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No Less Strange or Wonderful

Review by Linda M. Castellitto

Have you ever thought about kidnapping a snowman’s butt? If you have, the essay “By Degrees” in author-illustrator A. Kendra Greene’s No Less Strange or Wonderful: Essays in Curiosity will leave you feeling very seen. If you haven’t, you may want to once you’ve experienced Greene’s chronicle of a weeklong, snowstorm-induced Texas power outage at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Greene quips that “there is a particular adrenaline to driving no more than ten miles per hour” on icy roads. She observes that “house after house, the rain chains were frozen exquisitely, wholly enveloped, long and bumpy and clear like the plastic icicle ornaments I hung with my mother on the Christmas trees of my youth.” On Greene’s fifth day without water, she considers melting snow in a bucket, and delivers a wonderfully operatic snowman-centric internal monologue: “Surely pilfering knows some bounds and one of them is robbing a snow bottom. Surely you cannot just take a tuchus. . . . Surely, to do so is a kind of kidnapping, of wonder and innocence, along with the weather-dismembered rump.”

We won’t spoil whether Greene completes that heist, but will note that the other 25 essays in No Less Strange or Wonderful possess a similarly heady mix of insightful contemplation nicely tinged with wackadoo humor and poetic poignancy. She comments on both politics and winged insects in “Ted Cruz Is a Sentient Bag of Wasps,” teases out snobbery in “Speaking of Basheis” and pulls back the curtain on the annual Twist and Shout balloon twisters’ convention in “Until It Pops.”

Fans of her 2020 debut, The Museum of Whales You Will Never See, will be glad to know Greene shares museum tales here, too, from dressing up Rusty (a model of a sloth) in holiday garb to pondering the concepts of extinction and collection. Museums, she writes, are places where “we might stumble on something so stunning it takes us out of ourselves for a moment, compels us in some manner, and leaves us changed—leaves us better, I hope.” The hope, ’tis true, of essayists as well. Readers who enjoy books rife with curiosity and curiosities, with artistry of word and illustration, will delight in No Less Strange or Wonderful. It’s an aptly titled gem of a read.

Readers will delight in A. Kendra Greene’s No Less Strange or Wonderful—an aptly titled essay collection and absolute gem of a read.
NonfictionMemoirEssays

Take My Name but Say It Slow

Review by Kelly Blewett

In his wide-ranging collection of essays, Take My Name but Say It Slow, debut author Thomas Dai reflects on the role of place and movement in forming his identity. Dai’s Chinese parents came to Tennessee to pursue academic advancement and work, and he grew up in a McMansion outside of Knoxville. His Chinese first name is Nuocheng, a portmanteau of Knoxville (Nuokeshiweier, in Chinese) and Chengdu (his mother’s hometown in China). This name, which was tucked behind the Americanized Thomas for his public life in the U.S., set the stage for a lifetime of traveling.

Dai’s essay collection tells various stories of this life in motion: a yearlong trip to China following his undergraduate education in New England, the attainment of a Master in the Fine Arts degree in Arizona, a road trip around the United States following the path of Vladimir Nabokov. Dai’s fundamental question is one of identity. What does it mean to grow up queer and Chinese American in Tennessee? How was his Asianness interpreted by those around him, and how does he interpret it himself? Though he travels to China often and for expanding lengths of time, Dai has no easy answers. Instead, he offers glimpses of what it feels like to see his Asian identity refracted in spaces that don’t seem to have room for it—“a yellow tinted image on a white, white sheet,” as he puts it when describing Mark Twain’s depiction of Asian characters.

Nonetheless, he does find echoes of himself: in his grandparents’ apartment in Chengdu, where he obsessively records everything, including the sound of his grandmother’s midnight prayers; and in Arizona, where he reflects on Chinese immigrants who made their way to the U.S. through the southern border; and, finally, in the beautiful essay “Southings,” which reflects on how it felt to be Asian in 1990s Tennessee. Through writing, Dai has sought to make his private thoughts public, to focus on ever-shifting interiors. He achieves an intimate travelogue that spans time, distance and desire. The reader begins to see Dai become himself. They can, as Dai puts it in his title, say his name, but say it slowly, and see the multiplicity of Dai’s origins and his possible destinations.

