National Book Award Research Articles

Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties: Stories

Reviewed by: Her Body and Other Parties: Stories by Carmen Maria Machado Carlos Gabriel Kelly (bio) Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties: Stories. Graywolf Press, 2017. Pp. 245. We begin by being vulnerable. Jacqui Germain’s succint metaphor—“My body is a haunted / house that I am lost in. / There are no doors but there are knives / and a hundred windows”—captures the brilliance that is Guggenheim Fellow Carmen Maria Machado’s debut short-story collection Her Body and Other Parties. A finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Shirley Jackson Award and the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Writing (among several others), this book unearths burdens, recounting immense pain through unforgiving lust and a delicate tension exploring the violence perpetrated against women and marginalized peoples. Through Germain’s knives, through windows of perception, we travel deep into the abhorrent realities so many have chosen not to see or to believe. Machado’s eight-story collection voices the need for us all to reckon with the question: will we ever believe women? Machado’s opening piece, “The Husband Stitch,” clues readers into misogyny and violence enacted by men in the name of love and marriage. In this story, Machado embraces the impact of repetition, writing: “if you read this story aloud, please use the following voices: / ME: as a child, high-pitched, forgettable; as a woman, the same … ALL OTHER WOMEN: interchangeable” (3). She returns readers to similar refrains throughout the story—a technique that is often paralyzing. Machado’s surgical prose builds the story of an empowered woman, certain of her path, who acts upon her desire and marries the man of her choosing. However, her marriage underscores the prolonged violence of patriarchy, the injustices perpetrated by men, and yes, even good men. The narrator, as in Machado’s other [End Page 202] pieces, reveals that these stories are an interchangeable force of lived experience demanding attention. Throughout her first piece, Machado expertly weaves enthralling stories by having her narrator recount different women’s struggles for bodily autonomy and safety. In Machado’s collection, unnamed narrators inhabit the burdens that can sometimes be associated with mother, sister, wife, and daughter. Indeed, one such character (a young tourist in Paris) pleads for help. She thinks herself mad because not one of the hotel employees believes her story about traveling to Europe with her sick mother. This moment, akin to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” highlights how women who express their pain often find barriers rather than sympathetic or empathetic audiences in men. Here, readers might feel the need to reexamine any and all assumptions of how women navigate the dangerous realities of patriarchy. Even with the #MeToo movement, with more awareness about women’s experiences, patriarchy still coerces people to scream for evidence—a story is not enough. The women who do share stories of survival find themselves forced into self-doubt, into fear, into believing sharing is far more dangerous than burying. Consider Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, whose positionality as a Yale-educated white woman, lawyer—a seemingly unquestionable pedigree when navigating institutional racism—still could not persuade men of her story. Or just remember that there are currently twenty-two women who have told their story about #45 and yet we’ve done nothing. Move forward into the half-brujeria half-sci-fi capitalist critique “Real Women Have Bodies,” where a condition changes some women into apparition-like ghosts; whatever their path, women will eventually transform from whole-bodied women to faded women. These women find themselves woven into the fabric of the everyday from literally being woven into clothing to committing protests by inserting themselves into ATMs and electrical systems. In this story, readers wrestle with the implications of the body as a husk of the self, with inhabiting the liminality of disappearing. Machado writes in tensions: “I come fast and hard, like a bottle breaking against a brick wall. Like I’ve been waiting for permission” (132). Similarly, readers ask permission to swim through violent desires and the eerieness attached to faded women. Then there is the violence of weight. If you’re Latinx, you’ve probably had...

A little space problem: uncovering structural criticism in William Gaddis’ JR

ABSTRACT William Gaddis’ National Book Award winning JR is often read as a novel of ‘entropy’ or ‘chaos,’ and held out as an ‘ur-text’ (in Jonathan Franzen's phrase) of apolitical literary experimentation in late-century America. Yet JR delineates, in its obsessive interest with the built environment, the structural changes taking place at the height of American neoliberalisation. This paper recovers those structural criticisms by uncovering them – by considering the way the novel’s wayward language blankets, fills, and changes space. I begin by delineating the structures that produce, house, or result from the novel’s ‘chaotic’ language, arguing that the dominant discourse of this novel, rather than random, is a specifically ‘neoliberal discourse.’ I clarify the way neoliberal discourse reshapes space by relating it to Lefebvre’s ‘abstract space,’ before considering the political possibilities Gaddis attributes to these spaces, as well as to experimental literature itself. This reading expands our understanding of the politics and formal strategies not only of this novel but of the period’s experimental literature more generally, offering JR as an ur-text not of nihilistic difficulty but of a critical literary practice grounded in an experimental aesthetics that seeks to both capture and criticise emergent changes wrought by neoliberalism.

Domestic Violence and Psychological Oppression in Alice Walker’s the Color Purple

African-American literature is otherwise known as slave narratives. The popular African-American writers are Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Frederick Douglass, Alice Walker etc. The Color Purple is a well-known epistolary novel written by Alice Walker in 1983. The novel brought her a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award in 1983. This is a novel about a young fourteen year old black girl. She is tortured physically, emotionally, sexually by her step father and her husband. Later on she develops an intimate relationship with Shug. It has changed her life topsy-turvy. The poor, ugly, innocent, oppressed, inferior woman tremendously changed as a woman of self confident, beautiful and proud human being.

