By Naima Coster
It is 1992 when Naima Costerâs sophomore novel, âWhatâs Mine and Yours,â opens in the Piedmont Triad of North Carolina. Two men, smoking cigarettes outside an empty cafe, share the stories of their families. Though their chat seems little more than â15 minutes of smoking and standing together,â it is through this brief but candid exchange that we come to share two fathersâ dreams for four children who will be brought together by the impending misfortunes of these very men.
After a harrowing and gut-wrenching opening chapter, we discover Gee, a contemplative and grieving Black boy living with two steely women who have chosen to love him despite not loving each other. Gee masturbates compulsively â and the compulsion only worsens when he finds himself in the midst of a school busing dispute where he will be emotionally terrorized, not only by new classmates and their parents, but by his own mother, who pushes in all the wrong wa
By Rachel Kramer Bussel | Feb 26, 2021
Penguin Classics introduced the Penguin Vitae hardcover series in 2020 as a way to highlight what it calls “seminal works” by “a diverse world of storytellers from the past.” Many of the featured authors are women, with books by Nella Larsen and Audre Lorde on the launch list. A new edition of 1982’s The Women of Brewster Place by Gloria Naylor, due out in May, joins forthcoming reissues from several publishers that convey a variety of female experiences.
Gretchen Schmid, associate editor at Viking/Penguin, tapped
An American Marriage author Tayari Jones to write the foreword to
Ibram X. Kendi Likes to Read at Bedtime
Credit.Jillian Tamaki
Published Feb. 25, 2021Updated March 1, 2021
“I don’t remember the last time the pages of a book were not the final thing I saw before departing off for sleep,” says the author, professor and editor, with Keisha Blain, of “Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019.”
What’s the last great book you read?
I can’t just name one. I want to highlight three great books I recently read on America’s political economy. The first, “Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership,” by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, is an expertly told history of the post-civil rights emergence of what Taylor terms “predatory inclusion.” The second, “From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century,” by William A. Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen, is the best booklong case for reparations. The third, “The Broken Heart of Ame
Embracing our excremental selves eurekalert.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from eurekalert.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
The Lost Soul, illustrated by Joanna Concejo. Courtesy of Seven Stories Press.
There are very few children in my life right now, but if there are in the future, I look forward to sitting down with them to read Olga Tokarczuk’s beautiful and melancholy
The Lost Soul. Illustrated by Joanna Concejo and translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, it is the brief tale of a man who, by moving too fast in life, has lost his soul. As a wise doctor explains to the man: “Souls move at a much slower speed than bodies. They were born at the dawn of time, just after the Big Bang, when the cosmos wasn’t yet in such a rush.” All is not lost: the man moves to the countryside and, as illustrated in Concejo’s delicate, wistful images, waits patiently for his soul to find him. Once this finally happens, he throws away all his watches and suitcases so as to no longer move through life too fast. When I was a child, the writing and art I liked best always disturbed me slightly and made me realize, wit