“Why should Serena not respond to racism? In whose world should it be answered with good manners? The notable difference between black excellence and white excellence is white excellence is achieved without having to battle racism. Imagine.” Claudia Rankine writes for The New York Times Magazine about tennis player Serena Williams, racism in sports, and white privilege. Pair with our own Michael Bourne’s list of books that “shed light on the history and evolution of racism in America.”
Not Just Any Body
Holy Verse
Recommended Reading: Robyn Creswell and Bernard Haykel on why jihadists write poetry.
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Up There
Northern England has its own distinct genre of crime fiction, yet it’s never taken off abroad the way its counterparts in Scandinavia and Scotland have. In The Guardian, AK Nawaz wonders why this is, arguing that “there is an argument for a common and marketable ‘Northernness’ – if not an identity, then perhaps a literary state of mind.”
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What’s Frightening About Gone Girl
Don’t Cry author Mary Gaitskill reviews Gillian Flynn’s wildly successful thriller, Gone Girl, for the pages of Bookforum. What she finds is that the book isn’t really frightening because of its plot per se, but rather because its two main characters “do not resemble actual people so much as grotesquely smiling masks driven by forces of extreme artifice, and it’s exactly that extreme artificial quality that’s frightening to the point of sickening.” For what it’s worth, Edan Lepucki, Michael Bourne, Ed Park, Janet Potter, and Jennifer duBois each named Flynn’s book in their most recent Year in Reading pieces.
Overlooked Books of the Decade
The Daily Beast offers up a list of “the most overlooked reads of the past 10 years – none of which involve a wizard, a vampire, or a code” from John McGahern’s By the Lake to Pandora in the Congo by Albert Sanchez Pinol.
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Sonya Chung at McNally Jackson 3/10
Millions Contributor Sonya Chung will read from her just-released novel Long for This World at McNally Jackson Books, 52 Prince Street, NYC, on March 10 at 7pm.
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