“Every Novel is a New Country”: A Conversation with Junot Díaz

ABSTRACTJunot Díaz (born on December 31, 1968) is a Dominican-American writer, creative writing professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and fiction editor at Boston Review. He was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, and immigrated with his family to New Jersey when he was six years old. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Rutgers University, and obtained his MFA from Cornell University. Díaz is the author of the critically acclaimed short story collection Drown (1996), The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and This Is How You Lose Her (2012), a New York Times bestseller and National Book Award finalist. He received a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship in 2012, and was also the recipient of PEN/Malamud Award, Dayton Literary Peace Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship, and PEN/O Henry Award. He was appointed chair of the Pulitzer Board in April 2018. This conversation took place at MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts, on September 6, 2019.

Intellect, Art, Culture: Legacies of The New Negro; A Forum on Jeffrey C. Stewart’s Biography of Alain Locke

Jeffrey C. Stewart’s The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in Biography as well as a host of other honors from many disciplines.1 Among these are...

Alain Locke and the Project of Black Studies

Jeffrey C. Stewart’s definitive biography, The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke, is an extraordinary achievement, deserving of the many accolades, including the National Book Award for Nonfiction...

Black Girlhood, Representation, Place, and Relationships in Jacqueline Woodson's Work

Black Girlhood, Representation, Place, and Relationships in Jacqueline Woodson's Work Krystal Howard (bio) In the concluding lines of "february 12, 1963," the poem that begins Jacqueline Woodson's National Book Award-winning memoir in verse Brown Girl Dreaming, she meditates on her experience growing up in different parts of the United States in the midst of the American civil rights movement: I am born in Ohio butthe stories of South Carolina already runlike riversthrough my veins. (2) The final lines of this poem speak not only to the importance of memory and storytelling as it relates to personal, familial, and national history, but also to the influence of other writers, such as Langston Hughes, on her body of work. In her author's note at the end of Brown Girl Dreaming, Woodson explains: "And that's what this book is—my past, my people, my memories, my story" (323). Rooted in realism, much of Woodson's writing focuses on reflecting and magnifying marginalized voices by grappling with issues such as race, class, sexuality, immigration, teen pregnancy, and trauma. Here, I map Woodson's history and development as a writer, survey the significant thematic threads that are woven throughout her collected works, and discuss the ways in which her work magnifies Black girlhood through her varied depiction of voices and experiences. Click for larger view View full resolution Becoming a Brown Girl Dreaming Woodson is a celebrated and prolific writer. During the past thirty years, she has published over thirty works for young readers and adults and has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the 2006 Margaret A. Edwards Award for Lifetime Achievement, the Poetry Foundation's 2015 [End Page 3] Young People's Poet Laureate, the 2018 Children's Literature Legacy Award, the 2018 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, the Library of Congress's 2018–19 National Ambassador for Young People's Literature, and finally the 2020 Hans Christian Andersen Award, among many others. Woodson has also been a four-time Coretta Scott King Award honoree and a two-time Coretta Scott King Award winner, a four-time Newbery Award honoree, a four-time National Book Award finalist, and a National Book Award winner. Among Woodson's most celebrated works are her poetry, Brown Girl Dreaming (2014) and Locomotion (2010); novels for young readers, After Tupac and D Foster (2008) and Miracle's Boys (2000); and picturebooks, Each Kindness (2012), Show Way (2006), and The Other Side (2001). In addition to Locomotion and Brown Girl Dreaming, which take the form of narratives in verse, Woodson has also made use of poetry as a formal device in many of her works. In her own writing and interviews, she emphasizes the importance of African American poets (such as Hughes, Countee Cullen, Nikki Giovanni, Maya Angelou, and Nick Flynn) and her elementary and high school teachers in igniting a passion for and understanding of poetry. On her website, Woodson explains how her various works contain and convey meaning as poetry, noting that Brown Girl Dreaming is "poetry as memoir," Locomotion is "poetry as fiction," The Other Side is "poetry as picture book," Show Way is "poetry as history," and Each Kindness is "poetry as empathy." Additionally, many of her works that are not written as poetry begin with an epigraph from a poem that influenced the content and title of the work, such as Feathers (2007), which includes as an epigraph the lines from Emily Dickinson's poem, "Hope is a thing with feathers / that perches in the soul, / And sings the tune without words / And never stops at all," and depicts its protagonist exploring the meaning of this poem, as well as If You Come Softly (1998), which takes its title from and includes an epigraph referencing lines from Audre Lorde's poem, "If you come softly / as the wind within the trees / You may hear what I hear / See what sorrow sees." This framing of poetry as a formal device, but also as a way to evoke emotion and thematic understanding, outlines a unique model for thinking about poetry's uses and value for young readers. In an interview with Stacey Lynn Brown, Woodson notes that "one...

