This Thing of Existence: Talking with Rion Amilcar Scott
Rion Amilcar Scott discusses his new story collection, THE WORLD DOESN’T REQUIRE YOU.
...moreRion Amilcar Scott discusses his new story collection, THE WORLD DOESN’T REQUIRE YOU.
...more“[Y]ou really want to engage a reader, and not abuse their time.”
...moreLiterary events in and around the Bay Area this week!
...moreJon Day discusses his memoir, Cyclogeography: Journeys of a London Bicycle Courier, the bicycle as a symbol of gentrification, and the city as “a technology for living.”
...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.
...moreDon’t write about trying to change the world, just write about a changed world or a world that’s not changing. Let that do the work. Paul Beatty’s formally experimental, informally humanely scathing novel about race, The Sellout, has just won the Man Booker Prize. Chris Paul Wolfe interviews Beatty for Guernica, touching on invented languages […]
...moreDespite its uncanny salience in the context of this most recent wave of social injustice and protest, Paul Beatty’s The Sellout was written well before the #BlackLivesMatter movement began. Far from a coincidence, the book’s resonance is a product of the same paradox of time it describes, in which dated social conditions cannot possibly continue […]
...moreIf your family or your people are looking over your shoulder, change your seat or push them away. Ask them to trust you with the truth.
...moreSuperficially, Philip Roth and Paul Beatty might appear as polar opposites. But over at Forward, Hannah Assouline argues that Beatty could be Roth’s literary heir. Assouline calls Beatty’s latest novel, The Sellout, a “generation’s answer to Roth,” and compares the novel to Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint: “The Sellout” — which concerns a California sociologist’s son brought before the […]
...moreSaturday 4/18: Paul Beatty discusses The Sellout, Brooklyn Public Library, 4 p.m., free (RSVP recommended). Sara Fetherolf, John Reid Currie, Zakia Henderson-Brown, and Carrie Meyers join the Oh, Bernice! reading series. Astoria Bookshop, 7 p.m., free. Leslie Allison, Filip Marinovich, and Lewis Warsh celebrate the launch of their books from Ugly Duckling Presse. Pierogi Gallery, […]
...moreLuke Wiget reviews The Sellout by Paul Beatty today in Rumpus Books.
...moreChalk it up to a week where Twitter just felt like too much. Chalk it up to good ol’ nostalgia for the feel of a hefty book in your hands. Or maybe, just chalk it up to an aligning of stars that placed nine exceptional writers under the same roof. If you happen to have […]
...moreSaturday 3/7: Cynthia Daignault and Joseph Mosconi join the Segue Series. Zinc Bar, 4:30 p.m., free. Sunday 3/8: Ashley C. Ford, Daniel Jose Older, and Cynthia Cruz launch a new discussion series, The Hustle, that examines how writers work. WORD Brooklyn, 2 p.m., free. Elissa Schappell and Lynne Tillman celebrate International Women’s Day. Over the […]
...moreIn an interview with NPR, novelist and funnyman Paul Beatty discusses his novel The Sellout, and what’s on his mind when creating a world where plantation culture is reborn in California. The novel focuses on Bonbon, an African American man who reacts to the accidental shooting of his father by the LAPD by re-segregating his […]
...moreSaturday 2/28: Tom McCarthy reads Satin Island, a novel about writing the Great Report. 192 Books, 7 p.m., free. Claudia Rankine and Elizabeth Alexander read from their latest works. McNally Jackson, 7 p.m., free. Sunday 3/1: Joanna Fuhrman, Shelley Marlow, and Elissa Ball celebrate new books by Fuhrman and Marlow. Molasses Books, 8 p.m., free. […]
...moreThe Rumpus Book Club chats with Hilton Als about his new collection White Girls, an intriguing amalgam of fiction, essay, and memoir.
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