TOBI'S DESK

Rudolph P. Byrd Dear Dr. Rudolph P. Byrd, Scores of Brooklynites are marching on the busy street in front of my apartment. I’m watching from the window, hearing white people chant, “Whose streets? Our streets!” I’m happy to see the support for Black Lives Matter, but here in gentrified Brooklyn, I can’t help but find that funny. I recorded two minutes of it in the event that it’s useful if I ever write poems again. (Cataloging has been a habit of mine this month.) It’s times like these that I miss teaching, sitting with cohorts of first-year college students as their safe worlds are torn apart by conversations around race and privilege. But all of that makes me recall my own reckoning, the moment when I realized the extent to which the law functions to serve these white students more than myself. That was the fall of 2011, the year the State of Georgia executed Troy Davis. And about a month later, you died. I sometimes think about Adrienne Kennedy’s People Who Led to My Plays , an

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 . Jeanette Winterson. This week at The Paris Review , we’re highlighting queer and trans writers in our archive in honor of Pride. Read on for Jeanette Winterson’s Art of Fiction interview , Jericho Brown’s “ The Trees ,” Timothy Liu’s “ Action Painting ,” and a selection of diary entries by Jan Morris. 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 for as long as we’re flattening the curve,  The Paris Review  will be sending out a new weekly newsletter, The Art of Distance, featuring unlocked archival selections, dispatches from the  Daily , and efforts

Photo: John H. White. Courtesy of the National Archives at College Park. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. You know why they call them Indians? Because Columbus thought he was in India. They’re called Indians because some white guy got lost. —Herb Stempel, Quiz Show We called them American bhua and American phupher , the middle of my father’s three older sisters and her husband. As the vanguard of my family’s transplants to the U.S., they’d been assigned these honorifics by their nieces and nephews living then in England. American phupher arrived in Chicago for a temporary stay in the late fifties, then returned permanently with bhua in 1971. Together they raised three children while she labored in an electronics assembly plant, and he worked first as a diesel engineer for the Chicago Transit Authority and later in its managerial ranks. In their earliest years here, they would occasionally receive a phone call from a stranger who had just arrived at O’Hare on British Airw

In March,  The Paris Review  launched  The Art of Distance, a newsletter highlighting unlocked archive pieces that resonate with the staff of   the magazine , quarantine-appropriate writing on the  Daily , resources from our peer organizations,  and more. Read Emily Nemens’s introductory letter  here , and find the latest unlocked archive pieces below. “ As we move from spring to summer, as the days shift from getting longer to getting shorter, as some states push to reopen while others are placing new restrictions, I find myself split as well: wild to get outside, and desperate to crawl into a hole with a very big book. So I’m taking many walks outside with my family’s new puppy, Cashew (yep, we got a pandemic pup), and my current pandemic reading plan involves books in series—since reading all three volumes of Octavia E. Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy, I’ve moved on to alternating between Elena Ferrante ’s Neapolitan novels and Rachel Cusk ’s Outline trilogy (you’ll find these last t

Seventeenth-century Dutch map of Africa, Atlas van Dirk van der Hagen , ©Wikimedia commons In fourth grade, my teacher assigned us a research report on a foreign country. She was a nice white lady. They all were. She said to choose a country we could trace our ancestry to. I was one of her favorites, but when she made that lesson plan, she was not thinking about me. Or Yvonne. We were the Black kids in class. I asked my mom for help after school. She’s Black on her father’s side and Ashkenazi Jewish on her mother’s side; I thought she might get my bubbe on the phone to wax poetic about Eastern Europe. But she didn’t. Nor did she rant about the nerve of the nice white lady whose bright idea this was. If my mom was bitter, she didn’t let it show. She turned that mess into lemonade. She smiled and pulled out the map and we went back to Africa, Garvey on our minds. Sometimes I learned more Black history in a week at home than I did in a lifetime of Februarys at school. I knew about sl