Eudora Welty Foundation

Eudora Welty Foundation Jeanne B. Luckett Throughout 2019, the Eudora Welty Foundation coordinated and produced inspiring and educational programs and events and funded research endeavors to support the preservation and appreciation of the gifts of Eudora Welty—her literary and photographic treasures as well as the Eudora Welty House and Garden and the Welty Collection at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. Scholars, writers, students, and the general public benefit from the work of the Foundation. Many activities are carried out in collaboration with cosponsors and partners. NEH Grant Supports MDAH Welty Collection Digitization In April 2019, the Mississippi Department of Archives and History (MDAH) received a $217,982 implementation grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to preserve, digitize, and enhance access to the papers in its Eudora Welty Collection. The Welty Foundation is providing the MDAH required matching contribution for the grant. The two-year project is conserving 60 items and compiling metadata for more than 19,800 scans of items in the collection. Manuscripts, correspondence, photographs, and sound recordings are being digitized. An online catalog will be created to facilitate research in these materials. Beginning in 1957 and for over more than 40 years, Welty donated materials to MDAH, mainly manuscripts and photographs. After her death in 2001, the remainder of her papers, including unpublished manuscripts and 14,000 items of correspondence were bequeathed to the agency. These materials are the premier collection of Welty materials in the world. Poet Natasha Trethewey Offers 2019 Bettye Jolly Lecture Pulitzer Prize-winner and two-time Poet Laureate of the United States Natasha Trethewey delivered the 2019 Bettye Jolly Lecture to an overflow crowd at the Welty House and Garden on March 8. She spoke about her craft and her life and read from her latest book, Monument, which was longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award. A Mississippi native, Trethewey [End Page 209] is Board of Trustees Professor of English at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Trethewey answered questions from the audience and was engaged in conversation by Welty scholar Suzanne Marrs, who also introduced her. Marrs asked Trethewey to discuss her experience writing the foreword for the revised publication of Eudora Welty's Photographs, (UP of Mississippi), which was released the following month. The author of five poetry collections and a memoir, Trethewey was the 2012–16 Poet Laureate of Mississippi. She was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2013 and received the Heinz Award for Arts and Humanities in 2017. In 2018, Trethewey traveled across the nation for the PBS "NewsHour" series "Where Poetry Lives." The endowed Bettye Jolly Lecture honors the late Bettye Jolly, a longtime volunteer and supporter of the Eudora Welty House and Garden. Contributions may be made to the Bettye Jolly Lecture through the Eudora Welty Foundation. The lecture was founded by a book club which grew out of a Millsaps Great Topics Seminar taught by Marrs. Jolly was a dedicated member of the book club. Past lecturers have been Lee Smith, Rosanna Warren, Beth Henley, and Alice McDermott. The 2020 Lecture will be delivered by poet, short story writer, and novelist Ron Rash (postponed until further notice). Revised Welty's Photographs Released on Thirtieth Anniversary On April 13, 2019, 30 years to the date of the book's first release and Eudora's 110th birthday, a new revised edition of Eudora Welty Photographs, published by University Press of Mississippi, was celebrated at the Eudora Welty House and Garden. In hardback again for the first time in 30 years, the book also includes 16 photographs not included in the original publication. The Foundation-sponsored event featured a panel discussion moderated by Welty friend and biographer Suzanne Marrs. Panelists were Holmes Adams, Welty Foundation Board Chair; Seetha Srinivasan, director of University Press of Mississippi when the first Photographs was published; Craig Gill, current director of University Press; and Mary Alice Welty White, Eudora's niece, first director of the Welty House, and Foundation board secretary. A special feature of the program was a video interview with Eudora conducted by noted journalist and Welty friend Roger Mudd about the book's [End Page 210] first publication, broadcast on the...

Editor’s Note

Editor’s Note Carolyn Kuebler When something is created in one context but presented in one that feels profoundly changed, it makes us uneasy. We lose confidence. Does it still make sense, does it still matter? The 24/7 news cycle, which can age a piece of writing beyond recognition over the course of a day, and which seems to speed up and slow down according to each day’s anxiety level, has been operating at a ferocious clip these past few months. How can something that seemed important last winter, when it was possible to make plans, when certain expectations were in place, still matter this summer? Writers who dedicated their full attention and imagination to the work now at hand are faced with the effects of that strange passage of time. Now that all the words and pages are assembled and ready for print, ready for readers online, do they mean the same thing as when they first came together over the past months, the past year? During the winter, and looking ahead to this issue’s release, I had some idea in mind about what NER 41.2 would be about. For once, I thought, I can predict what theme will arise when it’s finally complete. With Marilyn Hacker finalizing her selection of contemporary UK poets, with permissions solidifying around a Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Bowen collage/essay, with Brexit finally taking place, and, on a personal level, with a trip to London planned and partly paid for, I felt a kind of convergence. A theme pertaining to Britain, or maybe to our shared language and historical differences, was sure to arise, and all the poems and stories that are decidedly about something else would find a place in that context, reverberating with that theme, as so often happens as an issue of this magazine takes shape. And while the UK poets feature did come together, and the Brexit referendum was big news early this year, Britishness does not in the end feel like the theme here. Not even for the British poets. The idea that a “British theme” would emerge began to seem as short-sighted as expecting any other issue to have an “American theme.” What would that even mean? Instead of having something to reveal about the UK in particular, what this issue seems instead to reveal is something about persistence—the persistence of each individual piece, over time, over place, over context—and the resilience of the literary creation in general. While it’s only been several months or at most a year since the pieces here were selected, 2020 already feels very different from, and much later and darker than, any date in 2019. While it’s true that certain pieces play a little differently now than they did a few months ago, and that different images and details stand out, sometimes even feeling prescient, overall there’s persistence: their images are still vivid, their humor is still funny, and their truths are still true. [End Page 6] One thing that a magazine like this can do that’s even more pronounced now that our physical spaces are so fraught is to bring dozens of writers together in one place in a meaningful way. Bringing in a troupe of British poets, who themselves are not a coherent group with similar aesthetic or linguistic preferences, opens up borders that are now attempting to close. Their work can travel in a way that we can’t and suggests an alliance, or an affiliation, between contemporary England and our “New England.” Marilyn Hacker, who edited this feature, is a poet who crosses plenty of borders. While our readers will be familiar with her for her own poetry and translations—she has published fourteen books, winning the National Book Award and Lambda Literary Award among others, and first appeared in NER in 1979 and as recently as 2019—editorial work has also long been part of her mission as a literary citizen. She was the first full-time editor of Kenyon Review in 1990 to 1994, served twice as guest editor of Ploughshares, and more recently was, for ten years, part of the editorial...

