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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Bryan Washington
188 posts
Bryan Washington has written for Puerto Del Sol, Ninth Letter, and Midnight Breakfast, among others; he's also the recipient of a Houstonia Fellowship. He lives around New Orleans.
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.…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…