Posts by author
Bryan Washington
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Speechmaker
Over at the NYRB, Darryl Pinckney deconstructs Ava DuVernay’s Selma, starting from seat of a laymen cinema-goer, and then tying it all back to what actually happened.
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The Last Pulp Star
Chris Offutt talks about the life and death his father, one of America’s last adult-pulp writers, for NY Times Magazine: In the mid-1960s, Dad purchased several porn novels through the mail. My mother recalls him reading them with disgust — not…
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No Lights, No Camera
Mitch Moxley took a trip to the North Korean Film Festival; reporting for GQ, he riffs on how the event was a script in itself: Afterward, outside in the afternoon sun, Hong politely poses for photos with a few fans. When I…
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Half a Century Later
Down at the New Yorker, Kelefa Sanneh asks where the black critics are (and whether we ever had any to begin with, and how the field is irrelevant until they come back): Sociologists who study black America have a name for…
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On a More Personal Level
Guernica interviews Rumpus columnist Thomas Page McBee; he touches on his upcoming novel, American masculinity, and his steady transition across genders and cultures: I didn’t transition until I was thirty. It was complicated, there were a lot of reasons that…
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Real Life Sci-Fi?
Over at The Toast, Mallory Ortberg gives us a compendium of signs that you’re stuck in a soft sci-fi novel. Among the more notable signifiers: You live in a world where robots masturbate, for some reason. The ship’s doctor has a drinking…
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Reasonable Cause
The Torres family learned how Christopher died from watching the news the next day. At a press conference, the department’s chief public-safety officer said that two officers had tried to arrest Christopher at home, but, when he resisted and grabbed…
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Where No Man’s Gone Before
Photographer Lynsey Addario is profiled by the Columbia Journalism Review; the piece highlights her work as a voice for Pakistani refugees, US marines, and Syrian war casualties—all while balancing her life as a mom: The photo of the Syrian teenager with…
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Kinky Reggae
Kima Jones chats with Marlon James over at Midnight Breakfast; the two touch on ghost stories, Bob Marley’s reverberations, and the danger in assuming a story’s authenticity: Some of the things that people think are invented are actually true. It’s…
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There and Back Again
The Guardian profiles Alex Malarkey, co-author of the bestseller The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven. After admitting that, among other things, he’s never actually been there, his publisher looks to backtrack, evangelists work at damage-control, and the Malarkeys try…
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What’s in a Name
Over at Matter, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie gives us a new piece of short fiction: My father’s first child was a girl. He said she was a loud squalling baby who grasped his finger with surprising strength, and he knew it meant…