How It Would Feel to Be Free: Olivia Laing’s Everybody
Pleasures and possibilities, though, come hard-won in this book.
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Join NOW!Pleasures and possibilities, though, come hard-won in this book.
...moreFor me, performance is a conversation with the sacred and timeless, the sublime.
...moreFenton Johnson discusses his new book, AT THE CENTER OF ALL BEAUTY.
...moreYou will now find some version of the list below. It is imperfect.
...moreMonica Prince discusses writing, advocacy, and the art of the choreopoem.
...more“I think if you are really doing the work, you can’t write about America and not explore race and slavery, and that goes for any writer.”
...moreOne thing I was taught about travel—because my father is a black man born in Alabama in 1950—was that there are safe places for black people to go and places that aren’t as safe.
...moreMick Harvey discusses his decades-long music career, working on cover songs written in another language, and finding longevity in the music business.
...moreErika T. Wurth talks about her latest book, Buckskin Cocaine, persevering through rejection, and white writers writing Native characters.
...moreWednesday 6/21: Cuban writer Achy Obejas (The Tower of the Antilles—our June book club pick!), currently Distinguished Visiting Writer at Mills College, reads from her forthcoming story collection. Free, 7 p.m., City Lights. Charif Shanahan, Nancy Patrice Davenport, André Le Mont Wilson, Andrew J. Thomas, and Nick Johnson are the featured readers for the June edition of popular reading […]
...moreI don’t use the term “lifelong hero” frivolously. There are a lot of people I respect and wish to emulate; Annie Lennox, however, is the only “lifelong hero” I’ll ever have. I need her.
...moreNina Simone’s troubles were highlighted in the recent gripping documentary by Liz Garbus, What Happened, Miss Simone? Though Simone had her fair share of challenges, it was her incredibly resonant voice and musical genius that contributed to the gradual accumulation of legends surrounding her. These talents are bursting from the seams of “Gin House Blues,” Miss […]
...moreTara Betts discusses her newest collection, Break the Habit, the burden placed on black women artists to be both artist and activist, and why writing is rooted in identity.
...moreAt Largehearted Boy, essayist, literary experimentalist, and scholar Mary Capello shares an annotated playlist for her new essay collection, Life Breaks In (University of Chicago Press). She describes mood as the “companion and muse” for her writing: If there is one subject under the sun that defies our ordering systems even as it tempts us […]
...moreI felt urgently that it was the moment to tell the story of what I’ve learned about American music—or maybe about being an American.
...moreGiven the anarchic, traumatic, and deeply worrying events of recent months, some might begin to lose hope. However, music—and especially jazz, the most particularly American music—never seems to lose its power to soothe and calm us. Louis Armstrong, in a special song that might sound deceptively typical to the hasty listener, made a groundbreaking statement on race relations in […]
...moreMax Ritvo passed away on August 23, 2016. Earlier this summer, he spoke with Sarah Blake about his debut collection Four Reincarnations, writing with and about cancer, and how language is a game.
...moreIn addition to his song “Spiritual,” which deals with the issue of police brutality, Jay Z has released a playlist of songs to get us through the crushing violence lately exposed by social media. “Songs for Survival” includes music by Beyoncé, Curtis Mayfield, James Brown, Common, Outkast, Gil Scott-Heron, Fela Kuti, Kendrick Lamar, Nina Simone, Marvin Gaye, Kanye West, and others. You can listen to […]
...moreEver since Zoe Saldana was set to play Nina Simone in the upcoming biopic Nina, controversy has surrounded the casting choice. Writing in the Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates says that the issue isn’t just about Saldana’s lighter skin tone, but the erasure of Simone’s facial features and what it says about America’s racist beauty standards: Saldana […]
...moreThe Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with Camille Rankine about her new book Incorrect Merciful Impulses, history, and trying to be a writer every day.
...moreRefusing to be tragic, and eventually, within the deep lost, the deepest I’ve known, comes rebirth.
...moreThe much-anticipated documentary of soul genius Nina Simone is available from Netflix starting today, with its rare archival footage and new interviews with family and colleagues, including the artist’s daughter, Lisa Simone Kelly, and music director, Al Schackman. As the date has approached, tracks have been popping up from RCA Record’s upcoming album Nina Revisited: A Tribute to Nina Simone, […]
...moreThere’s always that longing to say everything and nothing at once, that yearning for the moment I forget I am myself.
...more“I believe Nina Simone tried to build that gun because that night she realized what all other-ed bodies eventually realize: a gun was already at her head. She feared a song might not be enough. The fact that this gun could not be seen didn’t make it any less real or lethal. And I wonder […]
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