Victor LaValle: "Beyond the Skin Trade"

March 21, 2009

Victor LaValle: "Beyond the Skin Trade"

In a piece for Bookforum that is both personal and expansive, Victor LaValle questions how black nationalism stays relevant in the age of Barack Obama. It's funny and edged and brimming with ambivalence; it's a great story.

And while you're poking around Bookforum, don't forget to check out Matthew Price's contribution to the John Cheever celebrations and examinations that are all over the place these days, as well as a piece that rescues geography from the fourth grade syllabus and lets it live.

Posted at 12:20 AM in Culture, Literary Life, Politics | Permalink

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Isak

Isak is a space to celebrate tales and truth in the curious, joyful way embodied by the writer for which it is named. The name "Isak," after all, means "laughter," as she was fond of pointing out.

By tales, I mean fiction (especially short fiction), as well as other literary and artistic narratives. By truth, I mean the world in which we live. I especially have my eye on creative social justice.

Isak: The Extended Version

Featured Book Reviews

Toni Morrison: Sula
Sinking into Toni Morrison's fiction is like sinking into loamy earth. She writes novels that are ground heels-down into a planet of soil and water and stone.

Read my review here.
Adam Thirlwell: The Delighted States: A Book of Novels, Romances, & Their Unknown Translators, Containing Ten Languages, Set on Four Continents, & Accompanied by ... Illustrations, & a Variety of Helpful Indexes
This nonfiction book of blinding brilliance and rare pleasures -- one that I will easily name as a favorite -- orients itself on questions of literature in translation. How does style translate, or not translate, across not only language, but also time and country, politics and personality? How does the map of the imagination match up with the map(s) of our literal world?

Read the review here.
Joe Kelly: I Kill Giants
Here it is: a compilation comic of striking artwork and an unnerving story of fantasy, monsters, and disaster. Barbara Thorson is the eccentric and geeky young girl of great confidence who guides us through the pages. I Kill Giants is a work of beauty.

Read my brief review here.
John Knowles: A Separate Peace
The textual chatter works from the edges in, dissolving the story's substance. It has all the subtlety of a stubbed toe.

Read the review here.
Bonnie Jo Campbell: American Salvage (Made in Michigan Writers Series)
These stories shake in the bones. Their telling is agile and nuanced; while concise, each story has a sort of lingering feel about it. One reads this book feeling as if we, like the characters peopling a post-industrial land, are on the edge--a way of life ended, or begun; the ground shaking beneath our feet; lives strained and transformed; the smallness and bigness of it all.

Read the review here.
Junot Diaz: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Yes, I hear you, I get it: I’m several years behind in joining the clamor of appreciation for Junot Díaz’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel – his only novel (so far) and the slow-coming follow-up to the magnetic story collection, Drown. All the same, reading The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao feels like a discovery. This is a wild, soaring, stylized, hilarious, heartbreaking, and highly-voiced novel, one that indulges in tale-telling and, in the ample footnotes, passionate essaying.

Read my review here.
Norman Mailer: Miami and the Siege of Chicago (New York Review Books Classics)
Let me be sure to not bury the lede: This book is a lit fire.

Read the review here.
John O'Hara: Butterfield 8
What a bizarre book this is.

Read my review here.
Josh Neufeld: A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge
The author's passion for documenting these tales is evident, as is his honest concern for the failures that trapped citizens in a winless game of futility and danger. But I don't really like the book he made.

Read the review here.
Rainer Maria Rilke: Duino Elegies: A Bilingual Edition
Rainer Maria Rilke began writing Duino Elegies one hundred years ago this year while visiting -- I am not making this up -- a princess.

Read the review here.
Carla Speed McNeil: Finder: Voice
McNeil shifts between humor and the grotesque with unnerving dexterity. She plays with our expectations of gender. Class reigns heavily on the story. McNeil collects myth and futuristic technology, and collides them together in a way that dis-locates the reader.

Read the review here.

Isak

Celebrating Tales and Truth

March 21, 2009