Feeling out the contours of their own unexpected lives, Key and Biggs both summon the lives and works of other creators for help. Admitting that you can’t manage to get what you want is embarrassing. There have been times Key has pretended, to herself and to others, that she no longer wants romantic partnership, and […]
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R.F. Kuang is not new to the literary scene. She is already a bestselling fantasy author, as well as a doctoral student in East Asian languages and literature at Yale. “Yellowface,” Kuang’s fifth novel and first foray into literary fiction, is being hailed as a biting satire of the publishing industry. The story follows June, […]
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NewsOne Featured Video CLOSE Source: Dima Berlin / Getty It’s common knowledge that African American vernacular has influenced the culture on a global scale, so much so that it even led to a “digital blackface” controversy on the Internet not too long ago. Assigned to officially keep the world up on how the English language […]
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A Utah school district banned the Bible from its elementary and middle school libraries for containing “vulgarity or violence” after a parent used the state’s bans on pornographic and indecent content against Christianity’s horniest fanfic. In 2022, Utah passed a law banning books with “pornographic or indecent” content, and defined those terms loosely and vaguely, […]
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Overreach: The Inside Story of Putin’s War Against Ukraine by Owen Matthews Buy on Bookshop Mudlark, 448 pp., $21.99 The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History by Serhii Plokhy Buy on Bookshop W.W. Norton & Company, 400 pp., $30.00 “Yeltsin placed Putin in charge of waging war against Chechen rebels” when he became prime minister, […]
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Because we do live in a golden age of conspiracy, an age of stories, and it is a bit disappointing to get from a former top G-man little more than the interagency rivalries that 75 years of TV cops, courts, Feds, and spooks have already burned into our brains. The most powerful people in the […]
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Rebecca A. Fannin will be speaking at the Worth Cities Summit 2023 taking place on June 8th in Charleston, SC. Come to see Fannin speak live, in person by registering here. What has been known as the Rust Belt—a symbolic name for the rusting out of idled steel mills and auto factories—is now shedding its […]
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Science fiction authors and, by extension, their work are often ahead of their time. Intentional or not, when satirizing or commenting on their society, sci-fi books often make eerily accurate predictions about technological advancements and societal changes that have since become a reality. These are some prescient sci-fi books that accurately predict the future. “The […]
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These books are so hilarious that they need not reach for depth, yet they do that, too. London Fields is the story of femme fatale Nicola Six contriving to orchestrate her own murder, via the involvement of Keith Talent and nice idiot Guy Clinch, as nuclear war looms. The ridiculous premise gets you through the […]
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Praise of Danish design mounted quickly in the US through exhibitions, magazine articles, and word-of-mouth. Taft relates how Wegner was approached by a members-only club in Chicago in 1949 hoping to acquire 400 chairs, a number far beyond the capacity of the Copenhagen workshop that produced them. Danish chairs became a bragging right with devotees […]
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Screen and stage actor Brian Cox won his most recent Golden Globe Award for his starring role in the HBO drama “Succession,” which concludes May 28. His 2022 memoir, “Putting the Rabbit in the Hat,” is now out in paperback. The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy (1886) One of the great novels about fate. […]
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And that ultimately makes this book worth reading: In the fullest sense, nothing has changed. Post-Trump Washington certainly feels different. But that’s largely because of a change in us—the politics junkies, the news readers, the observers, the activists, the hobbyists. Trump stripped all the glamour and ornamentation from Washington politics for those who had not […]
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What could a city like New York achieve if it repurposed some of its 3 million curbside parking spots? It could get rid of rats by moving trash off the sidewalks and into containers. It could create safe, cool play spaces for the more than 1 million New Yorkers without easy park access. It could build bioswales to collect rainwater and […]
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It won the National Book Award and the Bancroft Prize when published, but its influence has only grown over time. In addition to his sensitive portrayal of a deeply conflicted individual, Steel assessed the various compromises that Lippmann would—and wouldn’t—make in pursuit of his twin goals of influencing decision-makers in positions of political power and […]
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It’s unclear, however, how these stories intersect—are we meant to contemplate the parallels between racial identity in the United States and the ideologies of Zionism and anti-Zionism? Is Naomi’s rejection of Blackness a part of the reason for her failure to live up to Bering’s legacy? Late in the novel, we read an unfinished essay […]
