New Orleans' own Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s book of short stories, The Ones who Don’t Say They Love You, is a funny, incisive, painful look at the New Orleans I haven’t often read about. The characters are real people trying to find joy and get by.
I also read Timothy Egan’s Fever in the Heartland, about the rise of the KKK in America in the 1920’s. Everything I thought I knew about America’s embrace of the Klan was underestimated and wrong. The white-hooded menace reached beyond what we like to think of as the backwards Southern states, deeply into the Midwest and out to Oregon and Washington. White women embraced it and preachers not only took the KKK’s money but endorsed the hypocritical hate group from the pulpit. Egan’s story focuses on the prosecution of the rape, torture and murder of a white woman in Indiana as the ultimate derailment of the Klan’s grip on America. With the rise recently in open hate and racism and homophobia on the right, you have to think the rot and repulsiveness is still there, festering away.
Margaret Verble remains one of my favorite writers, with Stealing, and Cherokee America, complex, witty, compelling Native American protagonists doing their best to survive and thrive in an America that seems intent on driving them out and away.
I wanted to enjoy Zehanat Khan's Blackwater Falls more than I did. The mystery part of it was fine but the personal lives of the Muslim characters felt flat, muddled somehow. I wanted more life and character in the detectives!
Trayvon Generation by Elizabeth Alexander, whom I had the privilege of hearing at Tulane recently, provides incisive, beautiful meditations and prose poems on art, culture, and race in America.
README.txt by Chelsea Manning was gripping and left me wanting more. I hope she’ll continue.
Celeste Ng’s Our Missing Hearts is beautiful fiction, about family and resistance and love and loss.
In my ongoing pursuit of knowing New Orleans better, I read Five Days at Memorial by Sheri Fink. Covering the five days after Hurricane Katrina at Memorial Hospital, it’s anecdotal and long and claustrophobic and sometimes messy and ultimately, worth a read.
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