In The Atlantic, Wright Thompson writes about what we still don’t know about Emmett Till’s 1955 murder. Thompson visits the barn in Drew, Mississippi where the fourteen-year-old was brought by a group of white men, and where he died. Many accounts leave the barn out of Till’s story. Today, the barn sits on a local dentist’s property, where Till’s family can visit. “The barn’s existence,” Thompson writes, “conjures a complex set of reactions: It is a mourning bench for Black Americans, an unwelcome mirror for white Americans. It both repels and demands attention.”
“The atmosphere in Nightbirds was ever five minutes after a big argument with no one telling you what it had been about or who’d won.” Read an excerpt from Colson Whitehead’s forthcoming novel, Harlem Shuffle, in the New Yorker.
Online now at n+1, you can watch a recording of the magazine’s July 16 event with coeditor Mark Krotov and novelist Dana Spiotta. They discuss Spiotta’s latest book, Wayward.
Felicia Sonmez, a reporter at the Washington Post, has filed a lawsuit against the newspaper, its former editor Marty Baron, and others. Sonmez has previously spoken publicly about how she was prohibited from covering stories of sexual misconduct at the Post due to her own experiences as a survivor of sexual assault. This coverage ban was lifted in March. Sonmez’s lawsuit alleges that she had suffered “economic loss, humiliation, embarrassment, mental and emotional distress, and the deprivation of her rights to equal employment opportunities,” and asks the Post and its editors to “take all affirmative steps necessary to remedy the effects of the illegal, discriminatory, and retaliatory conduct described.”
Submissions are open for the Sewanee Review’s Fiction, Poetry, and Nonfiction Contest through July 31. Brandon Taylor, Stephanie Danler, and Paisley Rekdal are judging submissions.
Tonight at 9pm EDT, novelist and University of Washington professor Dr. Charles Johnson will showcase poetry and prose by eight of the twenty-five contributors to the Anthology of Black American Literature issue of the Chicago Quarterly Review, which was guest-edited by Johnson. The event is hosted by Seattle’s Elliott Bay Book Company.