 

Thomas Dai’s intimate essay collection and travelogue, Take My Name but Say It Slow, reflects on his life growing up queer and Chinese American in Tennessee.
NonfictionMemoirEssays

Sweet Nothings

Review by Alice Cary

“Candy is about happiness in the moment—this exact moment, each subdivided microsecond of melt, each deliriously destructive chomp,” writes Sarah Perry in Sweet Nothings: Confessions of a Candy Lover. Her wonderful, near-encyclopedic ode to confectionery sweets is a collection of microessays, organized by candy color and accompanied by line drawings, including everything from Pop Rocks and Pixy Stix to wax lips and Lindt truffles. It’s quite the contrast to her first book, After the Eclipse, about her 30-year-old mother’s murder by a stranger in their home when Perry was 12. “I was so tired of darkness,” Perry writes. “Maybe my next book, I told my friends, should be about kittens and rainbows. I didn’t know how accurate that joke would prove to be.”

A supremely serious connoisseur, Perry notes, “For some, it’s sports, yoga, gardening, or sex; for me it’s candy—and sex, though not at the same time.” Indeed, her writing can be sensual, as in her description of an Aero bar: “Hold a section in your mouth and feel it break down, chamber by chamber, your saliva flooding it like the compartments of the Titanic.” She’s often humorous, noting, for instance, her love of Vitafusion melatonin gummies: “I’m candy dependent even when unconscious.” Interesting history emerges as well, such as the fact that candy bars were first popularized “as a ‘nourishing lunch’ for hungry men and rations for exhausted soldiers in World War I.”

What’s perhaps most fun are Perry’s strong opinions. She calls cotton candy “an edible cloud, the purest possible form of sugar, a miracle of physics, and still, I hate it.” Of Necco wafers, she confesses, “I just cannot believe that anybody truly likes these. Like refined Tums.” And Junior Mints are “the most candy of the mints, total perfection all around.”

This is much more than a book about sweets, however. Perry uses the subject to delve into many aspects of pop culture, politics, emotion and her past and present life, including her polyamorous relationships. Throughout, she draws sharp, poignant connections between her musings about candy, and memories and loss of her mother: “There’s a satisfaction in learning the real meaning behind any childhood moment, even if that meaning is sad or scary. It takes these floating, isolated memories and pins them to the fabric of your life story, allowing you to better retain them within a greater context.”

Dip in and out of these essays as you would your favorite treat. Sweet but never saccharine, Sweet Nothings is a book worth savoring.

 

Sweet but never saccharine, Sarah Perry’s collection of essays about candy, Sweet Nothings, is a book worth savoring.
NonfictionPop CultureEssays

Pure Innocent Fun

Review by Amy Scribner

Anyone who listens to Ira Madison III’s exuberant pop culture podcast, “Keep It!,” knows the writer has a way with words. Whether he’s critiquing a play (he’s a New York University Tisch School of the Arts grad and a Broadway geek) or a Taylor Swift album (he’s also a Swiftie), Madison always brings smart, edgy, hilarious takes. Pure Innocent Fun is a thoroughly enjoyable collection of essays in which Madison reflects on his sometimes-difficult 1990s Milwaukee childhood and the pop culture that shaped him, from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Lil’ Kim to Jerry Springer.

Growing up Black and closeted while attending a mostly white, all-boy Catholic high school, Madison learned early how to blend in—or at least try. “I did feel a bit like Clueless’s Dionne, a bougie Black girl played by Stacey Dash who understands the ins and outs of white culture and whose best friend is rich white Beverly Hills teenager Alicia Silverstone’s Cher Horowitz,” he writes.

Raised mostly by his grandmother, Madison struggled with his self-esteem throughout adolescence. A chubby middle schooler, he noticed the unending focus on weight and appearance in pop culture. From Oprah infamously dragging 67 pounds of fat onstage in a wagon to the so-called Subway diet, fat-shaming was everywhere in the 1990s. “Celebrities like Britney Spears and Jessica Simpson were called fat even when they were rail-thin,” Madison writes. “Every TV sitcom had a fat-friend character whose only dialogue involved responding to punch lines about their weight.”

Madison found refuge in the movie theater and, later, in his high school and college theater programs. He didn’t end up coming out until college (more accurately, he was outed by a classmate). He recounts this incident and his understandably less-than-magnanimous reaction with heart and candor, hallmarks of this entire essay collection. Pure Innocent Fun is a dizzyingly fun treat for children of the 1990s, pop culture aficionados and really anyone who enjoys hilarious, clear-eyed essays. A superfan of the razor-sharp writings of pop culture critic Chuck Klosterman, Madison shares his idol’s ability to connect pop culture moments to bigger life themes.

