Booksellers recommend their favorite books of 2020 from indie publishers; Candacy Taylor discusses Green Books
December 30, 2020
At the
New York Review of Books, Salamishah Tillet interviews painter Jordan Casteel about her large-scale oil portraits and the importance of scale in her work: “I was thinking about the way that Black male bodies have existed in the visual and historical realms in the Americas, and how they’ve been villainized, made to feel small, disrespected. I just wanted to give them as much room as possible.”
Scott Donaldson, biographer of Ernest Hemingway, John Cheever, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, has died at the age of ninety-two. He also wrote a book on the difficulty of writing biographies, which includes a section detailing how fourteen different writers discussed Zelda Fitzgerald’s mysterious relationship with French aviator Edouard Jozan. “From 14 books,” Donaldson wrote, “you get 14 different accounts.”