1959 is a novel by Thulani Davis that was published in 2001 by Grove Press. It is a first-person coming-of-age narrative that chronicles a young black girl named Willie Tarrant coping with adolescence and tensions over desegregation in Turner, Virginia. It’s also a fictional chronicle of how Willie’s community is transformed by the civil rights movement. I was interested to read the novel because it speaks […]
Recitatif is the French word for recitative, which is a type of spoken performance that’s a combination of regular speech and singing, similar to the German term Sprechgesang. It’s typically used in narrative interludes during operas, for instance. “Recitatif” is Toni Morrison’s one and only published short story; you can read an annotated version online […]
Pnin is a short novel by Vladimir Nabokov originally published in 1957. It was Nabokov’s 13th novel and the 4th one he wrote in English. It tells the story of Timofey Pavlovich Pnin, a fifty-something Russian professor living and teaching in exile in the U.S. Pnin’s life is narrated through the eyes of V. V., another […]
The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing: Traitor to the Nation: Vol. 1: The Pox Party tells the story of Octavian, a young slave boy who’s a living experiment conducted by the Novanglian College of Lucidity. Octavian’s life as an experiment began when the head of the College (Mr. Gitney) purchased Octavian’s pregnant, teenaged mother Cassiopeia at […]
Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred D. Taylor tells the story of a black farming family attempting to cope with racism in Mississippi during the Great Depression. The viewpoint character is Cassie Logan, a 9-year-old schoolgirl who is just starting to realize the depth of the bigotry in her community and how dangerous it […]
As a person who’s attempting to write thoughtful, modern weird fiction, I found The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle to be a pure delight. Go read this one, folks! It’s a fabulous novella. The narrative is very much in a dialog with (and functions as a razor-sharp rebuttal to) H.P. Lovecraft’s story “The Horror at […]
“The Horror at Red Hook” is a short story by H.P. Lovecraft that first appeared in the January 1927 issue of Weird Tales. The protagonist of the story is Detective Malone, who investigates a series of kidnappings linked to a mysterious recluse named Suydam. The recluse has been involved in shadowy dealings with gangsters and other criminals operating in the […]
Head Games, the second volume in Joe Hill’s Locke & Key graphic novel series, focuses on the Locke siblings as they cope with life after their father’s death and unwittingly fall more under the influence of the escaped demon Dodge, who is posing as the cousin of the high school’s track coach, Ellie. Bode Locke find the Head […]
Rot & Ruin is the first volume in Jonathan Maberry’s popular Benny Imura series. This novel introduces 15-year-old Benny and follows his adventures as he becomes an apprentice to his zombie-killing older brother Tom, whom Benny has always resented because he feels that Tom failed to save their parents from becoming zombies. (Tom obeyed their mother’s […]