The Convents of Manila: Globalized Architecture during the Iberian Union by Pedro Luengo

Reviewed by: The Convents of Manila: Globalized Architecture during the Iberian Union by Pedro Luengo Jethro Calacday PEDRO LUENGO, TRANS. CONCEPCION L. ROSALES The Convents of Manila: Globalized Architecture during the Iberian Union Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University, 2018. 293 pages. Laureled as the best book in history at the 2019 National Book Awards organized by the National Book Development Board, The Convents of Manila: Globalized Architecture during the Iberian Union reconstructs the global, cross-cultural history of the architectural ventures of the four traditional religious orders that were missioned in the Philippines: the Augustinians, Franciscans, Jesuits, and Dominicans. The author, Pedro Luengo, is associate professor in the Department of Art History of the University of Seville and a prolific author who has published six other books and numerous essays and book chapters on the history of architecture in the Spanish empire. Undoubtedly the work of a brilliant and diligent historian who has mastered the Spanish imperial archives, The Convents of Manila is an indispensable [End Page 277] resource for scholars specializing on the Spanish colonial Philippines to discern leads in the labyrinthine maze of yet unused materials in Spain. Moreover, Concepcion L. Rosales's translation of the book from Spanish to English is a welcome gesture in addressing the language barrier between Spanish-speaking and English-speaking scholars of Philippine studies. Departing from the usual schema of studying the Spanish colonial Philippines in terms of "Spanish imperial expansion" (1), Luengo proposes that the framework of global cultural transfer is the "only … basis [by which] Philippine history [can be] understood" (ix). He argues that Philippine architecture is a confluence of Asian, native Filipino, Latin American, and European techniques and workmanship, indeed the result of a global "cultural dialogue." Luengo extensively uses archival materials from the Archivo General de Indias in Seville, the Archivo Histórico Nacional in Madrid, and the National Archives of the Philippines in Manila, in addition to other religious and ecclesiastical archives in Spain. The book has seven chapters: two introductory chapters, four chapters dedicated to the architectural projects of each religious order, and a conclusion. The book's one major drawback, however, relates to its theoretical contribution: although Luengo demonstrates the connections of Philippine architecture with Asian and European influences, the idea of cultural transfer or cultural dialogue—the book's major proposition—is not conceptually defined. This fundamental lapse results in a rather confusing—but still promising—analysis of the evidence: was cultural transfer aesthetic or functional? Did cultural transfer mean the adaptation to the environment in which structures were built? Was it merely a matter of a multiethnic labor force coming together and sharing techniques? Hence, for the most part, the text just rehashes an old and obvious insight. For Luengo, "native professionals responsible for many of the churches … belonged to the pre-Hispanic architectural tradition in the Philippines" (21); they made use of "indigenous techniques [that] were quickly adopted by the missionaries and continued until the nineteenth century likely without modifications" (24). Brought to Manila by commercial and migrant ties with Fujian during the Ming dynasty (5), the Chinese controlled the entire construction supply system, but they also contributed their "knowledge of local wood and stone carving, as well as making bricks and tiles" (25). Carpenters and military engineers from Spain were also present, although they were fewer compared with native and Chinese workers (42–43). [End Page 278] Luengo suggests that "the arrival of [the] Spaniards meant a meaningful change in many building processes" (33) because it consolidated indigenous and Chinese techniques. Whereas precolonial natives made exclusive use of light materials and wood, the Spanish introduced stonemasonry and the making of lime and bricks. Spanish friars from Macao also applied techniques they learned in the Portuguese outpost to their new construction projects in Manila (11). For Luengo, this diversity in manpower, technical knowledge, and materiality highlights the "deep cultural dialogue among, at least, these three traditions" (33) of the indigenous, the Chinese, and the Spanish. In chapter 3, which discusses the Augustinian order and its Recollect branch, Luengo puts prime albeit unnecessary emphasis on the funding of the construction, the personalities who bought side chapels, biographical demystifications, and conflicts between the...

Луиза Глик: мифологический феминизм и попытка преодоления антагонизма

For many people the fact that Louise Glück won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature was a complete surprise. Ian Probstein comments on the judges’ decision and reminds about the poet’s “CV” that includes National Book Award, Pulitzer Prize, Bollingen Prize, National Book Critics Circle Award, National Humanities Medal, several Guggenheim fellowships and some other prestigious awards. Louise Glück was Poet-Laureate of the United States (2003–2004), the president of The Yale Younger Poets Prize jury. The essay contains a brief biographical sketch and a careful, subtle analysis of Glück’s poetry supplemented by Ian Probstein’s translations of poetic fragments.