 

In his dizzyingly fun debut essay collection, Ira Madison III riffs on his 1990s Milwaukee childhood and the pop culture that shaped him.
Science Fiction & FantasyNonfictionFictionLiterary FictionHorrorHistoryEssays

Want a short, sharp blast of literary excellence? Try one of these 4 novellas

Feature by the editors of BookPage

The Turn of the Screw

For every reader, there are things that will make them politely but firmly close a book and never open it again. For me, it’s always been what I deem perverse ambiguity. “Who’s to say what really happened! People are unknowable!” a book will proclaim, and I will grip it by its metaphorical lapels and demand to speak to its author. However, for some books, the ambiguity is the point, and there is no better example of this than Henry James’ eerie novella, The Turn of the Screw. The tale of a governess in Victorian England who becomes convinced that the children she cares for are being haunted by the spirit of her predecessor, The Turn of the Screw is horrifying because of its inscrutability. It could be a traditional ghost story, but tilt it just a few degrees, and it’s a tale of a woman trying so hard to suppress her sexuality that it becomes a paranoid obsession. Is her quest to protect the children a noble one, or does something heinous lurk within her need to safeguard their “purity”? A novel might not have been able to sustain such ill-defined anxiety, but as a novella, it’s an undiluted sliver of dread. 

—Savanna Walker, Managing Editor

Foster

In rural Ireland sometime in the past, a shy observant child has left home for the first time. Her long-suffering mother will soon have another child, so the girl will be looked after by the Kinsellas, a kind couple from her mother’s side of the family who own a small dairy farm. Though we don’t learn the girl’s name or specific details of her life at her home, it’s clear within two pages that her family is very poor, and her father is a layabout who would happily see her left on the side of a road, as long as another man didn’t put him to shame by helping her. And because the girl is telling the story, we know that she knows all this too. In the Kinsellas’ house, the missus tells her, there are no secrets and no shame, and the days the girl spends with the couple are filled with order and delight, as well as a mounting understanding that the Kinsellas are not entirely happy. Foster is filled with moments of ease, heartbreak and joy. Despite author Claire Keegan’s bucolic setting, the story never pretends that life is easy. Keegan’s writing is spare but never austere, and the hour spent in Foster’s quiet world will change you.

—Erica Ciccarone, Associate Editor

A Small Place

OK, this isn’t a novella. But if you’re looking for powerful literature that you can read the whole of in a single dedicated burst, this 80-page essay by the great novelist Jamaica Kincaid fits the bill perfectly. Kincaid grew up on Antigua, an island in the Caribbean that was colonized by the British in the 1600s and became the independent country Antigua and Barbuda in 1981. In A Small Place, written just seven years after independence, Kincaid addresses the North American and European tourists who vacation on the 9-by-12-mile island, picking apart a tourist’s mentality to reveal its willful ignorance, and drawing connections between centuries of slavery under British colonialism and the corruption of Antigua and Barbuda’s government. There’s so much here—careful tracing of how history becomes cultural narrative, evocative descriptions of the island’s “unreal” beauty, anecdotes about Kincaid’s love of her childhood library. Everyone living in our so-called “post” colonial world, especially anyone who’s ever been a tourist, should read A Small Place.

—Phoebe Farrell-Sherman, Associate Editor

Train Dreams

Inside the worlds of Denis Johnson’s fiction, the mundane evokes great sadness, terror or joy. Simple acts are magnified in subtle yet staggering ways. Along with his straightforward, limpid prose, this aspect of his writing makes the National Book Award-winner (Tree of Smoke) exceptionally suited for the novella format, as proven by Train Dreams, which tells the story of Robert Grainier, an itinerant laborer in the American West during the turn of the 20th century. Johnson gracefully doles out disjointed portions of Grainier’s life as it unfolds in an era suffused with ordinary tragedy. All around Grainier, people die from dangers both natural and human-made. But just as a ravaged forest returns after a massive fire, “green against the dark of the burn,” so does the humanity that stubbornly persists in this rapidly changing landscape. Despite—or as a result of—its short length, Train Dreams showcases Johnson’s impressive capacity for creating memorable characters, whether it’s a dying vagrant, or a man shot by his own dog. It’s truly a wonder that a book can fit so much engrossing vibrancy within so few pages.  

