TOBI'S DESK

Let us not even dream of speaking, no For the stars are luminous phones In the palms of night. ─ Rolli   I am helpless to this golden twinkling at sundown: this architecture of clouds, dyed into a line of yellow neon­ness; to how the sky bends into a circumference around the departing sun as […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2T8QvBi

Jessi Jezewska Stevens. Photo: Nina Subin. Anyone who has googled their own name knows the curious thrill of watching the page populate with alternate identities. Percy, the protagonist of Jessi Jezewska Stevens’s debut novel, The Exhibition of Persephone Q (out next week), suddenly finds herself awash in that potent mix of familiarity and alienation. She indeed googles herself not long after receiving a new exhibition catalogue of photographs, taken by her ex-fiancé, of a naked woman with a hidden face. Percy feels certain the woman is her—she recognizes the apartment, the body—but she cannot prove it, and the more she insists, the less plausible it all starts to seem. Previously a person of apathy, Percy has long been satisfied to be taken through life by a slow-moving current as invisible to herself as it is to those around her. She discovers she is pregnant and keeps not mentioning it to her husband; she goes out for long walks at night, makes money in vaguely nondescript ways,

PRESS RELEASE: The winners of the Mabati Cornell Kiswahili Prize for African Literature 2019 were announced by the Chairman of the Board of Trustees, Abdilatif Abdalla, together with the the Safal Group CEO, Mr. Anders Lindgren, during a special ceremony at Intercontinental Hotel, Nairobi, on Thursday, 27 February 2020. The guests of honor included Ms […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/32zociE

A staff writer at The Mary Sue is calling for the literary world to “stop marketing Black sci-fi as the ‘Black version’ of White Stories.” It’s something that has been mentioned here and there on blogs and social media, but Princess Weekes is forcing a necessary long look at the trend, citing the receptions of […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2Vu5F5J

African Writers Trust (AWT) awards an annual publishing fellowship programme to “early career publishers and creative writers intending to self-publish their manuscripts.” A call was made for applications from writers based in Uganda, Malawi, Zambia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique. The shortlist of 11 has now been announced. Uganda takes the most spots with three, followed […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/399uIiv

In a new interview with the American magazine Newsweek, Biyi Bandele made the kind of revelation that will surely send people Google-searching. The Nigerian novelist and filmmaker—author of Burma Boy (2007) and director of Half of a Yellow Sun (2013)—was asked a variation of that very tired question: Whom do you write for? And he […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/3cgw7pn

Jeffrey Yang   On an overcast Friday this past January, I rode the Metro-North up the Hudson to meet Jeffrey Yang at Dia:Beacon. Yang’s wife is a docent there, and the couple has lived in the town of Beacon, New York, for the past fifteen years. His poem in our Winter issue, “ Ancestors ,” centers around an exhibition at a gallery in Seoul, South Korea, and the piece made me curious about his work as it overlaps with visual art. When I asked Yang if he might show me one or two of his favorites at Dia before we sat down to talk, my request was met tenfold. We embarked on a comprehensive tour: Dorothea Rockburne’s complex mathematical concepts alchemized through abstract, geometric installations; Richard Serra’s heavy, leaning sculptures of steel; the minimalist reimagining of a book of hours by On Kawara ( who Yang recently wrote about here ). The pieces that he found exciting were as aesthetically diverse as his poetry. The world of a Jeffrey Yang poem is eclectically populated. H

When my sister and I were children, we, along with our parents, were often invited to dine at the homes of other Chinese families. On such occasions, while our German American mother prepared Chinese food in the kitchen, our Chinese father would give us a crash course in Mandarin. We would learn—i.e. memorize—a brief paragraph designed to last the duration of the few minutes we spent on the host’s doorstep. Something along the lines of: Hello, Uncle Wu. How are you? Thank you very much for inviting us to your home. Our father would pay us a nickel ahead of time, saying, If you say X, I’ll pay you Y . But we knew the “if” was incidental. Refusing the money was not an option. We knew we would have to speak. We dreaded the feeling of that foreign language in our mouths; those native speakers watching us, their expert ears listening for mistakes; the possibility of a mispronunciation; the possibility that the host might ask a question that required an answer. In effect, we dreaded the m

