Tag: New York Review of Books

  • Kristen Green’s The Devil’s Half Acre recounts the story of a fugitive slave jail, and the enslaved woman, Mary Lumpkin, who came to own it.

  • Thomas Chatterton Williams, who belongs to the hip-hop generation of multiculturalism and diversity, is willing to risk being a throwback in his memoir/essay “Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race.”

  • He [George Schuyler] was a man of contradictions. For someone so utterly unsentimental and sternly rational about race and blackness, he indulged his wife’s [Josephine Cogdell] strange neoessentialist belief in “hybrid vigor”—that is, her belief that their daughter’s racial fusion of black and white represented the birth of a new, superior race. With Schuyler’s help,…

  • There is no stable ground to stand on in “Black No More.” Its irony and merciless satire steadfastly resist the anthropological gaze of the reader. It is a novel in whiteface. And while black literature is almost always read as either autobiography or sociology, Schuyler’s work can be read as neither.

  • Jean Toomer’s “Cane” was greeted in 1923 by influential critics as the brilliant beginning of a literary career. Many stressed the “authenticity” of Toomer’s African Americans and the lyrical voice with which he conjured them into being. His treatment of black characters contrasted starkly with both the stereotypes of earlier work by (mostly) white authors…

  • On Optimism and Despair The New York Review of Books 2016-12-22 Zadie Smith A talk given in Berlin on November 10 on receiving the 2016 Welt Literature Prize. First I would like to acknowledge the absurdity of my position. Accepting a literary prize is perhaps always a little absurd, but in times like these not…

  • Blacks & Jews Entangled The New York Review of Books 2016-07-14 Darryl Pinckney Oreo by Fran Ross, with a foreword by Danzy Senna and an afterword by Harryette Mullen, New Directions, 230 pp., $14.95 (paper) Google wasn’t around when Oreo was first published in 1974. You are hit with Greek mythology and Yiddish right away…

  • Forward Passes The New York Review of Books 2015-12-17 Darryl Pinckney Loving Day by Mat Johnson; Spiegel and Grau, 287 pp., $26.00 The importing of human beings into the US from Africa to be sold as slaves was outlawed in 1808, after which the slave markets of the southern states traded in black people born…

  • President Obama & Marilynne Robinson: A Conversation in Iowa The New York Review of Books 2015-11-05 President Barack Obama Marilynne Robinson President Obama and Marilynne Robinson at the Iowa State Library, Des Moines, September 2015 (Pete Souza/White House) The following conversation between President Obama and Marilynne Robinson was conducted in Des Moines, Iowa, on September…

  • Speaking in Tongues The New York Review of Books Volume 56, Number 3 (2009-02-26) Zadie Smith The following is based on a lecture given at the New York Public Library in December 2008. 1. Hello. This voice I speak with these days, this English voice with its rounded vowels and consonants in more or less…