The stories in this collection plumb the performance of womanhood. Daughters, wives, girlfriends, and caretakers writ large reflect on their prescribed familial roles, their bodies, their professions, or their solitude with dry wit. Broken into three sections—“External Riots: Threats and Violence,” “Internal Riots: Secrets and Lies,” and “Laugh Riots: Growing and Trying”—the book grapples with […]
Left to her own devices while Mom takes care of official business, Alice finds a series of friendly tour guides—including the specters of a cat, James Madison, and Blanche Bruce, the first Black senator to serve a full term—who take her around the building and fill her in on the party and electoral systems, the […]
Sama opens with a scenario worthy of a Matt Damon hero: threatened with blackmail by an unnamed bad guy, he connects with two ex-Mossad agents in downtown London who deliver the news that “there is a conspiracy to remove you from your job” and demand a cool million bucks to make it go away. Go […]
“Being a black quarterback,” wrote a Los Angeles Times sports columnist, “is like being a member of the bomb squad.” Make a mistake, in other words, and Boom! you’re done. In 1979, an era in which, writes Moore, “it was still a foreign concept that Black men could be the field generals,” two Black players […]
In 1976, as the United States celebrated its bicentennial, Morris found herself alone on a hilltop at the Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge near Seneca Falls, New York, playing “Mother Eagle” to two bald eaglets. She had been selected to participate in a program to reintroduce bald eagles into the state. Following the ravaging effects on […]
The author opens his nonfiction debut with a concise account of his own traumatic past: The Christian community to which he and his parents belonged gradually devolved into a cult from which all three of them had to struggle to extract themselves. “How could an organization seemingly driven by a noble mission become so toxic?” […]
The author has spent over a decade teaching her writing method to a variety of audiences, helping to prompt procrastinators or aspiring writers who don’t know how to get started. The steps cover topics including generating ideas; developing characters, settings, and plots; and drafting and revision. Each day’s agenda begins with “warmups,” moves on to […]
It is a measure of both the Black Panthers’ renown and the fear its members inspired that Ross Perot, running for president in 1992, “claimed that the Vietnamese sent some Black Panthers to kill him in 1969.” Historian Street, the chief of police in Dallas, where Perot lived, refutes Perot’s story, saying, “There were only […]
Two years before writing this book, the author, an avid runner, completed the 2022 New York City Marathon at the age of 51. The race was grueling, she says, but far shorter and easier than her lengthy and often discouraging struggle to have children. Her first pregnancy in the late 1990s was difficult; she experienced […]
Whenever Priya’s extended family comes over, her older siblings and cousins run off to play, telling her that she’s too young to join them. Priya doesn’t mind, though, because she gets to hang out with Mauntie (“My Auntie”)—the nickname she’s given her mother’s sister. Both the youngest in their generations, the two experiment with extravagant […]