PositiveThe New YorkerBearing in mind the epistolary origins of the novel as a literary invention, one can regard the results—sixty years of correspondence progressing to a narrative—as another Ellisonian magnum opus, one necessarily unfinished ... is wisely divided by decade, starting with the nineteen-thirties, and Ellison’s voice is urgent from the start ... The far more intimate letters to Murray cease in the sixties, presumably because they were now Harlem neighbors. Yet it can start to feel that such intimacy has become more elusive for Ellison, who has become less the Great Black Hope than the Great Explainer. And explanations, interesting though they might be, do not a novel make ... The later letters portray a novelist busily not finishing his novel, despite working on it; along with his essays, gathered in two collections while he was alive, these letters contain his most extended, indispensable riffs. Earlier letters reacting to the Brown v. Board decision are remarkable, tying the hopes for his new novel with the hopes of a nation. But these later letters find a mind who could no longer attach his personal ambitions to the larger struggles of his day ... Where the letters from the nineteen-forties are preparations for a strike and those from the fifties reverberate with his novelistic achievement, the later letters can start to feel like a way of avoiding the wider world, a world that this writer required in order to create. One feels, in these letters, an art that circles loss.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
PositiveThe New York Times Book Review\"With some quarters seeing the 2008 election less as a promise than as a threat, Obama’s achievement proves to be both a milestone and a millstone. The same might be said of Coates’s ascension as an important critic, if not the important critic, of our time … Eight Years could have settled for being the obligatory miscellany that too often follows a writer’s masterpiece; instead, the book provides a master class on the essay form. Structured as a call and response between eight of his most significant articles and briefer, more personal essays arranged by year, Coates gives us something between a mixtape and a Künstlerroman, demonstrating how he came to dominate the nonfiction genre … It is the record of his struggle as a writer that is of great interest here. As in Baldwin, the struggle of the writing dovetails with the struggle of the race. This becomes clearest in his 2014 essay ‘The Case for Reparations,’ which became Coates’s calling card, and rightly so.\
Paul Beatty
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewFrom its title on, The Sellout so clearly and gleefully means to offend that any offense taken suggests we aren’t as comfortable with race or ourselves as we wish to be .... Beatty’s novel breaks open the private jokes and secrets of blackness (one of which is that Being Black Is Fun) in a way that feels powerful and profane and that manages not to be escapist ... If not a classic, The Sellout is destined to be a really good cult jam. It’s a post-soul parody, trying to feel more like the skits between songs than the song itself.
