Book Reviews

Bad Feminist: Essays arrived in August 2014 and announced Roxane Gay as one of the most necessary and readable voices in contemporary cultural criticism. Gay had published fiction before, and her presence in literary circles had built a following, but this collection gathered essays from various publications over several years and delivered them to a…

In February 2007, a memoir arrived in American bookstores that most publishers would have thought unsaleable. Its author was a young Sierra Leonean man in his mid-twenties, writing in his second language about crimes he committed as a child. No American happy ending was promised. No distance was offered between the narrator and his worst…

Begin with a single object: a rough cotton flour sack, about the size of a pillowcase. In the early 1850s, somewhere in South Carolina, an enslaved woman named Rose packed it before her nine-year-old daughter Ashley was sold away from her, probably forever. Inside she placed a tattered dress, a handful of pecans, a braid…