[{"id":276284,"date":"2026-09-08T05:06:59","date_gmt":"2026-09-08T09:06:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=276284"},"modified":"2026-09-05T21:52:01","modified_gmt":"2026-09-06T01:52:01","slug":"what-the-ghetto-of-venice-reveals-about-jewish-history-and-identity-in-europe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/what-the-ghetto-of-venice-reveals-about-jewish-history-and-identity-in-europe\/","title":{"rendered":"What the Ghetto of Venice Reveals About Jewish History and Identity in Europe"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

\u201cBut how I caught it, found it, or came by it,
\nWhat stuff \u2019tis made of, whereof it is born,
\nI am to learn\u2026\u201d
\n\u2013William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice<\/em>, 1.1.3-5
\n*<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It was a cold January afternoon when I first came to the Ghetto. I got there much later than I had hoped. I had spent much of the day elsewhere and had lost track of time. It was already beginning to get dark. The campo<\/em> seemed deserted. Shutters were closed and, apart from the tinkling of water in the wells, there was hardly a sound. There were no streetlights; barely even the glimmer of a lamp. But in the branches of the trees, thousands of tiny lights were shining.<\/p>\n

Having nothing else to do, I wandered idly across the square. On a wall opposite, I spotted an imposing bronze plaque. It was hard to make out in the gloom. Squinting, I could just see the image of a train pulling what looked like trucks. Hundreds of people\u2014and around them, soldiers with guns. I caught my breath\u2014a sharp intake of icy air. Behind the plaque, in a large irregular recess set with a metal grille, there was an inscription with names. Not far off, there was another with a date. I picked out the numbers slowly. 5 December 1943. I stopped. 5 December. My birthday.<\/p>\n

Just then, I heard a sound coming from my right. A gentle song, joyful and defiant. Turning, I saw a light in a ground-floor window and a small group of men dressed in black, shawls pulled up, nodding their heads in prayer. Then it struck me. It was Friday. The Sabbath was beginning. Something stabbed at my heart. Without knowing why, I burst into tears.<\/p>\n

Most of all, the Ghetto\u2019s story is a testament of hope. Despite all they endured, its inhabitants not merely survived but thrived.<\/p>\n

It was in that moment that my fascination for the Venetian Ghetto began. Although I did not realize it at the time, I had glimpsed\u2014felt<\/em>\u2014the essence of its past. To most of us, the word \u2018ghetto\u2019 will be familiar. We know the tragic stories of the Warsaw Ghetto, the \u0141\u00f3d\u017a Ghetto, and the horrors which followed. We have heard it used of the \u2018imprisoned cities\u2019 of Black Americans in parts of Harlem and Chicago, Brownsville and Detroit. We have seen it reimagined in poems and songs. But it was there, in an out-of-the-way corner of Cannaregio, that the word\u2014and its benighted history\u2014was born.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

In many ways, there was nothing particularly new about the Venetian Ghetto. It was certainly not the first time Jews had been confined to a quarter which was ‘obligatory, separate, and enclosed.’ Far from it: by the time it was established on March 29, 1516, the practice of enforced segregation was already a painfully familiar feature of European life. From at least the thirteenth century, Jews in Prague, Frankfurt-am-Main, Marseilles, and more than a dozen other cities had been required to live in specified neighborhoods, cut off from the surrounding area by barriers and iron gates.<\/p>\n

But the Ghetto was not \u2018just\u2019 the culmination of earlier trends. There was no conscious effort to model it after Jewish quarters elsewhere, no clear awareness of its past, and no vision of how it might evolve more than a handful of years in the future. Rather, it was an ad hoc creation, occasioned by the tumult of the Italian Wars, and framed by Venice\u2019s\u2014perhaps myopic\u2014determination to reconcile religious prejudice with its most pressing economic needs.<\/p>\n

Like many other European states, Venice had long regarded Jews as a threat to its Christian identity. Preachers and patricians constantly warned that, if allowed to live unchecked in the city, Jews would \u2018infect\u2019 the Christian faithful, poisoning the minds of the pious and stealing souls away from salvation. Yet the Venetian government knew that it could not manage without<\/em> a Jewish presence, either. By the early sixteenth century, the Republic\u2019s economy was already showing signs of decline. The \u2018working poor\u2019 were especially vulnerable, but since the Venetians were unable\u2013or unwilling\u2014to offer any form of credit on their own account, they had no choice but to rely on Jewish moneylenders instead. The Ghetto was simply the easiest way of allowing Jewish loans to keep flowing while keeping the spiritual \u2018risks\u2019 to a minimum.<\/p>\n

