RaveTIMEEight Years is about the work of black people, and the striving and strife they have lived through in America, and is based on eight columns that Coates wrote for the Atlantic, one to represent each year of Barack Obama’s presidency ...enriched with personal memoir, and a stocktaking, as Coates takes the reader through his own life and reflects on how the columns relate to the present ... Obama isn’t so much a subject as a lens ...for those of us who would like not to be complicit in a backward-lurching culture, we can’t \'privilege the appearance of knowing over the work of finding out,\' to borrow an eloquent Coatesian turn. I’m ready to do the work.
Hari Kunzru
RaveTIMEAny novel set in the music biz rightly aspires to stereophonic meaning, but the reverberations of Hari Kunzru's White Tears echo long after it's done. Part ghost story, part travelogue, White Tears is a drugged-out, spoiled-rotten treatise on race, class and poverty of the soul ... Crackling literary allusion is spliced throughout White Tears, slyly evoking works by Thomas Mann (Carter's decidedly Aryan, vaguely incestuous family), Ralph Ellison (Seth's persistent inability to make others notice him becomes an actual shift in skin color) and others.For all that and then some, White Tears is a book that everyone should be reading right now.
