What to Read When You Want to Reclaim Your Time
Books that center us and offer new perspectives.
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Posts Tagged: Ralph Ellison
Reading Other People’s Mail: Talking with Michelle Dean
Michelle Dean discusses Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion, literary legends, and the absence of Black writers from the narrative.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #84: Susan DeFreitas
Picture this: a curbside juggler with a rose between his teeth. That’s the opening image of Susan DeFreitas’s powerful debut novel, Hot Season. Vivid (and sometimes strange) images strike again and again, conjuring ponderosa pines, cafés, old houses, and new characters. The book is firmly set in the fictional town of Crest Top, Arizona, and […]
...moreHarlem Is Nowhere
A new exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago takes visitors through the collaborative efforts of writer Ralph Ellison and photographer Gordon Parks: In some ways, their collaboration is akin to a great songwriting duo… One handles the music, the other lyrics, and there’s never something that comes completely first. They understood that the sum […]
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VISIBLE: Women Writers of Color: Desiree Cooper
Desiree Cooper discusses her debut collection of flash fiction, Know the Mother, what mother-writers need, and why motherhood is the only story she’s ever told.
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Anna March’s Reading Mixtape #22: Classic Novels That Are a Joy to Read
Sometimes we bypass the classic novels on the way to the rich offering of current literary fiction. Fair enough; there is so much to love in today’s fiction. But once in a while, dust off a classic gem and consider the language, the depth, the metaphorical heft these books carry—along with being engrossing, powerful reads. Reading […]
...moreWriting from the Basement
I never bring my computer with me to the basement, and the discipline of the method is to force myself to work out the ideas, the arrangement of the argument or story before I start building paragraphs and sentences. For the Kenyon Review, Brian Michael Murphy talks about how locking himself up in a basement […]
...moreDo Authors Use Symbols on Purpose?
In 1963, a high-schooler named Bruce McAllister decided he would prove to his English teacher once and for all that the symbols she was asking students to find in books like The Scarlet Letter were not actually put there on purpose by authors. So he sent a survey out to 150 authors asking if they intended to […]
...moreInvisible Man Gets A Little More Invisible
The Raw Story’s Arturo Garcia reports that Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man has been banned from school libraries and reading lists in Randolph County, North Carolina. After a parent decried the book as “not so innocent,” the school board voted 5–2 to ban it, declaring it “a hard read” without “any literary value.” How wonderful that […]
...moreHappy Birthday, Ralph Ellison!
Happy birthday to Ralph Ellison, who would have turned 99 today. His fiction was revelatory—Invisible Man won the National Book Award in 1953—as were his essays on literature, music, and race. You can read a 1977 interview with him here.
...moreHarlem Blues
Between 1915 and 1970, six million African-Americans left the oppression of the Jim Crow South to find freedom in California and the northern states. Most traveled by rail, with those in the Southeast taking the Seaboard Air Line up the East Coast to Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, and New York. The most popular destination for southern […]
...moreThe Political is the Personal
Saïd Sayrafiezadeh’s new memoir about life in the Socialist Workers Party shows the effects of political idealism on a child’s upbringing
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