This Is the Love

This Is the Love Diane Raptosh (bio) This is my lover, but when I cease to love him I will leave him.This is my lover. For him I am, of an evening, leaf and hymnal.This is my lover. But when I seize love, certain trees sing off-key.This is my him. But should I leave love, I will seize the hymning. This is my hymn. When love is squeezed by law, that is despotism.This is my law: it is ruddy-leaf love, heady, and shouldered by all.This: if I want intercourse with one hundred men, so I may have it.These are my loves: my leeway to think freely, to feel out thought. This is my lover: it is this her-dominion—my reedy belief-weave.This is my love: it is how bees dance maps and plants eat the light.This is love. When I cease using my, seas ease leaves into free fall.This is my love: this slipping of strings, fringe reef leafing into tree. This is the love: limbs that slap through the lungs to sycamore out.This, how love lilacs: I stand arm in arm with every act of my life. [End Page 95] Diane Raptosh diane raptosh's poetry collection American Amnesiac, from Etruscan Press, was longlisted for the 2013 National Book Award. The recipient of three literature fellowships from the Idaho Commission on the Arts, she served as the 2013 Boise Poet Laureate, as well as Idaho Writer-in-Residence from 2013 to 2016. In 2018 she won the Idaho Governor's Arts Award in Excellence. Her collection Dear Z was recently published by Etruscan Press. * Copyright © 2020 University of North Carolina Wilmington

Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You by Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi

Reviewed by: Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You by Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi Janaka B. Lewis (bio) Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You. By Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi. Little, Brown, and Company, 2020. Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You is billed as a remix of Ibram X. Kendi’s earlier book Stamped from the Beginning, which won the 2016 National Book Award for nonfiction. In this new book, Kendi, a scholar of African American history, and [End Page 417] Jason Reynolds, an author of novels for young adults and middle-grade readers, write about race and the “r-word: racism.” Stamped was originally published March 10, 2020, just days before the impact of COVID-19 spread wildly through the United States and weeks before the release of the videoed deaths of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd and the media reports of the deaths of Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and others at the hands of the police rocked our nation. Stamped offers an incredibly comprehensive context of the existence, relevance, and significance of race and racism in American history in ways that middle-grade students and young adult through adults can understand and, more importantly, can use to shape potentially difficult but necessary dialogue on how we got to this moment. Reynolds and Kendi separate the book into an introduction and five sections from 1415 to today. The introduction, addressed from Kendi to the reader, states, “To know the past is to know the present. To know the present is to know yourself. I write about the history of racism to understand racism today. I want to understand racism today to understand how it is affecting me today. I want you to understand racism today to understand how it is affecting you and America today” (ix). Kendi describes the book as “a narrative history of racist and antiracist ideas,” defining both: “a racist idea is any idea that suggests something is wrong or right, superior or inferior, better or worse about a racial group. An antiracist idea is any idea that suggests that racial groups are equals”; furthermore, “racist and antiracist ideas have lived in human minds for nearly six hundred years” (ix). Kendi describes how, after watching the television coverage of the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Darnesha Harris, and Michael Brown (all aged twelve to eighteen), he didn’t just want to write about racist ideas, but discover the source of them. He wanted readers to understand how and why Black people are blamed for social inequity, how arguments persist that there is something inherently wrong with them that makes them more likely to be incarcerated (at 40 percent) and in need of increased restriction and regulation. Specifically, the book addresses the understanding of racial inequity from the racist politics of enslavement beginning 1415–1728 through subsequent periods 1743–1826, 1826–1879, 1868–1963, and 1963-today. The first chapter, “The Story of the World’s First Racist,” discusses the story of Prince Henry of Portugal who convinced his father King John to capture the main Muslim trading depot on the tip of Morocco to steel gold and take human prisoners then promoted the depiction of Africans as savage animals via a publication by his commander Zurara. Kendi and Reynolds cover twenty-eight specific chapters with numerous studies of American race and racism. They discuss theories of slavery brought to colonized America by Puritan ministers John Cotton and Richard Mather who built both churches and systems of power and hierarchies and subsequent systems of segregation to preserve social capital through religion and access to education [End Page 418] (the creation of White privileges through planter Nathaniel Bacon’s rebellion to use the Susquehannocks to turn poor White and Black people against each other in seventeenth-century Virginia). Covering the Salem Witch Trials (which used both race and gender to instill fear of “others”) as part of a system of what the authors call “political play,” the book discusses ways new codes are developed that prevent interracial relationships, classify Native and Black people as livestock, prevent the holding of office, and eliminate property holding by enslaved people while White indentured servants were freed and awarded fifty acres of...

