Month: November 2016

  • Venous Hum Arsenal Pulp Press 2004 232 page Paperback ISBN: 9781551521701 Suzette Mayr High school reunions can be hell. But when you throw in racial and sexual tensions, extramarital affairs, and cannibalistic, undead vegetarians, it’s hell times infinity. Brash, clever, and monstrously funny, Venous Hum charts the lives of Lai Fun Kugelheim and Stefanja Dumanowski,…

  • Half and Half Sunday Book Review The New York Times 2007-02-11 Bliss Broyard David Matthews, Ace of Spades, A Memoir (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2007). Twenty minutes into David Matthews’s first day of fourth grade in a new school in a new city, his classmates surround him and demand to know what he…

  • Zadie Smith: By the Book The New York Times 2016-11-17 Zadie Smith Credit Illustration by Jillian Tamaki The author, most recently, of “Swing Time” says the best gift book she ever received was from her dying father, who “gave me his copy of ‘Ulysses,’ along with the confession he had never read it.” What books…

  • Swing Time Penguin Press 2016-11-15 464 pages Hardcover ISBN: 978-1594203985 Paperback ISBN: 978-1524723194 Zadie Smith Two brown girls dream of being dancers—but only one, Tracey, has talent. The other has ideas: about rhythm and time, about black bodies and black music, what constitutes a tribe, or makes a person truly free. It’s a close but…

  • A take-no-prisoners tale of growing up without knowing who you are

  • Life in Trump’s America: A mixed-race educator in the rural South speaks The Daily Dot 2016-11-18 Courtney Parker West Photo via Gage Skidmore / Flickr (CC-BY-SA) Photo via dolgachov / GettyImages | Remix by Jason Reed This is the first in a series of essays on what lives look like in post-election America. One woman…

  • [Emma] Dabiri’s own story serves as a typically atypical example. Her mother was born to white Irish parents in Trinidad, where Dabiri’s maternal grandfather worked as a civil engineer. Her father was born to black Nigerian parents in Ireland before moving back to Nigeria, and Dabiri herself was raised in her paternal grandparents’ house in…

  • Black and British by David Olusoga review – reclaiming a lost past The Guardian 2016-11-17 Colin Grant David Olusoga at St Michael’s Church, Burgh-by-Sands. Photograph: Des Willie/BBC/Des Willie Olusoga’s insightful ‘forgotten history’ amounts to much more than a text to accompany a TV series. Yet despite its many attributes, is it too temperate? How do…

  • Black and British: A Forgotten History Pan Macmillan 2016-11-03 624 pages Hardcover ISBN: 978-1447299738 Ebook ISBN: 978-1447299745 Digital Audio ISBN: 978-1509837113 David Olusoga A vital re-examination of a shared history, published to accompany the landmark BBC Two series. In Black and British, award-winning historian and broadcaster David Olusoga offers readers a rich and revealing exploration of…

  • Sophie Okonedo Is Queen Margaret in ‘The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses’ (On PBS Dec 11-25) Shadow And Act 2016-11-17 Sophie Okonedo “The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses” is a lavish three-part follow-up to the BAFTA winning “The Hollow Crown,” which aired in 2013 on THIRTEEN’s “Great Performances.” The first series…