Christopher Schaberg, Columnist: Bloodchild and Other Stories by Octavia Butler
Octavia Butler’s collected short fiction (plus two bonus essays) in Bloodchild and other stories. Butler helps us slow down and do a different kind of speculating, in an age of rampant acceleration and speculation of a quite different sort.
Shelly Shi, Associate Editor for Reviews: If you only read one book this February, make it Kindred.
Published in 1979, Octavia Butler’s most haunting work follows Dana, a modern Black woman who is violently pulled back in time — again and again — to an antebellum Maryland plantation. There, she must keep a white enslaver named Rufus alive, because his survival is tied to her very existence. He is her ancestor. She has no choice.
Butler described the novel not as science fiction but as “a grim fantasy,” and that framing matters. There is nothing escapist here. The time travel is a mechanism for confronting something we might prefer to keep at a comfortable historical distance — the psychological and physical reality of slavery, and the impossible moral calculations forced upon those who endured it.
What makes Kindred so devastating is the question it refuses to let you avoid: how do you judge people who survived by bending? Butler was inspired by a young Black classmate in the civil rights era who declared he wanted to destroy the older generation for their submission to white authority — without recognizing that their survival, however compromised, had made his defiance possible. That tension is the beating heart of this novel.
Kindred is not comfortable. It is not meant to be. But it is the rare book that earns its darkness completely — a work of serious literary depth wrapped in an unforgettable premise. By the final page, you will understand something about history, survival, and inheritance that no textbook could teach you.
Asia Thompson, Associate Editor for Interviews: Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
As many of my peers know, I’m a big Toni Morrison fan. While I could recommend one of her many amazing and beautifully complex works, like Song of Solomon or Beloved, I’d recommend the book that started it all for me: Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. So many topics that Hurston touches on in the novel, from self-love and discovery, to navigating social expectations and reclaiming oneself, my only regret is that I didn’t read this book and discover its messages sooner. Hurston started as the drop that created a ripple effect in the sea of great literary work by Black authors, extending beyond enslaved and traumatic narratives. If you’ve felt like your voice was lost in a sea of others, that your dreams were escaping you like the broken tree limbs of a dying oak, it’s never too late to figure yourself out. Find a copy and sit under a pear tree to discover and read the many intricacies of life that this book and your life have to offer.
Sarah Steinberg, Associate Editor for Essays: Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah.
I absolutely adore this book for its humor, education, and realness. It is a testament to the memoir form. I bought this book at the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama and never regretted it. I recommend this book all year round (as well as the Legacy Museum). Check them both out!
Shanzeh Afzal, Managing Editor: The Book of Delights by Ross Gay
Out in the football field of my college campus, a few of us would often sit in a circle and share with each other the poems and prose that we held closest to our hearts. A new friend who at that time was living far away, had sent to me on whatsapp an excerpt from Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights.
The words echoing in my mind, I read it to the group:
“It astonishes me sometimes how every person I get to know lives with some profound personal sorrow. Brother addicted. Mother murdered. Dad died in surgery. Rejected by their family. Cancer came back. Evicted. Fetus not okay. Is this sorrow the great wilderness?
Is sorrow the true wild? And if it is—and if we join them—your wild and mine—what’s that? For joining too, is a kind of annihilation. What if we joined our sorrows, I’m saying.
What if that is joy?”
She, holding guilt for being away from an aging parent and I, holding the heartbreak of the end of a close friendship, we often sent each other silly messages, catching each other in moments of sorrow.
When she returned that summer, she brought with her a copy of The Book of Delights.
It was a special gift and one I still treasure. “We don’t think and write enough about joy”, I found myself thinking as I read the book. Ross Gay made it a practice to write down and dwell upon the things that give him joy every day. I found myself doing the same, albeit inconsistently, after reading this book. What gives me joy? The flowers on my windowsill, my new water bottle and the stillness and quiet of my room at 5am. And this book. “Joy was not made to be a crumb” as Mary Oliver says.
I found a copy of his poetry book The Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude in perfect condition for eleven dollars at a second hand bookstore in Pittsburgh, and gifted it to my friend without even thinking about it.
Ed Simon, Editor-in-Chief: Pym by Mat Johnson
At the conclusion of Edgar Allan Poe’s only novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, published in 1838, the protagonist and his crew who have just departed from Tsalal Island in the southern hemisphere populated by natives who are so described as being “barbarous, subtle, and bloodthirsty,” sail towards the misty coast of Antarctica when suddenly a massive, god-like, human-figure emerges out of the icy cataract, a being that glowed in the most otherworldly white. An estimably odd little book, this Arthur Gordon Pym, reading as if H.P. Lovecraft by way of Herman Melville (both of whom were influenced by Poe’s novel, it should be said). A peripatetic scribbler, Poe has been claimed by everyone from Boston to Philadelphia, but at his core the antebellum writer was always a stalwart Southerner, and even more so, a white Southerner, with all that that implied. As such, the racial politics of Arthur Gordon Pym, with its dehumanized natives who were supposedly so dark that even their teeth were black offset against this quasi-divine avatar of a transcendent whiteness, are difficult to countenance, a book that is somehow both terrifying in what it implies about its author’s (and nation’s) perspective, while also somehow being estimably silly. Not a bad description of the metaphysics of racism itself, an ideology that in its material effects is terrifying but that in the particulars of its claims is as stupid as a white giant emerging from the surf as a means of concluding a novel.
“Whiteness, alone, is mute, meaningless, unfathomable, pointless, frozen, veiled, curtained, dreaded, senseless, implacable,” writes Toni Morrison in her critical study Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. “Or so our writers seem to say.” Morrison’s study is among the great interrogations of American literary culture, of the way that the original metaphysic of racism and division operates, often unconsciously, across a wide variety of writings. Nineteenth-century literature obviously comes in for particular consideration, all the more obviously does the work of that consummate racist Poe. As Morrison explains, American literature is often about these constructions of “whiteness” and “blackness,” even when it doesn’t appear to be about those things, and all the more so because those are arbitrary, invented, fantastical qualities that nonetheless have very real world effects on very real world people. There has been, in the generation since Morisson helped expand the canon to consider more Black voice both in her role as a critic and novelist and then very tangibly in her position as an editor at Random House, a move towards a kind of irreverent expression about the absurdity of America’s racial politics as explored by African American authors, writers who in someways pen very different works than those written by Morrison herself.
Call them the “Sons of Ishmael,” as in the heterodox satirist Ishamel Reed who in novels like 1976’s Flight to Canada, played with racial expectations and the standards of the Black canon. Authors as varied as Colson Whitehead, Charles R. Johnson, Percival Everett, and Mat Johnson have all produced cutting, sarcastic, and brilliant recontextualizations of American and specifically Black American culture, looking at traumas from the Middle Passage to Jim Crow. Among my favorite titles in this varied assemblage is Johnson’s Pym, a satirical novel about a Black studies professor denied tenure who discovers that Poe’s Tsalal was based on a real island and so convenes an all-Black crew on an expedition to the mythic locale. Johnson imagines a return to the source of literary racism, as it were, since so often the “beginning of the primary conversation in African American literature… [is] the African descendant explaining to the European descendant about how white people’s actions are affecting the lives of black people,” rejecting that condition as surely as a boat being rammed into the base of a giant white idol emerging from the Antarctic Ocean.
