Last year the Washington Post began Fatal Force, a database that provides information about American civilians who have been killed by police, providing, when the information is available, the victims’ gender, race, and age. As of July 11, 512 deaths have been recorded. In about 40 percent of the cases, Fatal Force also identifies the officers who killed. The Guardian is maintaining a similar database devoted to Americans killed by police; its list puts the number of deaths at 571.
Claudia Rankine—whose award-winning book Citizen: An American Lyric pointedly meditated on racism in America and violence against people of color such as Michael Brown in Ferguson—spoke to NPR in the wake of the killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. Asked if she will write about this, she responds: “I might. You know, I don't know. But the thing that struck me deeply was that child in the back seat who said, It's OK, I'm right here with you, to her mother when the shooting occurred in the car. And why a policeman would send a bullet in a car with a 4-year-old child, I'm not sure, when no one was firing at him. But that child—that black child - now has to behave and perform like an adult and negotiate a trauma for the rest of her life.”
Brooklyn Magazine has published an article about Emily Books, the excellent literary project run by Emily Gould and Ruth Curry, which since its founding in 2011 has showcased a number of innovative titles by women including Eileen Myles, Renata Adler, Heather Lewis, and Paula Bomer. Emily Books has become a publisher, too, having recently teamed up with Coffee House Press to release Problems, the debut novel by Jade Sharma. The imprint’s second title, Chloe Caldwell’s essay collection I’ll Tell You in Person, is due out in the Fall. Says Gould: “It’s starting to feel like we’re at this really exciting moment, where there’s this new cultural openness to radical honesty
