In Alice Randall’s Black Bottom Saints, a dying man eulogizes the “Black Camelot” of mid-20th-century Detroit
…city is also expiring, “dynamited to pieces in the name of urban renewal, singed in the embers of righteous rebellion.” Ziggy’s gilded-era Detroit goes by various aliases: Black Camelot, Motown,…
Bobbie Ann Mason gives her heroine a second life in Dear Ann
…for an imagined alternative: Stanford University, in sun-glazed California. Mason drives us down a Route 66 of fantasy, back to the Summer of Love, marijuana brownies and be-ins, the Beatles…
Blues legend B.B. King gets the royal treatment from biographer Daniel de Visé
…King B.B. King, who died in 2015 at age 89, gets the royal treatment from his biographer, and rightly so. We get it all, a life in full, from dirt…
Rickie Lee Jones recalls her family and career in Last Chance Texaco
…icon.” I spoke to the legendary pop savant ahead of her virtual event with the 2021 Southern Festival of Books. Jones always meant for her memoir to be, as she…
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…
A hilarious and poignant YA novel about finding your place in the world
…a dragon curled around each shoulder.” Second, Star is a social media influencer with 900,000 virtual followers. She’s a Christian model whose brand is purity. “That’s why she loves it…
