In the New York Times Magazine, Ismail Muhammad asks, “Can Black Literature Escape the Representation Trap?” Looking at recent fiction, and considering the debates about Black representation in literature stretching back to Baldwin, Wright, Hurston, and Morrison, Muhammad defines the stakes and limits of representation in literature, writing: “This is representation’s trap—the whittling down of Black life’s full scope into marketable, digestible facsimiles that are then thrust onto Black writers.”
The 2022 MacArthur Fellows have been announced.
In a preview of the new issue of The Drift, Noor Qasim writes about Annie Ernaux and the millennial sex novel: “On self-indulgent days, I like to imagine that my story is something like Ernaux’s. That, in its telling, I, too, cast off shame and take sexual obsession seriously. I’m not the only one.”
Barnard College Creative Writing has posted a video of their live event with Ernaux from last night.
Tonight at the Strand bookstore in New York, Becca Andrews and Jamilah King will discuss Andrews’s new book, No Choice: The Destruction of Roe v. Wade and the Fight to Protect a Fundamental American Right. The event is a partnership between the Strand and the news organization Reckon.
