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The Known World.
Edward Jones’ Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Known World combines techniques or themes from some seriously great novels of the last fifty years, including Beloved, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and...
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Jazz.
I posted a blog entry on Matt Harrison, Aaron Crow, and two other pitchers yesterday, and my latest draft blog entry is on Christian Colon and Gary Brown; I was going to see Greg Peavey today but was...
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Tar Baby.
I’ve filed two pieces from the AFL so far, one on Sunday and one on Thursday. Jason Grey also wrote a piece on Friday; we saw Brothers pitch again on Saturday and his stuff was down about 2 miles an...
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A Mercy.
Toni Morrison’s most recent novel, A Mercy, is extremely short, somewhere between novel and novella, and feels as wispy as a short story with both scant character development and a frenetic jumping...
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The Klaw 102: the top novels of all time, version 3.
A few months late, again, but I have updated my own personal ranking of the 100 greatest novels I’ve read, extending the list once again by another title to bring us to 102. The top 20 remain unchanged...
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Let the Great World Spin.
My ranking of the top prospects for 2015 impact is up for Insiders, and I held a (somewhat hard to read) Facebook chat about that piece on Tuesday. I also have a piece up for Paste from my visit to...
View ArticleStick to baseball, 5/5/16.
My one Insider piece this week was a draft blog post on Matt Manning, Nolan Jones, Blake Rutherford, and more, with all three of those guys possibly going in the top ten picks next month. Eric and I...
View ArticleThe Sellout.
My updated ranking of the top five farm systems right now is up for Insiders. I first heard about Paul Beatty’s farcical novel The Sellout when looking at predictions of nominees for the 2016 Pulitzer...
View ArticleI Am Not Your Negro.
I Am Not Your Negro is the hip outsider’s pick to win Best Documentary Feature at this weekend’s Academy Awards, a highly topical film that includes four of the most important figures in the civil...
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The Underground Railroad.
Colson Whitehead’s 2016 novel The Underground Railroad won the National Book Award for that year and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, the first book to win both awards. The last...
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The Warmth of Other Suns.
Isabel Wilkerson says she spent 15 years researching the book The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for General...
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Sing, Unburied, Sing.
Jesmyn Ward’s novel Sing, Unburied, Sing won the National Book Award for 2017, and is among the leading contenders for this year’s Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. It’s very much in the long tradition of...
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An Unkindness of Ghosts.
Rivers Solomon’s debut novel An Unkindness of Ghosts bears a blatant stylistic similarity to the writing of N.K. Jemisin in her Broken Earth trilogy, from prose to characterization to both writers use...
View ArticleThe Nickel Boys.
Colson Whitehead won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for his last novel, The Underground Railroad, which re-imagined that escape network as an actual subterranean train system that...
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All Our Names.
Dinaw Mengestu is an Ethiopian-American author of three novels, most recently the 2014 book All Our Names, as well as an essayist and literature professor at Bard College. I’d never heard of him prior...
View ArticleThe Parable of the Sower.
I’ve read a lot of science fiction authors, including at least one book by every winner of the Hugo for Best Novel, but had never read anything by Octavia Butler until I read The Parable of the Sower...
View ArticleMumbo Jumbo.
I can’t believe Ishmael Reed’s 1972 Mumbo Jumbo escaped my notice until just this year, when I grabbed it for $2 for the Kindle. It would have fit perfectly in the class I took in college called...
View ArticleMa Rainey’s Black Bottom.
The movie adaptation of August Wilson’s play Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (on Netflix) has been overshadowed by the death of one of its two stars, Chadwick Boseman, last August, making this his final film...
View ArticleThe Vanishing Half.
Brit Bennett has popped up as a favorite to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, to be announced next Friday, June 11th, for her second novel, The Vanishing Half, which HBO is already planning to adapt...
View ArticleHarlem Shuffle.
Colson Whitehead’s last two novels, The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys, both won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, making him the first Black author to win that prize twice. Both were serious...
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