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
Bring it Back! Literature In the Olympics by 2016!
Fun Fact: “Literature” was an Olympic event until 1948. In fact, several other events were also listed under the umbrella of “Sporting Art,” as Olympic historian John MacAloon points out to NPR. For example, W. B. Yeats’ brother, Jack Butler Yeats, won the “Mixed Painting” silver in 1924; some people even won “Medals for Making Medals!”
“A potent symbol”
In the Times, Jennifer Schuessler reviews Ishmael Beah’s new novel, Radiance of Tomorrow, which takes place in the same war-ravaged setting as the author’s 2007 memoir. Schuessler writes that Beah “delivers a glimpse of the hardships of postwar Sierra Leone along with strong and repeated assurances about the redemptive powers of stories themselves.”
MAN Asian Literary Prize Winner Announced
Please Look After Mom by Kyung-Sook Shin has been named the winner of this year’s MAN Asian Literary Prize. Learn about the seven-book shortlist in our extensive write-up from January.
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Anxiety of Influence
“Cursed Child … is an act of overreach that feels mandated not by [J.K.] Rowling’s desire to fill out details but by an entertainment industry intent on reviving and rebooting anything that’s ever made money.” Sophie Gilbert reviews Harry Potter and the Cursed Child for The Atlantic.
Letting Autism Actually Speak
“If we have no internal lives, then artists are free to make them for us, or to use us as tools for providing depth and motivation to the non-autistic characters, the real ones.” Sarah Kurchak writes for Electric Literature on the abysmal state of autistic representation in books, film, and television, namechecking both The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and A Visit From the Goon Squad, which we considered here and here, respectively.
American Literature in the 19th Century
“American literature in the 19th century speaks in the 21st in terms we have not yet abandoned – for all our technology, globalism, and panache.” (via Arts and Letters Daily)
“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.