At first, it was intended to be a temporary measure; yet the collapse of Venice\u2019s maritime trade\u2014once the guarantor of its prosperity\u2014demanded that the Ghetto not only be retained but expanded. Jewish merchants, originally from Spain and Portugal, were invited to make the Ghetto their home and, in doing so, help revive Venice\u2019s flagging commerce with the Levant. One Ghetto swiftly became three; and as long as Venice\u2019s fortunes continued to worsen, their existence was all but guaranteed\u2014so much so that, by the mid-seventeenth century, their status could well be regarded as a barometer of Venice\u2019s decline.<\/p>\n

Though each of the Ghetto\u2019s three areas (the Ghetto Nuovo, the Ghetto Vecchio, and the Ghetto Nuovissimo) retained its own, distinct character until remarkably late, it was always cramped, unsanitary, and marred by privation. Its residents were subject not just to innumerable petty restrictions, but to an ineradicable, if often variable, hostility. Comparisons with Shakespeare\u2019s The Merchant of Venice<\/em> are invidious, but perhaps unavoidable. Although most scholars now agree that Shylock\u2019s \u2018pound of flesh\u2019 owes more to antisemitic hysteria in London than to daily life in the lagoon, the abuse he suffers at Antonio\u2019s hand in the Rialto market would not have been all that unrecognizable, at least in a slightly earlier period. Insults were common, threats familiar. Accusations of blood libel periodically recurred. Physical attacks were not unknown. There are cases of Jewish corpses being abused on their way to the cemetery; and even one instance of a father watching as his son was stabbed to death in the street.<\/p>\n

Over the 300 years of its existence, the Ghetto became a byword for the forcible segregation of Jewish communities. And after its gates were finally pulled down, it lived on\u2014as much in mind as in space. To borrow James Baldwin\u2019s phrase, its limits were \u2018set forever.\u2019 Jews, though relieved of their financial burdens and recognized as citizens, often struggled to escape the Ghetto\u2019s shadow, and Venetian antisemitism, shorn of its religious mantle, took on the more vicious garb of race.<\/p>\n

The Ghetto\u2019s tale is anything but simple, however. Though its high walls were intended to protect the Christian population, they sometimes did more to defend the Jewish people within. Particularly after Venice\u2019s break with the papacy in the early seventeenth century, the government went to great lengths to shield judaizers from the Inquisition\u2019s glare and recast the Ghetto as a refuge. On other occasions, its walls could be remarkably porous. The Ghetto was, after all, founded in the expectation of regular exchange between Jews and Christians and was enlarged in the hope that it would be a window of sorts onto the East. Jews often lived outside the Ghetto; and, at times, Christians made their homes inside its walls. Conversions were common; apostasy not unknown; and the presence so-called Marranos (Jews from Spain or Portugal who had converted to Christianity) made it virtually impossible to draw a clear distinction between religious communities. Even at the height of Jewish segregation, Jews might work in partnership with Christians, call on Christians to arbitrate in disputes, or be welcomed into Christian homes as friends. And once segregation was ended, we find Jewish councillors at the heart of civic politics, Jewish restaurants being haunted by Venetian gourmands, and Jewish soldiers taking their place in the struggle first for Italian unity, then for Italian freedom.<\/p>\n

The longer I have studied this most remarkable place…the more clearly have I come to see its essential truth: that its greatest monument is its endurance; its greatest blessing, its memory; and its greatest hope, its people.<\/p>\n

Most of all, the Ghetto\u2019s story is a testament of hope. Despite all they endured, its inhabitants not merely survived but thrived. They were, in a sense, a microcosm of the Jewish world. Having all fled persecution abroad, the early residents belonged to three \u2018national\u2019 groupings, worshipped according to two separate rites (Ashkenazi and Sephardic), and spoke any number of different languages. At various times, they practiced a dizzying range of professions: from doctors and rag-traders to merchants and copy-editors. More than once, they helped keep the Venetian economy from collapse. They founded no fewer than eight glittering synagogues, each a masterpiece of its kind; they founded innumerable charities; and they administered their own affairs with democratic probity. They were poets and scientists, musicians and philosophers; they put on plays and held festivals; and they transformed Venice into the greatest centre for Hebrew printing in the world. And almost five centuries after the Ghetto\u2019s foundation\u2014long after the horrors of the Holocaust\u2014I found them still there, on that cold winter evening, proud, defiant, and full of hope.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

