Claudia Rakine’s Citizen: An American Lyric, which won the Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and was included in our own list of “Nine Books for the Post-Ferguson Era,” has been adapted for the stage, and previews are beginning in Los Angeles. Graywolf, the independent press behind Citizen, The Empathy Exams and On Immunity: An Inoculation, has interviewed the playwright behind the adaptation about the project and his process. As he explains it, “what makes the book—and the theatre piece—unique is that they expose and illuminate the small, sometimes unintended, and unconscious acts of everyday racism. Subtle, insidious, soul-crushing.”
Citizen on the Stage
The Underground Railroad: The Series
Moonlight director Barry Jenkins plans to adapt Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad as a limited-run series. In his review of the novel for our site last year, Greg Walklin gushed that “Whitehead’s brilliance is on constant display.”
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Sex, Drugs, and Anniversaries
“For that reason, it’s hard to imagine coming to this book for the first time, and experiencing it in the same way as that college senior back in 2003.” The Outline on the 15-year anniversary of Chuck Klosterman‘s Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs. (Read our review of the king of pop culture’s newest book.)
Collapsing Genre
“The clash of genre values is fundamental to the novelistic experience. That’s how we ought to be thinking about our books. Instead of asking whether a comic book could be “as valuable” as King Lear, we ought to ask how the values of tragedy and romance might collide.” Joshua Rothman writes about the coming “collapse of the genre system” and our own Emily St. John Mandel‘s National Book Award short-listed Station Eleven for The New Yorker.
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On Fear and Dread
Mary Ruefle, author of the forthcoming Madness, Rack, and Honey, wrote a poetic essay on the subject of fear. It’s chock full of lines like this one about why she likes the word dread more than the word fear: “because fear, like the unconscious emotion which is one of its forms, has only the word ear inside of it, telling an animal to listen, while dread has the word read inside of it, telling us to read carefully and find the dead, who are also there.”
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