James Baldwin
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The Rumpus Interview with Daniel Torday
Dan Torday talks about his novel, The Last Flight of Poxl West, the role of fear in fiction, the fabrication of facts in a memoir, and about being “constitutionally unoffendable.”
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“The Labor of Reconsideration”
For the Millions, Philip Graham considers how childhood traumas can inspire art. In his exploration, Graham looks to works by John Gardner, Rabih Alameddine, and James Baldwin, authors who confront “psychic wounds” and use writing as a method of healing: We…
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Something Small and Heavy
This is not a biography, photograph, or method of cloning, not footage, not a transcription—in short: this is not faithful.
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Vernon Reid Digs James Baldwin
At Esquire, sci-fi author Jeff VanderMeer and Living Colour guitarist Vernon Reid discuss genre fiction, and how one art form can inspire another. Reid says: Fiction has always evoked pictures and provoked ideas and sounds in my mind. James Baldwin, who…
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The FBI’s James Baldwin Obsession
Writing for Publishers Weekly, William J. Maxwell examines the 1,884-page FBI file on James Baldwin—the longest on record—as part of his effort to obtain surveillance information on African American authors through the Freedom of Information Act. Along with reports on…
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A Super Bowl Preview for People Who Don’t Know Football (2015 Edition)
Like an all-night rager in the apartment upstairs or a crying infant on a red-eye, the Super Bowl is one of those ineluctable public occurrences that’s seemingly impossible to stop and difficult to ignore.
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This Week in Short Fiction
Some story collections drop with fireworks and great fanfare, while others make their entrance, it could be said, on tender feet. The latter is the case with the works of Edith Pearlman, who released her fifth story collection, Honeydew, on…
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Turning to Baldwin During Tragedy
Art has to be a confession. I don’t mean a true confession in the sense of that dreary magazine. The effort, it seems to me, is: if you can examine and face your life, you can discover the terms with…
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The Big Idea: Eula Biss
On Immunity author Eula Biss speaks to Suzanne Koven about mythology, personal freedom, and the history of vaccines.
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The Devil Finds Work
Combining The Exorcist, New Jersey, and James Baldwin, among other things, Nick Ripatrazone reviews William Giraldi’s new novel, Hold the Dark, at The Millions. He contemplates Giraldi’s place in contemporary Catholic literature, using his fiction, alongside Cormac McCarthy’s and Christopher…
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“Let America be America Again”
In an interview with The New Yorker, Graywolf poet Claudia Rankine discusses Ferguson, James Baldwin, and the experience of invisibility: “[T]he sort of execution-style shooting takes [Michael Brown’s shooting] to this whole other place that starts approaching the language of…
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Rereading James Baldwin
Teju Cole has a long, staggeringly (good, sharp, dynamic, crushing) essay in The New Yorker about rereading James Baldwin’s Stranger In The Village: American racism has many moving parts, and has had enough centuries in which to evolve an impressive camouflage. It…