In looking back at the Ghetto\u2019s past, I have used three lenses. The first is context. As will perhaps already be apparent, the Ghetto is a product of much wider Jewish diasporas. Those who lived there came as refugees or migrants from Germany, Spain, Portugal, the Ottoman Empire, modern Ukraine\u2014and perhaps even beyond; and the Ghetto\u2019s story cannot be told except through their own. At the same time, it is equally impossible to understand the Ghetto except in relation to Venice\u2019s own fortunes. Just as the Ghetto\u2019s foundation was precipitated (if not necessarily caused) by the catastrophic defeats Venice suffered during the Italian Wars, so its subsequent history was shaped by the decline of Venetian shipping, its fractious relationship with the Ottoman Empire and the papacy, its shift towards the land, and its subjugation\u2014to France, to Austria, and finally to Italy. I have therefore tried to link the daily happenings in Cannaregio with the bigger picture as clearly as I can. As will become clear, this has often necessitated giving a good deal of attention to Venice\u2019s economic situation, the state of its public finances and\u2014most of all\u2014the workings of credit markets. These are, understandably, often rather tricky topics; but I have done my best to avoid unnecessary technicalities whenever possible.<\/p>\n

The second lends is environment. Although the Ghetto\u2019s story often unfolds across a large canvas, as a tale of negotiations and charters, wars and finances, the Ghetto itself was never anything less than a lived environment. Whatever the squalls raging about, those few small blocks structured and shaped the daily lives of Venice\u2019s Jewish population. It was there, in those squares and streets, that people had their homes, ate their meals, celebrated, worshipped, and mourned. The fabric of the Ghetto is the warp and weft of its social existence. At each stage of the narrative, I have therefore tried to give as clear an impression as I can of the built environment and its evolution: the state of the tenements, the shops and synagogues, the wells, drains, and bridges. In this, I have been helped immeasurably by the abundance of primary materials still available and by the many wonderful studies which have been produced in recent decades, most notably by Donatella Calabi, Ennio Concina, and Ugo Camerino\u2014not to mention the outstanding conservation work which has preserved so many of the Ghetto\u2019s buildings for posterity.<\/p>\n

The third is personalities. Although this book traces the Ghetto\u2019s history from the arrival of the first Jews in Venice down to the present day\u2014a period of some 700 years\u2014it is above all a story of individuals. The Ghetto itself was a place to live; and though its fate was often shaped by factors beyond the control of any one person, it was always a living community of families, friends, acquaintances, and rivals. As such, I have tried to tell the Ghetto\u2019s tale through the experiences, and (where possible) the voices of its inhabitants. Particularly for earlier periods, this has, admittedly, not always been easy. Far fewer first-hand accounts have come down to us than we might like. As a result, non-Jewish sources have necessarily had to be privileged, a fact which has the unfortunate effect of reinforcing Jewish exclusion. From the mid-sixteenth century onwards, however, the situation is quite different. Thanks to the wealth of materials which have survived, we are fortunate to be able to reconstruct many lives in exceptional detail. Some of these are \u2018significant\u2019 figures who made some noteworthy contribution to cultural, political, or religious life, or who are otherwise well represented in the documentary record, such as the poet Sara Copia Sullam, the learned rabbi Leon Modena, the revolutionary Daniele Manin, and the doctor Giuseppe Jona. But I have tried too, balance these with the lives of more ordinary people, too, like Simc\u00e0 Todesca, the housewife who found a baby on her doorstep, and the children who were separated from their parents during the Second World War.<\/p>\n

This book cannot pretend to completeness, however. It is the historian\u2019s curse to see the past through a glass darkly; and even the most strenuous efforts afford nothing more than a brief and incomplete glimpse into the Ghetto\u2019s history. Yet the longer I have studied this most remarkable place, the more deeply I have dug into its records and remains, the more clearly have I come to see its essential truth: that its greatest monument is its endurance; its greatest blessing, its memory; and its greatest hope, its people.<\/p>\n

