Books
In her novel Pizza Girl, Jean Kyoung Frazier has given us an exhilarating spin on a long line of road-rebel mothers.
The text is littered with accusatory, staccato lines from mama Wince, whose conversations with her daughter achieve Carrie-esque arias of passive aggressiveness.
For each of these major, prize-honored writers — Siegfried Lenz and Walter Kempowski– birth = destiny = art.
Despite her story’s potential for uncomfortable confrontations and revelations, the author chooses to pack the vicissitudes of her novel’s changing neighborhoods and their inhabitants’ lives into a neat and tidy package.
Parakeet is a virtuosic, perplexing, challenging trip. If it’s too disturbing a tale for this particular moment (it shouldn’t be), it may be a great work to explore in a year to come.
The Fallen artfully diagnoses the spiritual and material maladies of contemporary Cuban life through the lens of a single family, a household threatened by decay, exterior and interior.
According to Sarah Kendzior, “we have a transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government.”
I am Derek Chauvin, and I am George Floyd. Who are you?
This is a beautifully produced book, replete with illustrations. Full-page photos of evocative landscapes are supplemented by both maps and smaller shots detailing architectural features.
Author Interview: Peniel E. Joseph on “The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.”
“Malcolm X and MLK evolved over time and came to converge in surprising ways. Malcolm’s movement for radical black dignity became a global human rights touchstone in a manner that made King’s struggle for radical black citizenship both necessary and more expansive.”
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