—Yi Jiang, Associate Editor

Our favorite quick reads pack an enormous punch in a slim package.
NonfictionEssays

The Memory Palace

Review by Deborah Mason

A memory palace is a memorization technique used by figures as diverse as Cicero, international memory champions and the late, great Sherlock Holmes. Practitioners visualize placing images representing information they want to recollect in a familiar setting that they can revisit whenever their memory needs a nudge. The Memory Palace: True Stories of the Past, by award-winning podcaster and screenwriter Nate DiMeo, however, is a more intimate and complex edifice than any mnemonic device. Instead of facts and figures, DiMeo’s memory palace is inhabited by the moving true stories that illustrate how human beings throughout history, whether famous, infamous or unknown, felt the same emotions and had the same imperfections that we have and humans will always have.

Like DiMeo’s podcast of the same name, The Memory Palace’s stories—numbering nearly 50 in this volume—are briskly told, varied, unexpected and often paradoxical, giving us a sideways view of human nature. William Mumler, a 19th-century con artist photographer who stumbled upon a technique to make “ghosts” appear behind his subjects, gave genuine comfort to spiritualist Mary Todd Lincoln as she grieved the death of her child. William James Sidis, a boy genius who, at age 11, gave a Harvard lecture on the implications of the fourth dimension, could have been an academic celebrity, but instead sought seclusion to pursue his passion: collecting streetcar transfers. Carla Wallenda, the last surviving child of the founders of the Flying Wallendas high wire troupe, witnessed over several decades the gruesome deaths of her father, husband, cousins, aunt and uncle—but until her death at the age of 85, never felt so alive as when she was on the tightrope.  

DiMeo ordered the stories in no particular way, and he suggests that The Memory Palace could be a “dipping book.” But there’s a benefit to reading it in order: In his final seven stories, he seamlessly interweaves episodes from his family’s lives in a way that illuminates both the individuals chronicled in his “cabinet of curiosities” and the project of the book and podcast as a whole. Readers will feel a shiver of recognition and understanding—making a second or third visit to DiMeo’s memory palace both irresistible and gratifying.

The Memory Palace collects stories from Nate DiMeo’s award-winning podcast about historical people—famous and unknown alike, all breathtakingly human.
NonfictionMemoirEssays

My Pisces Heart

Review by Natalia Berry

Born in the American South to a banking family, Jennifer Neal has been traveling across continents, reinventing and reimagining herself for most of her life. Her migration story spans the American South, Japan, Australia and Germany in My Pisces Heart: A Black Immigrant’s Search for Home Across Four Continents. Neal (Notes on Her Color) is both a lyrical writer and an astute historian, studying the complexities of race and Blackness with tenderness and reverence in each place she has lived. 

Neal unpacks imperialism through a queer, Black, American lens as she navigates love, friendship and career. Some of the best essays in My Pisces Heart describe her college years in Japan and her search for solidarity among Black and Japanese people. She finds allies and mentors in academia, connects with a coalition of Black studies enthusiasts and visits the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. She explores how racist Western philosophies were brought to Japan, yet doesn’t shy away from Japan’s problematic history of colorism. Other heartbreaking and nuanced essays follow her time in Australia, where she battles casual racism and experiences a difficult romantic relationship. Here, she explores how the Aboriginal people of Australia keep their communities alive through protests and demonstrations. While white Australians often sought to isolate Neal from this community, she felt a kinship with them due to the similar histories of Australia’s and America’s anti-miscegenation laws. 

In lovely astrology interstitials that appear as vignettes before each section, Neal analyzes her birth chart to provide a framework through which to view the world beyond herself, without borders. These sections inspire the reader to look outward—and up—in search of their own guiding light. 

Throughout, Neal is quick to direct the reader to the hidden histories of Black people all over the world. Though racial homogeneity is accepted as the norm in places like Japan and Germany, Neal proves that Black people exist everywhere and, in many cases, always have. In an age when we can see the devastating impacts of colonialism on devices in the palms of our hands, My Pisces Heart is an essential read for anyone curious about cultural differences and eager to explore what it means to be in solidarity with those oppressed across the globe.

