At the Believer, Raven Leilani, author of Luster, discusses her desire to write Black women who actively resist conforming to society’s preconceptions about them. “I wanted to afford a Black woman the latitude to be fallible,” she says. “I wanted to write against the idea that there is a particular way to comport yourself to earn the right to empathy. Black women are especially subject to this expectation, and I think to have to expertly navigate racist and sexist terrain to survive and be denied the right to a human response is to deny that person dignity. It’s a recipe for a repressed, combustible person. I’ve been there, and I’m still unlearning that reflexive curation as we speak, so it was a relief to write a Black woman who leads with her id. It was a relief to write toward her want and rage without apology, which is, unfortunately, what some people might find unlikeable.”
Raven Leilani on Unapologetically Writing Towards Want and Rage
Brooklyn Boys II
…meanwhile, quondam neighbor Jonathan Lethem has packed up for California (to take over the Pomona College position last held by David Foster Wallace). Just in time for Halloween, he raps with New York Magazine about the move…and about his new, book-length treatment of John Carpenter‘s They Live.
Best New Poets
Poets, rejoice! Tracy K. Smith’s selections for Best New Poets 2015 have been announced. After you’ve checked them out, go take a look at Sophia Nguyen’s Millions essay on Smith’s newest memoir Ordinary Light.
Masha Gessen Signs on to Write Tsarnaev Book
Masha Gessen will be the first writer to publish a book about the Boston Marathon bombing suspects, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Previously the author demonstrated her knowledge of Chechnya in her 2012 book The Man Without a Face. Gessen, who is also working on a book about embattled punk group Pussy Riot, will reportedly leave her directorship at Moscow Radio Liberty in order to report on both projects full time.
I Have a Mortgage
“Over three decades of almost constant composing and recording, he would amass over sixty LPs, running the gamut from early records with his band the Mothers of Invention that helped to create the milieu we think of as the Sixties, to caustic send-ups of that same counterculture, doo-wop pastiche, tape cut-ups, film scores, gonzo cabaret, big-band charts, way out prog, show tunes, music composed entirely on and for the Synclavier digital sampler, full-score orchestral music, and thousands of scabrous, exploratory guitar solos.” On Frank Zappa, music theory wizard and occasional public intellectual.
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“New” Zora Neale Hurston
The Chronicle of Higher Education analyzes three short stories by Zora Neale Hurston never before reprinted.
We Can Get Behind This
We would be remiss not to mention this new ‘Fifty Shades of Muppet’ trailer. Pair with our own essay on literary predecessors in published fan fiction.
Zadie Smith’s Big Week
Oh, look, the Paris Review freed Zadie Smith’s “Big Week” from the clutches of their paywall. (Bonus: you can subscribe to a dual subscription to both the Paris Review and the London Review of Books all summer long.)
“Want” and “rage” and “without apology.” Sounds like my five year-old. Or Donald Trump. Lead with that id, folk; seriously? Women imitating the worst behaviors of immature and toxic men is not a step towards progress.
“Imitating the worst behaviors” is what’s turned me off a lot of contemporary female writers, whose subjects and style exemplify, imo, the worst of male entitlement. But this book really hit home for me, because the narrator’s id is presented with compassion and humility. It’s an amazing balancing act to write in the voice of a woman–a person–who is so very present, and vulnerable, in her life (and in THE present). She watches herself from outside herself, as we do, trying to make sense of why she is motivated to act as she does. Sometimes she succeeds in understanding herself; sometimes not. She is not uncaring or selfish, like so many modern characters. She just IS, unapologetically. I thought this book was a revelation.