I read Kiese Laymon’s novel Long Division and his nonfiction essays How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others a few years back and I could tell by the early previews and even the cover of this book that it was likely to be very good. And it is. There’s a handful of comparisons on the cover of this book from early reviewers to Richard Wright’s Black Boy, which is also subtitled “American Hunger” and while I do agree there’s some real connections between the two, one of the […]
It’s our very capacity for self-consciousness that makes us self-destructive!
Here’s some questions: Are you?? Does this book pass the Bechdel test? Yes, overwhelmingly. Also, say the title of the book with the emphasis that makes the most sense to you. ARE you my mother? Are YOU my mother? Are you MY mother? Are you my MOTHER? All of these work for this book. This is a follow-up memoir after Fun Home, that is a mature and interesting work, but one that’s also less successful and ultimately less memorable. This book follows more so along […]
‘One can find time for everything if one is never in a hurry,’ explained his host didactically.
So I might be the only person I know who doesn’t absolutely love The Master and Margarita, but I did really like this really bizarre little novella. This story is a kind of Pygmalion, a kind of Frankenstein, a kind of George Schuyler’s Black No More, and a touch of the episode of Futurama where Bender becomes human. This story starts with a dog thinking upon his own situation, eating trash, living rough on the street, and sleeping in the cold. He is brought into the warm house of a […]
My little friend was a strange mix of Flemish thrift and artistic fervour.
This is a collection Miss Marple and Poirot stories repackaged and republished in 1961. There’s about a split in terms of how many of each you get. What’s great about the audiobook version is that a lot of the files are clearly pulled and recollected from other produced audiobooks, so you get a variety of different actors reading them. I think this or something similar to this would be a really interesting usage of this kind of material to see who does different things with […]