Focus IBBY

Focus IBBY Liz Page (bio) A Very Special Press Conference The Covid-19 pandemic is having an enormous effect on the IBBY schedule in 2020. The thirty-seventh IBBY World Congress, due to be held in Moscow, has been postponed until September 2021, book fairs have been turned into digital events, and many of our projects have been put on hold. The IBBY-Yamada projects that were reported in the previous issue of Bookbird have either taken place online or have been postponed to a later date. IBBY has also been innovating! The 2020 Bologna Book Fair press conference was held online. The conference was prerecorded, put together in Basel, and streamed on Monday, May 4. Nearly 3,000 people watched the conference on that day. After the event, each part of the conference was made into mini-clips that can be watched on the IBBY YouTube channel; they are still being viewed. The winners of the three 2020 IBBY awards were announced at the press conference by the jury presidents. Click for larger view View full resolution IBBY-Asahi Reading Promotion Award 2020 The unanimous choice of the jury for the IBBY-Asahi Award 2020, Casa Cuna Cuenteros is a group of passionate volunteers who carry out reading and storytelling activities in a children's hospital in Buenos Aires. This group began to make storybooks available to many children and families, and regular storytelling sessions were held in various areas of the hospital. The stories they told were fun and inspired the children and adults alike. Soon enough, a change in attitude was noticed, and they saw many were enjoying reading and listening to stories. Active participation increased at all levels among people coming to the hospital, including the staff. They soon had a collection of books to read from and then even a small library at the hospital. The group has become known for their hard work and successes. They have been invited to provide training and workshops for volunteers as well as offer advice for the setting up of similar programs in other hospitals. The project has seen many heart-warming successes and has touched the lives of many children, teenagers, parents, families, and caregivers. It has also inspired many others to emulate it in other parts of the city and at other hospitals. www.casacunacuenteros.com Click for larger view View full resolution IBBY-iRead Outstanding Reading Promoter Award 2020 The winners of the 2020 IBBY-iRead Outstanding Reading Promoter Award are Marit Törnqvist from the Netherlands and Zhu Yongxin from China. Marit Törnqvist is a writer and illustrator who has developed reading programs for children that focus [End Page 86] not only on the story but also on the experience of reading and on encouraging children to narrate and illustrate their own stories. Zhu Yongxin is a well-known scholar who has devoted his life to continuous research and activities related to reading promotion, including training and programs for children in rural areas and children with special needs. www.marittornqvist.nl Click for larger view View full resolution Hans Christian Andersen Awards 2020 The winners of the 2020 Hans Christian Andersen Award are Jacqueline Woodson of the United States as author and Albertine of Switzerland as illustrator. Jacqueline Woodson was born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1963, and shortly thereafter moved with her mother and siblings to Greenville, South Carolina, where she spent much of her early formative years in the care of her maternal grandparents. At age seven she moved to Brooklyn, New York, where she has since lived. In 2014, her autobiographical work Brown Girl Dreaming was the winner of the National Book Award and Coretta Scott King Award; it is also a Newbery Honor book. It is the centerpiece of her oeuvre, depicting her firsthand experiences of how African Americans were treated differently in the North and South, where her own path to becoming a writer is woven in with her life experiences. Woodson was a finalist for the 2016 Hans Christian Andersen Award and won the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award in 2018. After serving as Young People's Poet Laureate from 2015 to 2017, she was named the National Ambassador...

"Ain't no more stories for you here": Vengeful Hauntings and Traumatized Community in Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing

"Ain't no more stories for you here":Vengeful Hauntings and Traumatized Community in Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing Megan Ashley Swartzfager Jesmyn Ward's 2017 novel Sing, Unburied, Sing Begins, in a sense, where Toni Morrison's Beloved ends.1 The novel, which earned for Ward her second National Book Award for fiction, grapples with the Beloveds—the persistent hauntings of slavery and other forms of racialized trauma—of an America that has attempted to bury slavery and its plurality of legacies beneath a formal history that proclaims the total and unmitigated success of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. The novel takes place in the rural Gulf Coast town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, where all of Ward's novels are set. This town is Faulknerian in the sense that it grew from the seeds of racism planted during slavery, making it a microcosm of post-slavery America. Bois Sauvage is the kind of place where a black man might be shot dead because of a bet gone awry, and where the authorities might agree to deem the incident a 'hunting accident.' A place where ignoring a No Trespassing sign can get you chased off a white man's property at the barrel of a gun. And where being black and poor or white and unlucky [End Page 313] might get you sent upstate to Parchman Farm, the Mississippi State Penitentiary, which has evolved only superficially from the long-ago days when it operated like a plantation. (Smith)2 The novel is told in turns by the thirteen-year-old Jojo, Jojo's emotionally distant mother Leonie, and the ghost of Richie, a twelve-year-old boy who was incarcerated at Parchman Farm at the same time as Jojo's grandfather, Pop. Though Richie is the only ghost in the novel who speaks for himself, he is far from the only ghost. Leonie is haunted by the ghost of her murdered brother, Given, whose death at the hands of a white schoolmate was covered up as a "hunting accident" and who appears to Leonie when she gets high—an experience she seeks daily. These two young men—Richie and Given—are "unburied" in two senses of the word. First, the fact that they never achieved manhood, or the sense of community and love that Ward believes is essential to it, makes their deaths almost impossible to grieve, and this feeling is compounded by the fact that neither youth's untimely death receives adequate recognition. The justice system fails Given and his family, and Richie—who is killed by Pop in a protective act against the retributive violence of white guards and their dogs when Richie tries to run from Parchman—feels betrayed by the only father figure he has ever known and falls into the ranks of Parchman's innumerable Black victims. A lack of closure, of burial, allows these ghosts to haunt the living. Additionally, their stories, along with generations of trauma and slow violence, are exhumed—unburied—and brought to the foreground in a novel that begins with Jojo's quest for the same manhood that was denied Richie and Given. The intergenerational nature of the trauma that is exhumed in Ward's novel discloses the narrative's positionality in the evolving discourse on trauma. Literary conversations about trauma tend to focus on how trauma complicates the narrativization of experience. A member [End Page 314] of the Caruth school of trauma studies, Kristiaan Versluys writes about the cultural trauma of 9/11 and its representations in literature in his 2009 book Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel3 Versluys describes 9/11 as "ultimately a semiotic event, involving the total breakdown of all meaning-making systems" that mirrors the physical collapse of the World Trade Center (2). In order to emerge from the semiotic rubble, people have no choice but to rummage through the symbols that the culture puts at the disposal of the distraught individual. Trauma leads to numbness, flashbacks, or nightmares. These intrusive symptoms can only be dealt with when a traumatic memory gets situated within a series of events. Trauma must be given...

