5 Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week
Hanif Abdurraqib on Zora Neale Hurston, Jia Tolentino on Melissa Broder, and more
The major literary event of the season so far has been the publication of Zora Neale Hurston Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo.” Hanif Abdurraqib, the author of They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, in his fascinating 4Columns essay, calls the book (written after Hurston traveled to Plateau, Alabama in 1927 to interview the eighty-six year old former slave Cudjo Lewis) “ahead of its time, largely due to how it makes the story of slavery both intimate and viscerally visual.” Elsewhere, in the Los Angles Times, graphic memoirist Kristen Radtke uses both image and text to review Jamel Brinkley’s “masterfully paced” debut short story collection, A Lucky Man; the New Yorker‘s Jia Tolentino considers the way in which Melissa Broder “convincingly romances the void” in her comic, erotic novel about a woman who begins a passionate affair with an LA-based Merman, The Pisces; Annalisa Quinn of NPR is impressed with how Curtis Sittenfeld gives “compassionate attention to the middle-aged women of America” in her short story collection You Think It, I’ll Say It; and Justine Jordan of the Guardian marvels at the “vein of dark, gleaming humor” in Carys Davies’ West—a slim tale but powerful first novel of delusion and duty on the American Frontier.
