Cartoonist Ruben Bolling has identified some additional ways in which Huck Finn might be cleaned up for today’s delicate readers.
Huck Finn, Improved
Art Like Reading a Good Book
Erica Baum uses found language and blackboards as her canvases. “Looking closely at Baum’s work to intuit such realities is both challenging and rewarding like reading a good book.”
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Writing the Godfather of Soul
“Kill ‘Em and Leave is [James] McBride’s own testament to [James] Brown’s philosophy. It’s a stunningly unorthodox book, indifferent to the conventions of biographical nonfiction … The book is a hybrid of forms, largely a telling of Brown’s life story and partly a telling of McBride’s search for that story, with digressions about the author’s own life, essayistic ruminations on Brown and his music, and free, looping riffs that have the energy of improvisation.” On James McBride’s unusual, unorthodox biography of the unusual, unorthodox James Brown.
Prison Poetry
Over at The Paris Review, Max Nelson writes about prison literature, from John Clare to Christopher Smart.
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