Penetrating cultural criticism.
Black lives in literature.
Award-winning novelist Brand, Toronto’s former poet laureate, melds autobiography and literary criticism to offer a shrewd, intimate reading of the 17th-, 18th-, and 19th-century novels that shaped her sense of self. She terms this fictional trove a “wreck,” from which she aims to salvage “the literary substance of which I am made.” As a Black girl attending an Anglican school in Trinidad, she was schooled in “the racial work of literature, whose most abiding feature will be our absence, on the one hand, and our eternal subjugate presence, on the other hand.” From novels such as Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, Defoe’s Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Austen’s Mansfield Park, Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, which she reread later at the University of Toronto, she came to understand the power of narrative structure and style—sentences, character, dialogue—to teach her “how to feel and what to feel” about her identity as a Black woman in a “world of coloniality.” “I am not interested in the morality of any given writer,” she asserts; “I am interested in the construction of, and the information contained in and relayed by, their paragraphs. I want to see what the writing imports from the systems in which the writer (and the work) is immersed.” That system was imperialism, dependent on the slave trade, on the suppression of non-whites, and on a firm belief in the unbridgeable chasm between civilized and savage—a depiction, Brand finds, that persists even in contemporary novels. J.M. Coetzee’s Foe, for example, insists on reviving the question, “Can Black people be trusted with freedom?” Paintings, movies, photographs (especially a significant portrait from her childhood), and American novels and popular culture are all part of the wreckage that Brand astutely analyzes.
Penetrating cultural criticism.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780374614843
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
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