Jennifer Neal’s essential memoir and travelogue, My Pisces Heart, proves that Black people exist all over the world and, in many cases, always have.
NonfictionEssays

An Image of My Name Enters America

Review by Catherine Hollis

Lucy Ives writes with a madcap intellectualism—think David Sedaris with a Ph.D. Her new collection of essays, An Image of My Name Enters America, sutures together such heterogeneous topics as fetal consciousness, unicorns, the medieval mystic Margery Kempe and the end of the world. Much like in Ives’ fiction (Impossible Views of the World), her meticulously crafted prose weaves these disparate threads into beautiful essays that surprise and delight with their interconnecting patterns. 

The five essays in this collection are linked by Ives’ experience of pregnancy and childbirth during the COVID-19 pandemic. In “Of Unicorns,” her midwife recounts a dream (or memory?) of being perfectly happy in a smooth enclosed place, perhaps her own mother’s uterus. Ives then pivots to her own childhood obsession with the My Little Pony toys of the 1980s, before turning to Zoroastrianism and the Renaissance unicorn tapestries that hang in New York City’s Cloisters museum. The lines Ives draws between these elements are astonishing and moving, and “Of Unicorns” is one of the best essays I’ve read in a long time. 

The titular essay returns to the theme of memory, both individual and cultural. Childhood memories also play a role, but so too does anamnesis—the recollecting of knowledge from before birth—prompting Ives to explore her family’s immigration story, which began with the Assyrian genocide of the 1910s. Although this violent historical event long precedes Ives’ own birth, it “refuse[s] to be forgotten,” and she feels its presence even before she is consciously aware of it. Questions of memory and identity persist across each of the essays grouped in this volume, lending a satisfying sense of cohesion to the collection. 

In the final essay, Ives links Cixin Liu’s science fiction novel The Three-Body Problem with the difficulty of finding words to accurately depict childbirth. Is the experience of giving birth, of moving from a pre- to post-natal state, akin to a holy state of nothingness, a place where language fails? The body-in-labor may be the ultimate testing ground for Ives’ thoughts on identity and language. 

An Image of My Name Enters America carries its scholarship lightly and with a wink. While each essay is scrupulously footnoted, the notes can be ignored (although interested readers will find further reading suggestions galore). Readers are advised to sit back and enjoy the many splendors of Lucy Ives’ magpie brilliance.

An Image of My Name Enters America shows Lucy Ives’ magpie brilliance in essays that weave together My Little Pony, childbirth, her family’s immigration story and much more.
NonfictionMystery & SuspenseFictionChildren's & YAYA FictionYASocial ScienceMysteryMemoirLiterary FictionHistorical FictionFamily SagaEssays

9 new books to read for Native American Heritage Month

List by the editors of BookPage
STARRED REVIEW
November 4, 2024

9 new books to read for Native American Heritage Month

Celebrate some of the best Native authors writing today with these absorbing titles.
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Book jacket image for Fire Exit by Morgan Talty

Fire Exit

Morgan Talty follows up Night of the Living Rez with Fire Exit, a beautifully written novel that is sometimes funny, often heartbreaking and hopeful against ...
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Book jacket image for Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange

Wandering Stars

Tommy Orange’s novel sensitively depicts Orvil Red Feather’s path to recovery after the tragedy in There, There, as well as chronicling important, overlooked moments in ...
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Book jacket image for Sheine Lende by Darcie Little Badger

Sheine Lende

Sheine Lende focuses on a girl who must use her experience finding missing persons with ghost dogs to track down her own mother.
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Book jacket image for Thunder Song by Sasha LaPointe

Thunder Song

Thunder Song is an essay collection full of sensitive meditations and powerful observations from Coast Salish author Sasha LaPointe.
Read more
Book jacket image for Where Wolves Don't Die by Anton Treuer

Where Wolves Don’t Die

In Where Wolves Don’t Die, Anton Treuer delivers an unflinching yet healing story that showcases Ojibwe culture while exploring themes of forgiveness and reconciliation.
Read more

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Celebrate some of the best Native authors writing today with these absorbing titles.
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Want

Review by Laura Hutson Hunter

As Gillian Anderson prepared for her role as a sex therapist in the British TV show Sex Education (which this writer quickly added to her Netflix queue), she read the 1973 cult classic My Secret Garden, a compendium of fantasies collected by novelist Nancy Friday. In Friday’s book, Anderson writes, it was revealed that “. . . for some of us, the sex we have in our head may be more stimulating than the physical nuts and bolts of any coupling, no matter how hot. Unconstrained by assumed social conventions, self-consciousness, or perhaps the fear of making our partner uncomfortable, in our imagination we can indulge in our deepest, most transgressive desires.”