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Photo: Javeria Ali. Javeria Ali, a twenty-six-year-old photographer, was on a walk in an Islamabad market when she spotted a man ladling out cups of milky tea. He was wearing a turquoise shalwar kameez with a white scalloped trim. His hair was slightly tousled, with a few stray locks falling above his dark eyebrows, and his cheeks were peppered with stubble. He wore a black thread looped around his wrist to protect him from the evil eye. She took three or four pictures of the chaiwala , or tea seller, while his head was bowed, then he looked up for a split second and stared right at her. She got the shot. Ali uploaded the photograph (captioned “Hot-Tea”) to her Instagram and Facebook pages on October 14, 2016. It was soon shared on various blogs and social media pages, with users commenting on the tea boy’s looks. By 2016, there were more than forty-four million social media users in Pakistan. Facebook had the biggest slice of the pie, with thirty-three million users, followed by

  Left: Samuel Delany (photo: Michael S. Writz) Right: Jeremy O. Harris (photo: Marc J. Franklin)   At three in the afternoon on a Friday in late January, Jeremy O. Harris arranged for an Uber to bring Samuel Delany from his home in Philadelphia to the Golden Theatre in New York City. Chip, as the famed writer of science fiction, memoir, essays, and criticism prefers to be called, arrived in Times Square around seven that evening to watch one of the last performances of Harris’s Slave Play on Broadway.  Though the two had never met before, Delany has been hugely influential on Harris, and served as the basis for a character in the latter’s 2019 Black Exhibition , at the Bushwick Starr. And Delany was very aware of Harris. The superstar playwright made an indelible mark on the culture, and it was fitting that the two should meet on Broadway, in Times Square, Delany’s former epicenter of sexual activity, which he detailed at length in his landmark Times Square Red, Times Squar

Cassava Republic Press, in partnership with A + F Creative, will be launching a series of events to celebrate black writing tagged “Black: The Literary Salon.” The first event, themed “Love and Desire Bared,” will take place on February 27, 2020 at Ace Hotel, London. It will feature the Nigerian-German writer Olumide Popoola and the […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/32uGCRO

Photos credited to CNA’s Team. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie hosted Lupita Nyong’o in a private dinner in Lagos, attended by notable personalities in Nigerian entertainment. The event was part of Lupita’s second visit to Nigeria in preparation for the Americanah TV series adaptation, in which she will star as Ifemelu. The series, which has been ordered […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/3c3L5iF

Every week, the editors of  The Paris Review  lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by  signing up for the Redux newsletter . Maya Angelou. This week at The Paris Review , we’re celebrating Black History Month by highlighting African American writers in our archive. Read on for Maya Angelou’s Art of Fiction interview , Edward P. Jones’s short story “ Marie ,” and Toi Derricotte’s poem “ Peripheral .” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not  subscribe  to  The Paris Review  and read the entire archive? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. And don’t forget to listen to  Season 2  of  The Paris Review Podcast !   Maya Angelou, The Art of Fiction No. 119 Issue no. 116 (Fall 1990) I try to pull the language in to such a sharpness that it jumps off the page. It must look

Photo: James Gehrt. The first time the writer Thomas Wentworth Higginson met Emily Dickinson, he remembered five details about the way she entered the room: her soft step, her breathless voice, her auburn hair, the two daylilies she offered him—and her exquisite white dress. Dickinson’s white dress has become an emblem of the poet’s brilliance and mystery. When Mabel Loomis Todd moved to Dickinson’s hometown in the 1880s, she gushed about the poet’s attire. “I must tell you about the character of Amherst,” she wrote her parents. “It is a lady whom the people call the Myth … She dresses wholly in white, & her mind is said to be perfectly wonderful.” Jane Wald, the executive director of the Emily Dickinson Museum, believes Dickinson began dressing primarily in white in her thirties, and it was common knowledge around town that a white dress was the poet’s preferred article of clothing. Dickinson realized people gossiped about what she wore, and once joked with her cousins, “Won