As well as exposing the continued ill-treatment and oppression of people from black and minority ethnic (BAME) backgrounds, the Black Lives Matter movement also served as a reminder – to me and countless others – of the huge range of black-authored literature which is often overlooked by white readers and critics alike. Various websites and booksellers published lists of must-read BAME authors, and I was certainly glad to be pointed in the direction of a number of great books (both non-fiction and fiction), some of which I’d not even heard of, let alone read. Continue reading “Racial passing”
Category: American literature
The modern American male
Following on from my last post on Elizabeth Strout’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Olive Kitteridge , I’m staying on the other side of the Atlantic for this one too: The Dinner Party by Joshua Ferris. Continue reading “The modern American male”
Olive Kitteridge: We are all starving
The novel Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2009, presents a picture of life in the small coastal town of Crosby, Maine. It has an unconventional structure for a novel: instead of a plot that develops in the course of the novel, with a climax and resolution, it is structured as 13 separate, but interrelated short stories. Continue reading “Olive Kitteridge: We are all starving”