Ed Tarkington talks about the class conflicts at the heart of his second novel, The Fortunate Ones
…often-destructive allure of wealth, and the perils of noblesse oblige. Short version: It’s a cross between The Great Gatsby, Brideshead Revisited, and All the King’s Men. Chapter 16: What makes…
In Alice Randall’s Black Bottom Saints, a dying man eulogizes the “Black Camelot” of mid-20th-century Detroit
Alice Randall’s fifth novel, Black Bottom Saints, is the fictional last will and testament of a real-life Motor City culture maven, Joseph “Ziggy” Johnson, who emceed at storied show clubs,…
Bobbie Ann Mason gives her heroine a second life in Dear Ann
…Alto, debating Dickinson and Romantic poets Keats and Shelley (whom Jimmy calls “Sheets and Kelly”). Like her peers Denis Johnson and Tim O’Brien, Mason was shaped by the Vietnam War…
Blues legend B.B. King gets the royal treatment from biographer Daniel de Visé
…He wasn’t Robert Johnson of crossroads soul-selling fame. He wasn’t Skip James or Mississippi John Hurt, who cut early classic sides, disappeared for decades, and then were rediscovered as real-life…
Rickie Lee Jones recalls her family and career in Last Chance Texaco
…born to live lives on an exaggerated scale. Even as children we have a larger suitcase in which to carry all the things that will one day be on our…
Nichole Perkins explores themes of identity, liberation, and belonging
…this before,” we are brought into Perkins’ Black-girl chamber of secrets, as she contends for sexual, social, and intellectual freedom on the page. She reconstructs text message conversations, which sometimes…
