Picking up yesterday's thread, the balance in Seçkin’s novel sways toward the personal, whereas the political scene in Alaa Al-Aswany’s The Republic of False Truths (2021) is more prominent, despite all the attention paid to characterization—a network that grows increasingly complex as readers turn the pages. (And there’s at
The 1619 Project (Edited by Nikole Hannah-Jones, Caitlin Roper, Ilena Silverman, and Jake Silverstein) opens with an epigraph from Langston Hughes, his poem “American Heartbreak 1619”: I am the American heartbreak-- The rock on which freedom Stumped its toe-- The great mistake That Jamestown made Long ago He’s such
The more time I’ve spent reading about slavery this year, the more often I’ve discovered references to it in unexpected places. (Looking to catch up? Here are all the links to the previous posts this year.) For instance, in Fred D’Aguiar’s memoir Year of Plagues (2021): “When I think
Here’s a glimpse of some recent reads which lend themselves more to sampling, in a handful of reading sessions, than gobbling in longer periods of time. Not the books which require a sink-into-your-seat focus, the ones which afford the opportunity to window-gaze between pages. Recently I’ve been missing a
Yesterday, in the wake of the librarians’ shushing, some might have taken advantage of the ensuing silence for a nap. Now, yawning ourselves awake, we can resume our chat about the overlap between fiction and non-fiction, in sprawling and slightly chaotic stacks and shelves. In the opening story of