Inspired by Friday, Anderson put out an invitation for women and genderqueer people to write down their own fantasies and send them to her. She soon began amassing a “torrent of unbridled passion from around the world.” The result is Want: Sexual Fantasies by Anonymous, an extensive series of writings—some less than a page long, but most a page or two—detailing a multitude of diverse fantasies. What began as a platform for women to anonymously share fantasies has turned into something like a calling.

The polyvocality of Want means there’s something for everyone, but it also means that you’ll probably come across a fantasy you’ve never considered, as with Anderson, who writes that she was fascinated by the number of women with dreams of being milked like a cow. “The human imagination has few limits and our sexual desires and fantasies are no different, yet are still treated as taboo,” she writes in the book’s introduction. “Is everyone ashamed and pretending not to be?”

Anderson herself is among the anonymous writers here. There’s no hint at which of the many fantasies is hers; the only identity markers at the end of every essay are nationality, income, religion, sexual orientation, relationship status and whether the writer has children. “I was terrified of putting my fantasy down on paper,” she writes, “lest someone was able to discern which was mine.” But after reading more than 1,000 others, she finds that “sexual liberation must mean freedom to enjoy sex on our terms, to say what we want, not what we are pressured or believe we are expected to want.”

With luck, this provocative, original volume will help women and genderqueer people feel more empowered and less ashamed.

Gillian Anderson asked women to send her their sexual fantasies. The result is a provocative, original volume that will help women and genderqueer people feel more empowered and less ashamed.
NonfictionNatureEssays

This Is How a Robin Drinks

Review by Linda M. Castellitto

When Joanna Brichetto sees potato chips, she craves goldfinches. An offbeat association? Sure. One imbued with enthusiasm and nature-loving logic? Absolutely. You see, she explains, the goldfinch’s call sounds like “potato-chip, potato-chip,” and the Lay’s Classic Potato Chips bag is a yellow “not unlike a male goldfinch in breeding plumage.” 

That perspective-shifting, find-joy-in-daily-life revelation is just one of many the blogger and certified Tennessee naturalist shares in her wonderful, wonder-inducing debut, This Is How a Robin Drinks: Essays on Urban Nature.

Brichetto—a former BookPage contributor —believes that “by paying attention to the natural world we have a chance to figure out who, where, and when we are.” Fortunately, “nature is all around”—and in this almanac organized by season, she encounters and explores nature in places we expect, like parks and gardens and birdbaths. But what about thrift stores, grocery bags and abandoned mall parking lots?

If we stroll rather than stride through our yards and neighborhoods, Brichetto assures us, we can find nature everywhere, too—despite humans’ relentless efforts to constrain, pave over or poison it. Readers will relish her thoughtful essays rife with idiosyncratic humor and poetic reverence, like her observation that a purchased-turf lawn has been “gentrified by sod.” 

In her summer section, Brichetto is particularly reverent toward cicadas, which can fall prey to new construction (the Nashville-based author was treated to two overlapping broods this summer). “He will sing with the moon,” she writes of one, “but I have his skin, which once held the sun.” In fall, her pockets “surrender snail shells, turn out twigs of spicebush, fumble oak apples round and dry.” A red-tailed hawk transforms her from a winter commuter to “a character in a fairy story.” And she composes a spring ode to catalpa trees, which she suggests may be “admired by pressing one’s face into a pyramid of blossom.”

This Is How a Robin Drinks is sure to trigger an uptick in meanderings—urban or rural, day or night—suffused with new appreciation for and a renewed determination to preserve our endlessly fascinating yet increasingly vulnerable environment. And not a moment too soon; after all, Brichetto writes, “Spoiler alert: nature’s best hope is us.”

Naturalist Joanna Brichetto uncovers the beauty of urban landscapes in her wonder-inducing debut, This Is How a Robin Drinks.
NonfictionSocial ScienceEssays

The Message

Review by Deborah Mason

National Book Award-winning author Ta-Nehisi Coates’ 2015 book Between the World and Me, and his 2017 essay collection, We Were Eight Years in Power, exposed the impact of slavery and Jim Crow on our understanding of America’s origins and its present. Written with clarity and forensic objectivity, his revolutionary insights into our society challenged us to not only acknowledge this past but also actively redress its lasting harms. His new book, The Message, is personal and introspective; four related but standalone essays chronicle Coates’ own revelations about the role stories play in shaping and misshaping our perceptions of the world.