  (As we take remember our broda, George Floyd) I go buy sometin for area wey I dey stay. The moni wey I know; e don tay, Naim I give dem. Maybe e no legit! Whether na my fault or no be my fault, Dem no even allow me talk! Na so olokpa dem stand […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/3icdcPF

Nigerian writer Eloghosa Osunde’s debut novel Vagabonds will be published by Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Group, in 2021. This comes as welcome news as Osunde’s debut novel has been highly anticipated. The publishers described Vagabonds as: “a tumultuous and unexpectedly joyous novel of oppression and defiance among the people and spirits of Lagos.” […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/3ibdKp1

Dolapo is Fine, a short film co-written and co-produced by Nigerian novelist Chibundu Onuzo, is one of five finalists for the 2020 American Black Film Festival’s Annual HBO Short Film Competition. Onuzo shared the news on Instagram, noting that Dolapo is Fine is the only entry from outside the United States to emerge finalist for […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2CSbfYw

Africa Writes have teamed up with Jacaranda Books to bring you a delightful monthly read from the publisher’s Twenty in 2020 releases. In June we are spotlighting Bad Love   by Maame Blue. Here’s a short blurb: #TwentyIn2020 romance Bad Love is the story of London born Ghanaian Ekuah Danquah and her tumultuous experience with first love. Marked by this experience, she finds herself at a crossroads – can she fall in love again, or does the siren song of her first love still call? If you’d like a 10% discount, head over to Jacaranda’s website and use the code ‘ AWNEWS ‘ to claim it! Jacaranda Books successfully crowdfunded with Knights Of and Spread the Word to support inclusive independent publishers hit worst by the COVID-19 economic crisis. You can read more about their Inclusive Indies  campaign here . #InclusiveIndies Tell us what you think about this excerpt on Twitter ,  Facebook  and  Instagram .   ***   Chapter  1   I am not a romantic. I do not know how to tell those

Arundhati Roy. Photo: © Mayank Austen Soofi. Haymarket Books will release Azadi: Freedom. Fascism. Fiction. , a slim new collection of essays by Arundhati Roy, this September, but if there were ever a book that, given some minor magic wand, I would abracadabra into publication, it’s this one. The nine essays were written recently, between 2018 and 2020, “two years that … have felt like two hundred.” The words I elided in that sentence are “in India”—as she has said earlier, we should not forfeit “the rights to our own tragedies,” and Roy’s writing is implacably, unrelentingly specific, digging into the smallest details. That zoom has the paradoxical impact of also revealing broader, more general patterns, fundamental forces that take on different shapes. It’s impossible to read this book now, in America, and not hear the ways in which it is talking to us, too. Given the moment, I think a bit about sickness, how a disease can cause a fever in this person, a heart attack in that perso

Though lockdown orders have started to lift in certain areas, COVID-19 shows no signs of stopping any time soon. Our advice? Stay at home and try your hand at these baking projects inspired by some of our favorite African novels. Below, we’ve selected a handful of quotes that describe a particular sweet and provided a […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/3eAkQRJ

“Carrie Bradshaw” of Sex & the City was spotted toting The Dragons, The Giant, The Women, Wayétu Moore’s debut memoir about her experience with surviving the Liberian civil war and her journey to healing and rebuilding. Seeing these pics of SJP was a peak career moment for Moore. In sharing this news on her Instagram […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2Bf0COO

Thomas Mann. Photo: Carl Van Vechten. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Arising by most accounts in the last decades of the nineteenth century, the novel of ideas reflects the challenge posed by the integration of externally developed concepts long before the arrival of conceptual art. Although the novel’s verbal medium would seem to make it intrinsically suited to the endeavor, the mission of presenting “ideas” seems to have pushed a genre famous for its versatility toward a surprisingly limited repertoire of techniques. These came to obtrude against a set of generic expectations—nondidactic representation; a dynamic, temporally complex relation between events and the representation of events; character development; verisimilitude—established only in wake of the novel’s separation from history and romance at the start of the nineteenth century. Compared to these and even older, ancient genres like drama and lyric, the novel is astonishingly young, which is perhaps why departure