Brit Bennett’s recently published novel and Nella Larsen’s classic reveal the danger—and loneliness—of a black woman passing for white in the early 1900s and the 1990s. Passing affords the freedoms and opportunities for reinvention that whiteness allows for, but this comes at a terrible cost.
Brit Bennett talked with me about her new novel “The Mothers,” and about the power of place–writing in the West through many communities–“performing California-ness,” the weird excitement for wildfire season, forever building piers into the ocean, and In-N-Out burger.
This election season is no joke. At times, this world can feel grim as the weather grows cold and the nights grow long. Pick up one of these necessary books to guide you through the end of 2016 with heart, honesty, and compassion.
August in the U.S. means football. It suffocates bar-stool conversation, seeps into family gossip. The whole business is as inextricable from the American identity as Protestantism. I can’t help wondering how an institution so all-encompassing has managed to dodge the pages of literary journals and publisher’s catalogs.
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