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In his eleventh book, Young recapitulates some of America’s most notorious humbugs, from P. T. Barnum’s Feejee Mermaid to James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces and Rachel Dolezal’s blackface. While his text primarily works to link the rise of hoaxes to “race and racialism,” Young also links this evolution to that of American media.
Tale of Two Americas: Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation Edited by John Freeman Penguin; Sept 2017 252 pp; $17 Buy: paperback | eBook Reviewed by Anne Kniggendorf In his collection of 36 essays, poems, and stories entitled Tales of Two Americas: Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation, John Freeman, curator of contemporary…
Jesmyn Ward introduces The Fire This Time, an anthology of essays and poems of witness and dissent, by expressing her own commingled dismay and hope regarding race relations in America. This book, she says, gathers “the great thinkers and extraordinary voices” of her generation to consider racism, both subtle and egregious.
We spend our lives avoiding conflict, and then we reach academia. On the playground we’re told to make peace, but in the classroom we’re praised for our thesis statement that makes an “argument,” that introduces “tension,” that “complicates” a previous notion. Conflict becomes, all of a sudden, the engine of every good story. During discussion,…
A published letter is a strange act. It’s like a whisper made into a loudspeaker. It’s a secret note the town’s tacked onto the city hall bulletin board after the carrier pigeon nosedived into the public square. It’s intimacy externalized. Some letters seem to speak to no one at all, but the best letters, though…
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