UNGRATEFUL, UNAFRAID Joanne wore a pink circle skirt and a ribbon in her hair the day her sister disappeared. She was proud of that skirt, proud that it came all the way from the sixties, dusty but intact in a plastic bag from the attic—booty from a weekend of endlessly ungrateful household chores. Read the full story here: […]
MILK TEETH So now she knew and it was done, and as the curves in the road rocked her in and out of the same bad dream she thought of him: of how rough he’d been with the woman at the wedding, of how surprised he’d been to see her, and then less so, and then resigned. […]
A HOSTILE ENVIRONMENT When I asked an employee at a hotel in Richmond, Virginia for directions to the Museum of the Confederacy, he gave me a strange look. “Are you sure you want to go there?” I understood the skepticism of this African American man in his smart bellman’s uniform. Black folks generally tend to […]
Why You Should Read Him Because you’re tired of seeing/reading the same people, the same stories over and over. The people of Rion Amilcar Scott’s world are people who share our cities, but for most of this country, for white people like me, they may as well be on another planet, in a science fiction […]
A New Novel by Julie Iromuanya “Everyone had done it, he supposed. To some degree, they had all told their little lies.” These are not the opening lines of Julie Iromuanya’s striking debut novel Mr. and Mrs. Doctor, but they may as well be. They are the thoughts of Job Ogbannaya, the protagonist. Job’s approach […]
In 2011, Washington writer Dolen Perkins-Valdez published “Wench,” an unsparing look at the brutal relationships between Southern plantation owners and the slaves they kept as mistresses. She captured the horrific treatment of these women even as they attempted to maintain their dignity. And now, in her second novel, “Balm,” she tells an equally moving story […]
Baltimore: What Hasn’t Changed Steven H. Wright Amid a national epidemic of violence involving police officers and unarmed young black men, the city of Baltimore’s swift prosecution of six police in the alleged murder of Freddie Gray has been seen as a glimmer of hope. Following controversial grand jury decisions not to indict police in […]
“A house divided against itself cannot stand,” Abraham Lincoln declared in his 1858 speech presaging the Civil War. Such a house sits at the heart of Mat Johnson’s ribald, incisive novel “Loving Day.” Bequeathed to the narrator, Warren Duffy, by his deceased father, it’s a roofless, ramshackle mansion in a black neighborhood in Philadelphia: “I […]
