I’m toying around with a New Orleans/hurricane themed course, whether in first-year writing or an upper-division humanities course. I’ve been trying to think about books that would be relevant, both fiction and nonfiction. Several people had already recommended Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones to me before, and with her new book garnering National Book Award buzz, I thought it might be time to give it a try. Esch is our protagonist. She’s fifteen, motherless, and pregnant. She is jockeying for family position amongst wild and […]
My favorite part of year
So screw the Pulitzer Prizes because they don’t release the nominees until the winner is announced, but August/September/October is my favorite part of the year because the Booker Prize and National Book Award release their longlists and we get a new Nobel Prize winner. So I haven’t liked the change toward American books on the Booker Prize because I like to expand what books I am watching, but so it goes. Of the ten books on the National Book Longlist, I have already reviewed two […]
We Are Losing Them
My life growing up was, in many ways, very different from the people who populate my adult life. I find myself looking around often and saying “but why don’t you understand _____________?” I grew up in a very diverse area and my experiences and knowledge reflect that diversity. But it’s fair to say that my expanded viewpoint is only expanded to a certain extent because I still view life from a place of white, middle class privilege. But the high school that I attended started […]
There Are No Monsters Here
“From 2000 to 2004, five Black young men I grew up with died, all violently, in seemingly unrelated deaths. The first was my brother, Joshua…” Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped is beautiful and heartbreaking in a way that only stories about family and home can be. This book made me weep in the prologue. I want to be clear: this was no mere tearing up. Sobs were heard. Ward’s words don’t require a book-long, slow build-up to a crescendo of emotion and tragedy. The tragedy […]