_______________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

From<\/em> The First Ghetto: Venice and the Origins of Modern Antisemitism<\/a> by Alexander Lee. Copyright \u00a9 2026. Available from Basic Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group. <\/em>The First Ghetto has been shortlisted for the 2026 Cundill History Prize<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cBut how I caught it, found it, or came by it, What stuff \u2019tis made of, whereof it is born, I am to learn\u2026\u201d \u2013William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, 1.1.3-5 * It was a cold January afternoon when I<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31838,"featured_media":276391,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6,43101,43092],"tags":[111978,63849,40901,11854,60417,12167,52657,5495,34399,112048,15921],"class_list":["post-276284","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","category-history","category-newsandculture","tag-2026-cundill-history-prize","tag-alexander-lee","tag-antisemitism","tag-basic-books","tag-cundill-history-prize","tag-europe","tag-hachette-book-group","tag-italy","tag-jewish-culture","tag-the-first-ghetto-venice-and-the-origins-of-modern-antisemitism","tag-venice","story-type-cundill-history-prize"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19Sc","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/life-ghetto-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276284","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/31838"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276284"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276284\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/276391"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276284"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276284"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276284"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":276585,"date":"2026-09-08T05:06:47","date_gmt":"2026-09-08T09:06:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=276585"},"modified":"2026-09-05T21:49:23","modified_gmt":"2026-09-06T01:49:23","slug":"this-week-in-literary-history-william-s-burroughs-kills-joan-vollmer-in-a-drunken-game-of-william-tell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/this-week-in-literary-history-william-s-burroughs-kills-joan-vollmer-in-a-drunken-game-of-william-tell\/","title":{"rendered":"This Week in Literary History: William S. Burroughs Kills Joan Vollmer in a Drunken Game of \u201cWilliam Tell\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

This first appeared in Lit Hub\u2019s\u00a0<\/em>Literary History\u00a0newsletter\u2014sign up here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

On the afternoon of September 6, 1951, in a friend\u2019s Mexico City apartment, a drunk William S. Burroughs pulled out his handgun and (supposedly) said to his wife, Joan Vollmer<\/a>, \u201cIt\u2019s time for our William Tell act.\u201d Vollmer (supposedly) laughed and placed a drinking glass on top of her head. Burroughs, known to be an expert shot, fired his gun, but missed the glass and instead shot Vollmer in the head, killing her. She was 28<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Before her death, Vollmer had been an influential member<\/a> of the Beat Generation; the apartment she shared with Edie Parker was a favored gathering place for Burroughs and his friends, including Jack Kerouac (who Edie would later marry), Allen Ginsberg, and Lucien Carr. \u201cBrilliant and well versed in philosophy and literature, Joan was the whetstone against which the main Beat writers\u2014Allen, Jack, and Bill\u2014sharpened their intellect,\u201d wrote Brenda Knight in The Women of the Beat Generation<\/em>. \u201cWidely considered one of the most perceptive people in the group, her strong mind and independent nature helped bulldoze the Beats toward a new sensibility.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then she was gone. Burroughs was arrested and held on murder charges for two weeks; he later (after speaking to a lawyer) changed his story<\/a>, as he would several times, telling a judge that his gun had misfired. He was convicted of criminal negligence and served little time in jail. The details remain unproveable, and reports of the event vary<\/a>, even from the few eyewitnesses, but the legend has remained. If you know one thing about Burroughs, you probably know this.<\/p>\n

Later, in his introduction to Queer<\/em><\/a>, Burroughs wrote: \u201cI am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan\u2019s death, and to a realization of the extent to which this event has motivated and formulated my writing.” He added, “I live with the constant threat of possession, and a constant need to escape from possession, from Control. So the death of Joan brought me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This first appeared in Lit Hub\u2019s\u00a0Literary History\u00a0newsletter\u2014sign up here. On the afternoon of September 6, 1951, in a friend\u2019s Mexico City apartment, a drunk William S. Burroughs pulled out his handgun and (supposedly) said to his wife, Joan Vollmer, \u201cIt\u2019s<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":74,"featured_media":276586,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6,43101],"tags":[77665,108293,5685],"class_list":["post-276585","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","category-history","tag-joan-vollmer","tag-this-week-in-literary-history","tag-william-burroughs","story-type-literary-history"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19X3","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/williamtell-copy.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276585","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/74"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276585"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276585\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/276586"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":275668,"date":"2026-09-08T04:54:38","date_gmt":"2026-09-08T08:54:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275668"},"modified":"2026-09-05T21:56:29","modified_gmt":"2026-09-06T01:56:29","slug":"how-to-be-a-black-author","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/how-to-be-a-black-author\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cHow to be a Black Author\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