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In Chile, the Edwards surname is as famous as it gets; a bit like being a Rockefeller in the United States. The family scion, Agustín Edwards Ossandón, a railroad baron and banker, was the richest man in nineteenth-century Chile. His great-great-grandson, Agustín Edwards Eastman, owned and published the conservative newspaper of record, El Mercurio, and, […]
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The pitfalls of investigations, however, are many. The health consumer’s quest exposes her to new crimes. Ramey is pushed to the limits by yogis and acupuncturists who insist she has the power to heal herself. O’Rourke still holds complicated feelings about her one-time trial of ozone therapy. At the recommendation of friends, Wells sees a healer […]
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The millennia fly by. The glaciers recede and, about 11,700 years ago, the Holocene begins, an epoch of relatively stable weather patterns that we will surely miss. Without them, Frankopan makes clear, most of what we recognize as human society would not likely have developed. In places like Mesopotamia, Iran, China, and South America, rainfall […]
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Florida is increasingly restricting what can be taught in schools at all levels. Governor Ron DeSantis has declared war on “wokeism” and has promised to defund diversity, equity, and inclusion programs on college campuses. He has backed the Stop Woke Act, which restricts teaching about race in colleges, and announced plans to mandate Western civilization […]
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The majority of the monsters on display are, no surprise, men, with a sprinkling of women for equity. The bad men are mostly abusers of women, the bad women are mostly bad mothers: Just as there’s a gendered division of labor, so is there a gendered division of monstrosity. The depraved-men beat is by now […]
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The rise and fall of empires, the brutal conquests of colonial powers, the map as we now know it—all this has depended far more on disease than we may have thought. More subtle was the arrival of the Puritans and the settlement of Plymouth Colony. Earlier attempts to build colonies in New England had faced […]
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At The Root, we’ve previously reported on the growing trend of book bans and how the act seems to be laser focused on works by writers of color. You can check out our list of banned and challenged books written by Black authors here. But if you haven’t been keeping up with what’s going on, […]
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Mailer was drawn to men who had committed unthinkable acts—prisoners such as Gary Gilmore, who murdered two young Mormon men during robberies that netted him barely a few hundred dollars, and John Henry Abbott, a career criminal who, in the late 1970s, began writing to Mailer about his life in prison. Mailer supported him in […]
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Bulkeley, the gunner, says, “In this state of nature, the old rules can’t govern us.” And then comes a real struggle on the island. Now they would never use the term “class struggle,” but it was obviously a class struggle. Again, these are these weird echoes to the present. Bulkeley, because he was not born […]
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In contrast, parking enforcement is feminized. In New York City, where Grabar grew up, he observes that the original meter enforcers were all women and were briefly fetishized (à la “Lovely Rita” in the U.K.) before being despised. In 1987, an attendant named Ana Russi was decorated with the Woman of the Year Award by […]
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Converse was a cult darling, and her disappearance offered an irresistible logline: the female Dylan who wrote a handful of masterpieces and vanished without a trace. It’s true that Converse seems to float in her own anachronistic bubble. Fishman reaches for parallels to help explain her—the Carter Family, Elizabeth Cotten, Jimmie Rodgers, Molly Drake—without ever […]
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Jeff Sharlet has spent much of his career talking to strangers and finding authenticity in encounters at typically American way stations on the road. His 2020 book, This Brilliant Darkness, stitches together vignettes of a night-shift worker, a motel boarder, a Cameroonian immigrant, and many others, as he drove from place to place, taking in the […]
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But Robb also quotes Eva Alt, who says that Balanchine style let her “be a wild woman when I danced.” When I first learned the Balanchine technique in open adult classes (this was 14 years after I too gave up on the pre-professional track), it felt like taking off the training wheels. With its broad […]
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Cannabis has a long history in the United States that can be traced from the early days of drug prohibition through its current green age of legalization. The approach of 4/20, the plant’s unofficial holiday, offers a chance to brush up on the history and science behind the controversial drug. Here are six books about […]
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Jean’s art is evidence of her own inheritance, Appalachia’s dead steel industry, and her outsider attitude. She learned her craft in part by watching her father, a metalworker who “rarely left the garage and was too hotheaded to hold a real job”; the workbench and welder she uses to construct her Manglements were once his. […]
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I picked up a copy of Samanta Schweblin’s “Fever Dream” during a trip to Anchorage last year. Sucked in by the title and the dramatic image of a horse in distress on the cover, I realized after finishing it last month that it was a good book to read during spring — in my mind, […]
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