Stephen Dixon (1936–2019): An Appreciation

Stephen Dixon (1936–2019): An Appreciation Matthew Petti (bio) American literature lost a much-underappreciated master when Stephen Dixon died on November 6th, 2019, at the age of 83, after a brief illness related to Parkinson’s disease. One of the most prolific and innovative writers of his generation, he wrote until the very end, hammering away on a manual typewriter with, as he liked to say, “the two good fingers Parkinson’s has left me.” The last two of his thirty-five books (eighteen novels and seventeen short story collections) were reviewed in November/December 2019 issue of ABR. Dixon — who was twice nominated for the National Book Award, and once for the PEN/Faulkner — published over 650 short stories in a remarkable career that spanned six decades and included multiple O’Henry Awards, Pushcart Prizes, and appearances in the Best American Short Stories anthologies. Jonathan Lethem, J. Robert Lennon, Julia Alvarez, Daniel Handler, Dave Eggers, and Paul Maliszewski are among a generation of contemporary writers who acknowledge his influence on the craft. And for twenty-seven years, he was a professor in the storied Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars, teaching, among his many students, Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie, Esi Edugyan, ZZ Packer, Porochista Khakpour, David Lipsky, Fred Leebron, Jean McGarry, and Pagan Kennedy. Dixon’s immensely personal narratives drew heavily from his own life, and usually dealt with the least palatable aspects of what it means to be alive, relentlessly confronting heartbreak, loss, disappointment, and failure. As the critic Michael Silverblatt once said of Dixon: “He attempts to render reports of unbearable experience. The outside world is calling with its terrors, and he as a writer is responding to the onslaught.” Dixon spent the last decade of his life writing about the illness and eventual death of his beloved wife, the translator, Russian scholar, and poet Anne Frydman. This work, culminating in an exploration of living as a widower with Parkinson’s Disease in Late Stories (2016), Dear Abigail and Other Stories (2019), and Writing, Written (2019), is an incomparably faithful rendering of human suffering. Dixon created texts that were viscerally experiential for the reader by dispensing with traditional narrative structure: his protagonists don’t simply move through a story from discreet beginning to resolved end. Instead, they tend to pace back and forth, in and around and over their troubles, picking off scabs, and licking wounds to see how they taste. The result is an obsessively self-revising text that reflects experience as if through a funhouse mirror — paradoxically both truly felt and narratively twisted. The critic Alan Friedman said of the 1991 novel Frog, arguably Dixon’s masterwork, “One doesn’t exactly read a story by Stephen Dixon, one submits to it. An unstoppable prose expands the arteries while an edgy, casual nervousness overpowers the will.” As in his writing, a significant thread of tragedy ran through Dixon’s life. In 1939, his father, Abraham Ditchik, a member of a criminal ring extorting doctors who performed illegal abortions, was at the center of a corruption scandal that made the front pages of newspapers nationwide. One of his younger sisters suffered her whole life from von Recklinghausen’s disease. His oldest brother, Don Dixon, an International News Service war correspondent, was captured by the Chinese in 1952 and accused of being a spy. He was held for a year and a half without a word to the outside world before finally being released. Fifty years later, Don was killed by a falling tree while jogging. Another of Dixon’s brothers — the one he was closest to growing up — died in 1960 when the freighter he was traveling on sank in the mid-Atlantic. Anne Frydman, his beloved wife, contracted MS two years into their marriage, and suffered with it for over twenty-five years before passing away in 2009. Click for larger view View full resolution Young Stephen was three and a half when his father was sentenced, and he was told that his father was away from home because he was a colonel in the Army’s Dental Corps, stationed in Albuquerque. At the age of ten, Stephen came across court documents and transcripts hidden away in...

In Search of a Dust Bowl Narrative for the Twenty-First Century

In Search of a Dust Bowl Narrative for the Twenty-First Century Frank Uekötter (bio) Dust Bowls of Empire: Imperialism, Environmental Politics, and the Injustice of "Green" Capitalism. By Hannah Holleman. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018. xvii + 231 pp. Notes, index. $35.00, cloth. Legacies of Dust: Land Use and Labor on the Colorado Plains. By Douglas Sheflin. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019. xiv + 406 pp. Map, photographs, notes, bibliography, index. $55.00, cloth. Documents of the Dust Bowl. Edited by R. Douglas Hurt. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2019. xxvii + 240 pp. Bibliography, index. $94.00, cloth. For everyone studying the Dust Bowl, the first order of business should be to realize how odd it is that we keep returning to this topic. With so many issues waiting to be explored at the intersection of agricultural and environmental history, scholars should have a good reason to look at one and the same event again and again. Do they have one? Elbow room is tight in the field, and every new book needs to squeeze in. The competition includes a book that won a Bancroft Prize (Donald Worster's Dust Bowl in 1980) and the winner of the 2006 National Book Award for Nonfiction (Timothy Egan for The Worst Hard Time). Scholars also need to cope with the combined cultural thrust of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, Dorothea Lange's photographs, and the music of Woody Guthrie. Is this a case akin to the wall full of graffiti that magically attracts artists (and those who see themselves as such) for yet another layer of paint? Or should we think in terms of the broken records of the shellac days that kept skipping back? The latter metaphor might lose readers below age fifty, though. Of course, the Dust Bowl had dramatic pictures. It is safe to assume that the plight of the Southern Plains would have received different coverage, if any, in the absence of spectacular photographs. The Dust Bowl offered the perfect images for the United States of the Depression years: in the words of David Danbom, Caucasians could watch "someone white with whom they could identify and who was worse off than they were."1 Dramatic photographs no longer stand out in an age awash with visuals, but something else has emerged that draws [End Page 161] writers to the issue. The Dust Bowl has shown itself to be a powerful and remarkably versatile template. If you have a cause that needs a little boost, just link it to the Dust Bowl. Needless to say, there is nothing illegitimate on principle about writing history in light of the concerns of one's time. In fact, some people say that this is why we engage with history. Residents of the Great Plains might object that templates are often imported from some- where else and have shallow roots in the land; narratives of the Dust Bowl are also about the cultural occupation of a peripheral region. It may provide a quantum of solace that marginalization is a common experience in rural areas worldwide. In industrialized societies, farmers are hopelessly outnumbered and cannot compete with the monetary and cultural capital that resides in the big cities. In any case, the present reviewer is not in a position to speak for the region. He has never lived in the Great Plains—a month at Iowa State University was the closest approximation—and if you write about the Dust Bowl in the urban wilderness of the English Midlands, it takes a particularly strenuous intellectual effort to understand that a few days without rain might be a problem. However, there is also an intellectual argument for a word of caution. Invoking the drama and the extent of human misery can turn into a surrogate for theoretical and empirical sophistication. Disputing an argument based on the Dust Bowl feels like leaving people dying in the dirt: no matter whether you have a reason, everyone will talk about your heart of stone. It is the environmentalist equivalent of the argumentum ad Hitlerem. Nobody will challenge you if you have the Dust Bowl on your side. We can see the approach at...