After Lorrie Moore and Kiese Laymon.<\/em><\/p>\n

You chose this program based on money and because you never had a Black person of any gender teach you anything about writing or reading. You learned math and Black Studies and the safest way to blow and push life into another person from other Black people, but none of them had taught you how to tell a story.<\/p>\n

There is a family legend about how you learned how to read, that one day you were sitting at a kitchen table, four years old, beads in your hair because you were fresh back from a visit to your Mom-Mom\u2019s, and you said something like, \u201cGood morning. I hate Mondays. Lasagna,\u201d and your parents realized you were reading a comic aloud to yourself. Reading came to you like a sudden burst into fruit brought forth by unseen winds.<\/p>\n

You wanted a lineage. Sometimes, creating one doesn\u2019t take generations upon generations. It can be established, at least in the arts, with the right, thoughtful conversation or idea passed around a table in two hours and forty-five minutes on a rainy Tuesday afternoon.<\/p>\n

I want to tell you that you\u2019ll make it through this year. But did you?<\/p>\n

The first time you all met as a class that semester, your most boring white classmate turned in a story that was about himself but named something cooler like \u201cAlistair\u201d or \u201cParker.\u201d Last year, you had read an infamous essay about women and likability that he had found offensive. You had personally found the essay a little boring in the duh-yes-of course way essays can be when they take on something you have personally experienced. The only marginalia you had bothered to write was Girl, you are preaching to the choir. <\/em>But this classmate had gotten somehow so upset with the author\u2019s phrasing, the way she treated men, that he had cried in the classroom. You had seen him lurking outside of after-class Guinnesses\u2014the cheapest beer in the happy hour special\u2014crying still, face mottled red, and typing something on his cell phone. All his stories were about young, misunderstood white men gazing at water and thinking about misdeeds that they never actually did in-scene. You and your friends sometimes called him Mr. Flashbacks. Sometimes, you called him Mr. Future NBA in Fiction.<\/p>\n

You listened to how your Black professor told him that his descriptions were \u201cmiraculous.\u201d She talked about Carver and interplays of emotion and reality and wasn\u2019t water ancestral? Her hair was thick and natural. You could see the effort she put into her curls being separated. Her glasses were red and slid down her nose. You were always a sponge for details. She was wearing a suit and a T-shirt underneath it with a picture of an iconic Black author and the word \u201cfree\u201d in all caps. Most of your class was nodding along almost in perfect synch. \u201cThis,\u201d your professor said in a serious, lovely voice, \u201cis what literature should be. This is reality.\u201d<\/p>\n

And this should have been your first warning bell. Your idea of literature was always built in seeing a saturated world filled with people dealing with the uncanny. Once, you wrote a story that was about a woman who had been sexually assaulted off-screen and she spent the entire story turning into a tree, until at the end, the man who had assaulted her stopped in and chopped her into bricks and turned her into a poorly built chair. The workshop you were in called it \u201cpolemic,\u201d \u201ccruel,\u201d and \u201cweird.\u201d<\/p>\n

And you read a book by a white writer where strange things happened in a lyrical way, girls kept becoming puppets or cake or being murdered and reawakening as their killer\u2019s Vitamix, and this was meant to teach you something about feminism, you knew that from being in the academy for so long, but in your heart, you felt like it was something people had done for years and years. You got it. Society made women feel like objects! But you spent the ninety minutes allotted for talking about the book mostly doodling because it seemed like almost everyone else found this profound. There was a phrase you hated but it felt appropriate in the moment: why yuck someone\u2019s yum? And it was a relief to hear everyone take seriously a book that was marginally adjacent to work you might do.<\/p>\n

You wrote a story with a main character based on a girl you hated winning the lottery and then being suddenly attacked by a pack of dogs on the beach for the ticket. They used the money to save their animal shelter. She was going to use the money to go to Paris and go on a shopping spree and change her name to Yvonne. Most of the people in workshop didn\u2019t even bother to write a response to that one. Your only friend in the class wrote a letter but it was filled with puns like, \u201cI woofed the moment when the gang of dogs appeared.\u201d<\/p>\n

To be honest, even you did not think these stories were good. There were times where you stayed up all night staring at your bedroom ceiling and wondering when you would get any better. But at least, you weren\u2019t writing about writers, you would tell yourself and pull the covers over your head. Sometimes, you fell asleep. Sometimes, you thought about how your parents\u2019 house was being foreclosed on, how some weekends you went home and figured out what to give away and watched as your dad burned some of your old school tests in the backyard. It was embarrassing to tell your parents that every day you cared so much about make-believe and style and fake people that it could keep you awake at night. You told them that you were enjoying yourself.<\/p>\n