Coates argues that writing is both an artistic and a political act: Authors must write with clarity and create narratives that explain and expose the world with urgency—and they must examine the stories we have been told as well as those we tell ourselves. How do authors extract truth from history, separate myth from fact? Coates travels to the Senegalese island of Gorée, which is prominent for its perceived significance in the slave trade. He acknowledges it as a “mythical site of departure”: According to scholars, very few enslaved people actually passed through its infamous Door of No Return. But on the island, Coates had a remarkable epiphany about the ways in which the myth-making about Gorée as “sacred, a symbolic representation of our last stop before the genocide” has obscured the lasting impact of colonialism on Africa. Still, that myth holds unique power: “We have a right to our imagined traditions, to our imagined places,” Coates concludes, “and those traditions and places are most powerful when we confess that they are imagined.”

His journey to East Jerusalem and the West Bank brings questions about objective storytelling to the fore, in an essay both heartrending and hopeful. Coates courageously allows the reader to see the confusion, grief and anger he feels observing firsthand how Palestinians are relegated to second class citizenship in a segregated society, all while Israel is hailed as “the only democracy in the Middle East” by the West—a situation which he finds all too familiar. Coates reports learning that illegal settlements steal Palestinian land. He shares meals with both Palestinians and Israelis, including a former Israeli soldier who tells him that Israeli forces subject Palestinians to a “constant threat of violence,” with methods that include home invasions targeting known innocents. Coates reflects on how Palestinian writers are seldom allowed to contribute their voices, and an “elevation of complexity over justice” shapes the narrative about the region.

Searching and restless, The Message is filled with startling revelations that show a writer grappling with how his work fits into history and the present moment. Coates believes that writing can change the world. Achieving this mission is arduous, vital and necessary. These masterful essays will leave readers convinced that Coates is up to the task.

Ta-Nehisi Coates wrestles with the weighty responsibility of being a writer in The Message, a powerful collection of essays.
NonfictionEssays

Magically Black and Other Essays

Review by Natalia Berry

Jerald Walker, the highly decorated author of the National Book Award finalist How to Make a Slave and Other Essays, proves in his latest triumph that he’s also a bona fide comedian. Magically Black and Other Essays captures how the political upheaval of recent years has multiplied the anxieties of American life and made it particularly fraught for Black Americans like Walker and his family. Bite-sized and deceptively funny, Magically Black’s impactful essays unfurl poignant cultural critiques sure to make you think.

Walker’s humor sprouts from situational absurdity. He riffs on the merits of keeping a racist contractor around, teaching Hannah Crafts’ The Bondwoman’s Narrative to well-meaning but misguided white college students, navigating the generational divide between him and his children and more. One of the most hilarious and smartly executed essays is “Crisis,” in which Walker makes his maiden voyage to a cannabis dispensary in a suit, drawing the suspicion of other customers and workers alike. Comically self-effacing, he wonders if being there is yet another symptom of the midlife crisis he has denied having, and his awkwardness sets in motion a comedy of errors. But beneath this facade, he is disoriented. Black Americans have lost generations of community members to incarceration thanks to the war on drugs; now, white people wait in long lines to buy weed legally.

Still, one essay takes a more serious tack: In the tender “Lost,” Walker waits three hours after curfew for his teenage son to return home from theater rehearsal. As tension builds, he examines what is at stake when Black families achieve economic success and move into white neighborhoods. At any time, his child can be othered into criminality or death. Shouldn’t Black boys be allowed the freedom to roam? Walker and his wife, Brenda—a wonderful addition to every essay she appears in—talk over parenting and racial anxiety. Conversations like this happen in many Black households, but Walker manages to capture how prevailing opinions shift throughout generations without ever indicating any viewpoint is wrong or foolish.

Walker is an erudite observer of America in all of its dangers and faults, and extracts the sum of its parts with a wink and a nod. Magically Black and Other Essays is a gift.

In Magically Black and Other Essays, Jerald Walker unfurls poignant cultural critiques about parenting, Blackness and American life with laugh-out-loud humor.

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