Jesmyn Ward’s Let Us Descend is a chronicle of survival and liberation
Following her National Book Award-winning 2017 novel, Sing Unburied, Sing, Jesmyn Ward returns with Let Us Descend, the story of an enslaved young woman, Annis, who is sold south by…
David Wesley Williams pens a post-apocalyptic vision of the Volunteer State
FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This review originally appeared on January 9, 2023. *** David Wesley Williams, author of the 2013 novel Long Gone Daddies, takes readers on a post-apocalyptic…
George Singleton’s stories sneak up on you
The prolific George Singleton follows up his 2020 collection of selected stories, You Want More, with a new batch of short fiction titled The Curious Lives of Nonprofit Martyrs. As…
Poet Anders Carlson-Wee on his new collection, Disease of Kings
…console / or rattle me. Strange to need // so little, but to need it / so badly.” Carlson-Wee, a Minnesota native who earned an M.F.A. in creative writing from…
Poet Terrance Hayes minds and mines language in a pair of new books
…which are a whole genre of language. In Watch Your Language Hayes begins by making clear the symbiotic relationship of reading and writing: “Such judgements don’t matter when the act…
Sadeqa Johnson’s The House of Eve surveys the possibilities for two young Black women in the 1950s
Sadeqa Johnson’s powerful fifth novel, The House of Eve, is set against the backdrop of 1950s America with two protagonists who embody what it meant to be a Black woman…