Punk Stories: Four Memoirs of Rebel Women in Music

Punk Stories: Four Memoirs of Rebel Women in Music Kristine Somerville (bio) Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys by Viv Albertine. Thomas Dunne Books, 2014, 421 pp., $27.99 (hardcover). Reckless: My Life as a Pretender by Chrissie Hynde. Anchor Books, 2015, 312 pp., $16.95 (paper). Girl in a Band: A Memoir by Kim Gordon. Dey Street Books, 2015, 273 pp., $16.99 (paper). I Live Inside: Memoirs of a Babe in Toyland by Michelle Leon. Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2016, 215 pp., $19.95 (hardcover). When rocker and poet Patti Smith was a teenager, she loved paging through used copies of Vogue, eager for glimpses of the world beyond her working-class home and family in south Jersey. A black-and-white photo of wispy, white-haired Edie Sedgwick, one of the magazine’s “Youthquakers of 1965,” doing an arabesque on the back of a leather rhinoceros captured Smith’s imagination. She wanted to be that girl— self-possessed and connected to the moment. Smith moved to New York in 1969; she chronicles her years as an artist struggling to find a place in the downtown avant-garde scene in her 2010 National Book Award– winning memoir, Just Kids. Smith frequented some of Sedgwick’s old haunts, even living at the Chelsea Hotel, and in 1975 achieved critical acclaim with Horses, her debut album, which was a revolutionary marriage of music and poetry. The cover photography by Robert Mapplethorpe captures Smith’s androgynous beauty. Her jaggedly chopped hair, white button-down shirt, and black jeans and jacket became an early template for punk-rock fashion. Smith’s iconic look and uncompromising [End Page 179] art inspired young women who also rejected being “good girls” for the rigors and rewards of making music on their own terms. Just Kids also whetted readers’ appetites for stories of New York and London during the 1970s punk revolution and the 1980s postpunk aftermath, as told by women musicians who were at the center of the action. ________ Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys Viv Albertine. Thomas Dunne Books, 2014, 421 pp., $27.99 (hardcover). The title of Viv Albertine’s 2014 memoir, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys, announces the primary preoccupations of her female punk-rock cohort. These interests, with varying degrees of alcohol and drug use, figure prominently in the stories of women in the scene. The women assume all the rock-star privileges of men—who can blame them?—before becoming wives and mothers in their later years. Albertine, the lead guitarist and songwriter for the seminal band the Slits, begins her story with the in-your-face pronouncement that she “can’t be bothered” to masturbate. A pretty girl, when her hormones kicked in at age thirteen, she started messing around with bad boys and never stopped. Born in Sydney, Australia, in 1954, she grew up in North London. The family struggled financially, and, as Albertine put it, “I lived in a dump.” Listening to the Beatles on her record player provided escape and drowned out her parents’ fighting. In a moment of vulnerability, she told her father, “I want to be a pop singer when I grow up,” to which he replied, “You’re not chic enough.” There were few female role models: “It was inconceivable that a girl could cross over into male territory and be in a band,” Albertine writes. Instead she attended art school, a rite of passage for many punk and pop musicians. While a barmaid at Dingwalls in Camden Market, Albertine fell in love with the spirited chaos of the punk bands that played there. She met Kokomo drummer Jody Linscott, who told her that musical skill was not a requirement for membership; Jody had joined a band before she could play. Patti Smith’s Horses was another revelation: “Up until now, girls had been so controlled [End Page 180] and restrained. Patti Smith [was] abandon.” And Johnny Rotten, whose voice was neither trained nor tuneful, had an absolute sense of self-possession on stage that she admired. What Albertine thought were barriers—class, accent, lack of musical education—Rotten turned into virtues...

Como la música que está presente

En esta oportunidad, Manuel Barrós traduce una selección de Dogs songs (2013), poemario de la escritora y poeta norteamericana Mary Oliver (1935-2019). Los poemas traducidos dan a conocer algunos de los principales rasgos del libro: sutileza, ternura y humor. La obra es una de las más conocidas de la autora, quien en 1984 ganó el Premio Pulitzer de poesía y, en 1992, el National Book Award.

Never A Lovely So Real: The Life and Work of Nelson Algren

Never A Lovely So Real: The Life and Work of Nelson Algren