Sunday Morning! “If Beale Street Could Talk” and “Riot Baby”
This week, If Beale Street Could Talk and Riot Baby, two stories, 46 years apart, about young Black men imprisoned, a disturbingly perennial theme
Category: Sunday
Sunday Morning! Hammer City Records
In reality, it was never much of a record shop. But, for many of us, Hammer City Records was home.
Sunday! “The Book of X” by Sarah Rose
This great little novel suggests that surrealism might be the only way to write about the strangeness of the human body.
Sunday Morning! “The Book of Disquiet” by Fernando Pessoa
Pessoa was that modernist type: a tiny man with a limited social life and an unfathomably rich and grandiose imaginary one.
Sunday Morning! Bowles on Film
Wrapping up our Bowles-o-rama with three depictions of Paul and Jane Bowles on film, in somewhat mutated forms.
Sunday Morning! Paul Bowles’ “You Are Not I”
On Paul Bowles’ short story, an alleged murder he committed, and the rediscovery of Sara Driver’s 1981 no budget film adaptation.
Sunday Morning! “In the Summer House” by Jane Bowles
Jane Bowles only wrote one play. Like her one novel, In The Summer House is a strange tale of eccentric women and the ways their eccentricities set the course for the weaker-willed people around them.
Sunday Morning! “The Spider’s House” by Paul Bowles
The Bowles series continues with Paul’s 1955 novel about the Moroccan independence movement and the struggles of ordinary people to keep a corner of their souls free of political power struggles.
Sunday Morning! “Two Serious Ladies”
Exploring the Bowles cannon continues with Jane Bowles’s more comedic novel about people who also wander halfway around the world to hear their own voice.
Sunday Morning! “The Sheltering Sky” by Paul Bowles
A debut novel that feels a bit like a rupture, not quite like anything that came before it, but marking a great deal that came afterwards. In The Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles left all sentiment to die in the desert.
Sunday Morning! “Not Dark Yet”
Berit Ellingsen’s beautiful and enigmatic debut novel details a modern day hermit seeking to avoid doing violence on an alien planet- ours.
Sunday Morning! “Some Of Us Are Very Hungry Now” by Andre Perry
“Perry is definitely a writer. His essays are meandering and misshapen, slippery and jagged, they wriggle and bite. But, read them for a bit, sit with them and get to know them, and you find they’re also gentle and wise. I mean, it’s a bit hard to get a bead on them, but that’s how identity is, right?”
Sunday Morning! “Giovanni’s Room” by James Baldwin
On the end of grief, and James Baldwin’s classic story of grief at the beginning and end of first love.
Sunday Morning! “Death in Venice”
The time felt right to reread Thomas Mann’s novella and watched Lucino Visconti’s 1971 film of desire and disease and our inability to quarantine either of them.
Sunday Morning! “The Vine that Ate the South” by J. D. Wilkes
J.D. Wilkes’s debut novel packs every Southern myth and legend into one epic, rollicking fricasseed Odyssey. Let’s call it Southern Gothabilly.
Sunday Morning! “Stoner” by John Williams
The “rediscovered classic” of academic life does what great art is supposed to do: immerse us in the inner life of an individual without romanticizing him, It is ennobling.
Sunday Morning! “In the Dream House” by Carmen Maria Machado
By subverting her narrative multiple times and in many different ways, the memoirist gives a good idea of the disorientation and terror of an abusive relationship.
Sunday Morning! “The Deeper the Water, the Uglier the Fish” by Katya Apekina
A great and complicated story about an unhappy family where every member is unhappy in their own way.
Sunday Morning! “They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us” by Hanif Abdurraqib
Music writing as autobiography, poetry, & survival. Seriously, read “They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us” by Hanif Abdurraqib right the hell now.
Sunday Morning! “Little Bones” by David Baillie
David Baillie’s second novel is a supernatural mystery set in a surreal crumbling landscape where I live.