That semester, you were writing a story that at its heart was you talking to yourself about how you were constantly torn between never wanting to die and being sometimes suddenly so desperate to be done with this world. The summer before, so many Black men and Black children and Black women had been murdered for the most meager of real or imagined offenses. A toy gun in a park, an argument with the wrong person in public, shoplifting a soda, missing a stop sign, not being honest. You would read the articles and think about a time where you and your dad were pulled over. They took your dad out of the car. One police officer stayed with you, always slurring you in every question he asked, he asked you about drugs and prostitution and would you suck his dick, and the only thing you knew how to do was stay very still and call him sir and you could tell he liked that you were little mouse limp. Your therapist said you had PTSD but you didn\u2019t want to believe it. Your dad had lived. You had lived. But here you were writing a haunted house story that if you looked sideways at it, there were all the things you could feel baking inside your brain and throat each time you read a news article that summer or read a tweet that began, Rest in Power.<\/p>\n

Sometimes, I think we died that night. That we, too, were taken out of the car and beaten and thrown in a ditch. That our father died, too. And some great angel couldn\u2019t stop the two of us from dying, but came down later and prayed and prayed until the heaven we had was one where we never died. She couldn\u2019t erase what had happened to us but let us continue forward. Can you really have heaven if you die in the worst possible conditions? But maybe heaven is always predicated on a kind of benevolent amnesia where you have to breathe in clouds and sweet grass and breathe out every wrong until enough of the wrong inside you dissipates into a forgotten mist.<\/p>\n

In your workshop story, a Black girl goes into a haunted house. On floor one, she is chased by white workers dressed as the wolfman and Ghost Face and killers. Floor two, there are actual monsters mixed in. On the final floor, she is met by an ancient evil that is wearing an expensive business suit. He kills her. She has paid ten dollars to die.<\/p>\n

When you brought the story into workshop, most of your white classmates were silent and so was your professor. She let the brilliant writers of color around you talk about their ideas of reality and unreality, what is haunted house literature, and was the United States itself a kind of haunted house of racial reckoning? The type of questions that can feel profound or vastly stupid depending on where you\u2019re sitting at the table. You were glad to hear their thoughts, but your gaze kept drifting to her, to the way she wouldn\u2019t really look at you, at how she kept curling her hair around her fingers. There was something she wanted to say, you felt.<\/p>\n

But you took notes and later, you could barely read what<\/p>\n

you had written because so many thoughts were coming so quickly and as always you had stream-of-consciousnessed it, so that it looked like: is-it-too-much-that-all-the-workers-of-the-haunted-house-are white-and-i\u2019m-so-hungry-why-did-i-forget-a-snack. You left happy that some people had taken your writing seriously but sad because you felt lonely in the way that only creativity could; your ambition and skills were still on two separate paths.<\/p>\n

After class, you took a long walk and reminded yourself of a family story. Your Mom-Mom had a natural talent for piano is what your mom always said. She was never formally trained but could hear any song and figure out within a few minutes how to play it. And it was true. One time when you were a child, you watched as she went from playing \u201cMoonlight Sonata\u201d to \u201cHot in Here\u201d back to the sonata and then into a beautiful rendition of \u201cHow Will I Know.\u201d \u201cEverything has notes,\u201d she said. \u201cSometimes, I play the breeze going through the trees or the sound of your voice complaining.\u201d And then that\u2019s what she did. You could hear what could be recognized as the sound of you wanting to goto McDonald\u2019s because your parents never let you go coming out of the black-and-white keys.<\/p>\n

\u201cCan I tell you a secret?\u201d your Mom-Mom asked. It was as always not really a question.<\/p>\n

She told you that when she was seventeen, all her best friends had been in the church choir but she had been cut. It was the first real disappointment of her life. And even though, you had been a little jealous of your grandma. You\u2019d gotten the idea that every person older than you had to have had a worse life than you. Racism, no good technology, bad food, everyone was dying all the time from weird sicknesses, only rich people got to eat fries. But, your parents had moved to a nice suburb and you went to nice schools, so you couldn\u2019t complain about things. And your grandma, she knew how hard things were for you. Even decades later, walking down the street with your headphones on, you rolled your eyes at the memory. Your Mom-Mom told you she felt so lonely and embarrassed that for weeks, all she thought about was how to have a talent. The rejection had set off a spiral of wondering if there was anything she was good at.<\/p>\n

