paper trail

Susan Choi on why humans are so trusting; Claudia Rankine and Morgan Jerkins in conversation

Susan Choi

At Vulture, Morgan Jerkins talks to Claudia Rankine black trauma, Serena Williams, and her new play, The White Card. “I love women who refuse invisibility in black femininity and who are insisting that we are worth whatever worth is out there,” Rankine said. “The policing of Serena shows up again and again in my work because the amount of respect I have for that woman floods me. We see her in a sport dominated by white people and you hear the racism against her again and again and again. And yet, she keeps winning.”

At Literary Hub, Monika Zaleska profiles Seasonal Associate author Heike Geissler.

The New York Times details the recent restrictions on free speech in Myanmar that are being put in place by the government of Aung San Suu Kyi.

“I wanted the reader to think about the ways in which we receive information and accept without question information from what seem like authoritative sources, not just in literature, but also in life,” said Susan Choi on why she chose not to reveal her characters’ real names in her new book, Trust Exercise. “Humans are surprisingly and maybe wonderfully trusting creatures, and we’re biased towards believing what we hear. We want to believe what we hear.”

An auctioneer has found two undiscovered poems by Daphne du Maurier hidden inside a frame behind a photograph. Roddy Lloyd, who found the works while cataloguing du Maurier’s archive, said that the poems were likely written when the author was in her twenties. “The poems are not juvenile ones of a child,” he said, “nor the polished products of her later years.”