line, Alexander alchemizes Black
Knopf, March 2022, 192 pp. Julie Otsuka’s third novel, The Swimmers, is not about swimming, however it might try to make you believe that it is. Otsuka, award-winning writer of The Buddha in the Attic and When the Emperor Was Divine, takes us to an underground swimming club whose members operate with a near-religious reverence. The first section of the book, “The Underground Pool,” is told by a collective voice. We, the devotees. Their routine
HOGARTH, FEBRUARY 2023, 608 PP. “I THINK POLITICAL violence leaves scars, like a national PTSD,” the Argentine journalist and fiction writer Mariana Enriquez said in a 2018 interview with LitHub. “The scale of the cruelty in political violence,” she continued, “always seems like the blackest magic to me. Like they have to satisfy some ravenous and ancient god that demands not only bodies but needs to be fed their suffering as well.” Enriquez’s 2019 debut
UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS, AUGUST 2022, 320 PP. EVERYBODY EATS, SO what’s political about eating? After reading Eating While Black, the answer is clear: everything. As a sociologist who studies Black beauty and hair, another topic that at first glance is often misjudged as banal, I was immediately drawn to anthropologist Psyche Williams-Forson’s analysis of Black food as creative material that simultaneously symbolizes social hierarchies and individual taste. Our bodies—what we put on them,
PENGUIN PRESS, MAY 2022, 360 PP. In “The Seducer’s Diary,” a novella from Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, a manipulative man stalks and courts a younger girl; soon enough, they are engaged. But the seducer takes his real pleasure in manipulation, not love, and he connives to have the girl break the engagement. Alone and without definitive proof of the man’s past affection, the girl wonders if the whole affair was a figment of her imagination. With
NYU PRESS, MAY 2021, 248 PP. When Moya Bailey—now an associate professor of communication studies at Northwestern University—first coined the term misogynoir in 2008, she was a grad student investigating how representations of Black women in popular culture influence their treatment in society and medicine. “It was in writing my dissertation that I landed on the word ‘misogynoir’ to describe the particular kind of venom directed at Black women through negative representations in the media,”
NEW DIRECTIONS, JULY 2023, 96 PP. THE ROAD TO the City is, at face value, apolitical. In an afterword from 1964, when Natalia Ginzburg was forty-eight, she describes the conception and creation of this, her first published book: “And I remembered how my mother, whenever she read a novel that was too long and tedious, would say, ‘What a blathering bore!’ […] I felt the impulse to write something my mother might like. So, to