Not especially kind, couldn\u2019t bake, could dance only in a group to blend into, was an okay driver, only decent at school, killed parts of the garden, and sometimes struggled to see the difference between some greens and blues. A boy had told her she kissed bad. Your Mom-Mom went out into the world and wasn\u2019t sure what she was going to do. Maybe, the idea was to sulk. Maybe, something else. You remember a hesitant look on her face. As an adult, you\u2019ve seen the own look on your face when you\u2019re thinking about all the things that can chew on your brain and self-respect.<\/p>\n

\u201cI met a man out in the fields,\u201d your Mom-Mom said.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe was taller than any man could ever be, his skin was soft green in the light, navy in half-darkness. His voice was kind and sweet. I\u2019ve never heard anyone sound like that. It made me trust him instantly.\u201d He took your Mom-Mom\u2019s hand and walked with her out in the high grass, listening to all her worries. Every single word was precious and she could tell he was taking everything she said seriously. The world filled with fireflies and rhododendron musk.<\/p>\n

He told her that every single person held some of the universe\u2019s song. People liked to pretend they were individuals, but every single one was a note on a fiddle. She loved that; you\u2019d heard her say those words so many times and it had made you think before this talk that there was a secret nest of poetry festering in her heart. She told you that man was God. He had held her head in her hands, breathed on her, and made her promise to always know his will was true. Her voice would be beautiful forever. Never age. All she had to give him was her promise, a performance or two.<\/p>\n

You were a child. And as an adult, you had cultivated the wisdom to let anyone who wanted to believe in something that didn\u2019t obviously hurt someone else. If a friend wanted to believe the power of her thoughts cured her from pneumonia not the antibiotics regimen, fine, as long as she didn\u2019t have kids or was a doctor. But you told your grandmother what was in your heart, that it sounded like a deal with the devil. You got your heart\u2019s desires without any work. You had someone mysterious tell you his will was true. And maybe this is how you learned that wisdom because despite you being a child, her eyes welled with tears. It was one of your life\u2019s big hurts that you could so casually do that to someone you loved so much.<\/p>\n

As you walked, you turned this story over in your head and kept thinking about the note your professor had written you. She had written: One day, when you get over the monsters and all<\/em> the ostentatious weirdness, you may write a book of real merit. You<\/em> need to learn how to talk about race in an honest way. <\/em>You had flipped the paper over to see if it was a joke or some computer error. There had to be more. But that was all she had given you.<\/p>\n

Then you went home and pulled the copy of her most famous novel off the shelf; you had bought it when you got into the program. The praise on the cover called it a tour de force of racial reckoning. \u201cA modern Nella Larsen!\u201d said an unnamed reviewer. A Black woman goes to Africa and appears to be annoyed that every Black person in Senegal and Tanzania and South Africa doesn\u2019t recognize her as some form of kin because she is light skinned. She sees every African kid\u2014poor kids in markets, rich kids in restaurants\u2014and thinks they could all have better lives with her in the United States but that is couched in the kaleidoscope of the main character\u2019s infertility and loneliness, so it feels like you\u2019re told not to judge. People were chocolate, cinnamon, wood, blue-black, obsidian. Everyone was mean but the woman in the book was coming off a bad breakup, so dear reader, give her a break. She was thirty-seven and the world felt so heavy and there was a line on her forehead that could be seen in very bright light. When she goes back to the US, alone and holding resentments toward everyone else in the entire world, there is an election happening. A white politician who had genuinely said Black Americans should go back to Africa won. The novel ended with the protagonist drinking a beer and wondering where in the world she could go next. Maybe Brazil.<\/p>\n

You felt like you had chugged an energy drink by the time you were done reading. There was something so rancid to you, so much of a performance of what literature should be, that you had to walk it off or feel forever cursed. So, you walked to the park, past that to the one across town. Few cars were on the road. The tires sounded like wishes muttered a sad man\u2019s breath. It was thrilling to care so much about literature. It was real loser shit to care so much about literature. The sidewalks became more cracked and uneven the further out of town you walked, then they disappeared, and it was only until you were on the edge of a long field that you realized how much your thoughts chomp chomping their way through your body had propelled you.<\/p>\n

