Guernica’s latest issue is devoted to the American South. As the issue’s introduction states, “The American South is at once a geographical distinction and a bright spot in the imagination, where burden vies with birthright, and where ignorance and renaissance exist side by side.” The issue features a Kiese Laymon essay on inequality and language, Ed Winstead on the Southern accent in writing, an interview with Jesmyn Ward, fiction, and more.
Guernica’s South
Jeremy McCarter on James Baldwin’s New Anthology
At Newsweek, Jeremy McCarter reviews The Cross of Redemption, a new anthology of James Baldwin’s previously uncollected essays and public letters: “At a time when serious people claim we live in a ‘post-racial’ society, the reappearance of Baldwin’s writing—insistent, accusatory, outraged—feels like a terrible family secret coming to light in an Ibsen play, or Banquo’s ghost showing up to spoil the party.”
From Flesh to Wafer to Cash
Here’s everything you’ve ever wanted to know about the communion wafer’s place in free-market capitalism.
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Delicate Husk, Inconvenient Hair
Recommended Reading: “So Often the Body Becomes a Distraction” by Kaveh Akbar.
Hair Trafficking and Russiandating.ru at Triple Canopy
Triple Canopy unveils a redesign with its tenth issue, which includes an essay tracing the global hair trade from Peru to Borough Park and Sam Frank riffing on Andrei Platonov in a twenty-first century epistolary romance.
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If It Is Fine Tomorrow
This list of the ten best weather events in fiction history includes, among other things, the mud in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House and the fraught weather forecast from Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse. Let’s talk a little bit more about weather with this review from The Millions.