2019
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Here Comes the Sun
Nicole Dennis-Benn
There are many compelling facets to this book, which is largely the story of a mother and two sisters who live together in Montego Bay, Jamaica. The older daughter Margot is employed at a big resort and has worked her way up, striving towards the management level, partially through her strengths in business but also in part because she learned...more
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When Brooklyn Was Queer
Hugh Ryan
This has been a slow reading year for me, but for the most part I’ve been spending my decreased reading time with really good books, cutting out the ones I would have been pushing myself to finish or charging through disinterestedly. Quality over quantity is not a bad approach. If I were to make a top ten list at the end of this...more
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Guestbook: Ghost Stories
Leanne Shapton
I really like this book in theory, as a collection of eerie vignettes that explore different hauntings through photos and ephemera. But while it’s enjoyably creepy, eventually the hints and suggestions of ghosts fell short for me. It makes sense in a way that the specters feel just out of reach, but the sections where the images were...more
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Magical Negro
Morgan Parker
from “A Brief History of the Present”
… I worry sometimes
I will only be allowed a death story. No one will say in
the New Yorker how my mother made her money, who
I married, how my career began. Your people. The death …
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The Clothesline Swing
Ahmad Danny Ramadan
Beautiful, elegiac. A play on the concept of Arabian Nights/One Thousand and One Nights, Hakawati takes the role of Scheherazade; many years past (close to the reader’s present) he was a Syrian refugee, a gay man who first experienced violence due to his identity and later due to the brutality of war. But he escaped...more