In summer, a farmer\u2019s market was held in this field. You had gone once and someone had handed you a flyer about how corn was just as big of a contributor to global warming as cows. Corn fields sweating their way into sweetness could make the air hotter and more humid. You realized as you sat down to watch the night sky that you had never checked that fact. It seemed too silly to believe. Venus ascendant, sky blackened with the new moon, and acool breeze soothed you.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve been waiting for you,\u201d a voice said. A man, too tall to be believed, his skin in the 4 a.m. gloom, navy. His hands were heavy with silver rings. There were faces and symbols carved into them.<\/p>\n

You were certain in a sudden heart pound that again, you had died. You tried to trace back what could have happened. Had you walked in front of a car? Had you harmed yourself? Had someone found you, a lone, distracted woman in the night and felt relieved that here was something easy to snatch and never missed? There was a time where you asked your therapist if you had Cotard\u2019s Syndrome and she\u2019d said, do you see yourself as a corpse? Do you believe truly that you are beyond harm? Oh, you\u2019d said lightly, every day hurts alittle.<\/p>\n

He told you to tell him everything weighing on you. You told him about a poem you had read five years ago about two lovers who fucked each other so good that one believed he was the sky and the other felt like he was the cloud inside the sky, heavy and filled with lightning, and that you would never write anything that would hurt someone so wonderfully as that poem hurt you. You told him that the only thing you truly loved was reading. Writing didn\u2019t even mean as much to you. He waited for you to ask about fame, to say wealth, universal acclaim. You told him about an interview you had read where a famous writer wrote about how the most meaningful thing to her were the early nights, before she became a capital-w Writer, where she sat at her desk and wrote only to please herself. He kept trying to hold your hand but you kept gesturing and talking. You told him that you had loved so many people but here, trying to write a book, this was your first great romance. He told you that if you gave him something, he could give you more than you might ever be able to consider wanting. You would only have to promise to give him something in return. I knew your grandmother, he said. You can trust me.<\/p>\n

His eyes were silver in that moment. It made you want to write a poem. You could see yourself at your desk trying to push the glint you saw against starlight against the metal of the small pocketknife you kept in your pocket because you lived alone and the nib of the nice fountain pen that was the last gift your grandmother had given you. She had never written songs or sang anywhere but in her kitchen and her church. Her voice always wonderful to you.<\/p>\n

I am thinking again what if I had said yes and taken his hand. Warm palm and smooth manicured nails and the hard metal of his rings holding onto mine for forever. He would have whispered an idea into my mouth that would have earned a million dollars and expensive shoes and a boring interview on TV to follow, and every day I would have known that it was never really mine. My parents might still own my childhood home, my father\u2019s garden still intact. In the bookstore, my old classmate and teacher have books in the front window. They are both about characters feeling things in front of the ocean, both are called \u201cmodern classics\u201d in large white print. I have my desk.<\/p>\n

__________________________________<\/p>\n

Excerpted from\u00a0<\/em>BLACK ARTS <\/a>by Megan Giddings. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollins. Copyrighted \u00a9 2026 by Megan Giddings.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After Lorrie Moore and Kiese Laymon. You chose this program based on money and because you never had a Black person of any gender teach you anything about writing or reading. You learned math and Black Studies and the safest<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":63,"featured_media":275679,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[25508,3,43074,26765,43075],"tags":[18482,525,54760,188],"class_list":["post-275668","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-daily-fiction","category-excerpts","category-fictionandpoetry","category-short-stories","category-short-story","tag-amistad","tag-black-arts","tag-megan-giddings","tag-short-stories","story-type-daily-fiction"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19Ig","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/black-arts.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275668","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/63"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275668"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275668\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275679"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275668"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275668"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275668"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":276725,"date":"2026-09-08T04:01:01","date_gmt":"2026-09-08T08:01:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=276725"},"modified":"2026-09-07T16:34:23","modified_gmt":"2026-09-07T20:34:23","slug":"anna-silman-on-revisiting-the-interview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/anna-silman-on-revisiting-the-interview\/","title":{"rendered":"Anna Silman on Revisiting the Interview"},"content":{"rendered":"

Welcome to season four of <\/em>The Critic and Her Publics: The Art of the Interview. This season, host Merve Emre talks with professional interviewers of all kinds about how they get the answer they’re looking for, what makes a good question, how do you listen for what’s unsaid, and how hard do you have to push someone before they say something new? <\/em><\/p>\n

Subscribe to <\/strong><\/em>The Critic and Her Publics<\/strong><\/a>, available wherever you get your podcasts!<\/strong><\/em>
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