The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye by A.S. Byatt My rating: 4 of 5 stars Reading this reminded me of a conversation I had with a friend recently about the films of Wes Anderson and Jim Jarmusch, how I love their artistic sensibilities but yearn in vain for, as my friend said, an intersectional lens.… Continue reading Straying in story
Assata: An Autobiography by Assata Shakur My rating: 5 of 5 stars Assata Shakur’s conviction in a joke of a trial for a murder she clearly did not commit has not been reversed. She escaped from prison and she lives in Cuba, still a fugitive. The story of how the hell this outrage came about… Continue reading She Who Struggles
Sistah Vegan: Food, Identity, Health, and Society: Black Female Vegans Speak by A. Breeze Harper My rating: 4 of 5 stars Here is a personal story, which you are welcome to skip (view spoiler)[I first read about this book in the first issue of Bitch magazine I ever read, which featured an interview with Dr… Continue reading Not on a Plate
A Proper Marriage by Doris Lessing My rating: 4 of 5 stars This novel follows Martha Quest and personally I advise readers to come to this after reading the beginning of Martha’s story. The tone of self reproach (taking Martha to be an avatar of the author) is perhaps a little softer here, and the… Continue reading social body
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers My rating: 5 of 5 stars McCullers adopts an omniscient author pose as completely as the anonymous teller of fairy or folk tale, her sentences as rhythmic, martial, unequivocal as their subjects are opaque, suggestive, unnerving. They get inside your mind-corners like sand into your clothes… Continue reading Genius frustrated
Black Style by Carol Tulloch My rating: 5 of 5 stars I ordered this online and I wasn’t expecting the content to be so great (fashion books can be so much marshmallow). My only complaint is that it’s such a slim volume, though its lack of heft did make it easier to read in bed… Continue reading arts & spirits of cloth
No Place to Call Home: Gypsies, Travellers, and the Road Beyond Dale Farm by Katharine Quarmby My rating: 4 of 5 stars Quarmby discusses the history of GRT* persecution drawing heavily on the work of Romani academic Ian Hancock and other historians. British legal history includes waves of hostility towards ‘vagrants’ and ‘itinerants’ and Gypsies… Continue reading A really important book
Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler My rating: 5 of 5 stars This was a compulsive page-turner for me. Compared with at least one contemporary USian perspective, say, that of the low waged service worker, Lauren lives in one version of utopia: a close-knit community, like a village, shaped by an ethics of… Continue reading Dreaming from a dark place
The Granta Book of the African Short Story by Helon Habila My rating: 4 of 5 stars Helon Habila has done a damn fine job of selecting a diverse and striking stories for this in my opinion, but he has made one editorial decision that didn’t suit me: putting the pieces in reverse chronological order.… Continue reading Short Strong Stalks
From the Ruins of Empire by Pankaj Mishra My rating: 4 of 5 stars Mishra’s approach here can’t be faulted; it would be preposterous to offer the sweeping statements and crisp conclusions of the sixth chaper Asia Remade without carefully laying the foundations in the previous five, painstakingly excavating the neglected work and histories of… Continue reading Writing Back Historically
(I am because you are) 