MacArthur fellow and National Book Award finalist Hanif Abdurraqib is a prolific poet and author, writing across genres of poetry, essay and cultural criticism to great acclaim. Abdurraqib turns his sensitive lens towards basketball in his newest work, There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension. With carefully constructed and imaginative prose, he immerses us in the basketball culture of his native East Columbus, Ohio, telling stories of hoop dreams, both deferred and fully realized.
Abdurriqib pays tribute to myriad figures, both ballers and civilians, who were part of the richly portrayed social web of East Columbus and the larger Black Ohio that it is situated in. We learn about East Columbus players who dominated courts in high school and college, leaving indelible marks on their community even though they didn’t thrive on the biggest stages. We also get to intimately witness the ascension and cultural impact of LeBron James, a hooper from nearby Akron who became one of basketball’s most recognizable, successful and yet polarizing figures.
Abdurraqib’s examination of basketball culture is, in and of itself, captivating. However, the book transcends the particulars of the sport to become a powerful meditation on place and community. The author paints a complex but loving portrait of East Columbus as its members navigate moments of love, grief, hope, fellowship and conflict. He generously and seamlessly weaves in his own story, offering it up as a conduit for the reader’s self-reflection.
Abdurraqib’s writing on basketball is among the best of our time, and it centers the sport’s relevance in local communities, a grossly underexplored element. At the same time, There’s Always This Year offers beautiful reflections on personal and communal journeys that have the power to transform anyone willing to step on the court.
At 40, Hanif Abdurraqib feels time’s passage. “Every hour that I live beyond what I anticipated my life to be feels like I’m just stealing time,” he says.
Abdurraqib has already left an indelible mark on America’s literary and cultural landscape. He is both prolific and diverse, successfully venturing into poetry, essay and music criticism. Whether he is writing about seminal hip-hop group A Tribe Called Quest (Go Ahead in the Rain) or Black performance (National Book Award finalist A Little Devil in America), or such wide-ranging topics as the ’90s rom-com You’ve Got Mail, Bruce Springsteen and public displays of affection, the MacArthur fellow blends observation, analysis and memoir. His writing reveals our most fervent desires and heartbreaks, and at times, his own, such as the untimely deaths of his mother and some of his friends.
“I write in hopes that my larger world becomes a little less lonely,” the author says.
With There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension, Abdurraqib turns his singular pen toward asphalt courts in neighborhood parks and waxed hardwoods in 10,000-seat arenas. If you’re thinking, “Basketball isn’t my thing,” fear not. By exploring the cultural nuances of the sport, Abdurraqib uses it as a lens through which to grapple with grief and legacy, place and beauty, our struggles and our strivings.
“You grow a legacy and mythology through word of mouth, through storytelling.”
Like a basketball game, There’s Always This Year is structured in four quarters that count down from 12 minutes. Poetic intermissions and timeouts offer moments of pause, sometimes mid-sentence, and a pregame chapter serves as the book’s introduction. This ambitious approach could be a distraction in less gifted hands, but here, the form adds to the immersive nature of the book and the tension of a clock that will inevitably run out. But before it does, Abdurraqib shows us what it means to ascend, like a player who launches himself from the foul line, he writes, “his arm stretched straight up, heavenbound, the basketball, an offering to the sky, but only for a moment.”
“I wanted to reframe my relationship with the passage of time,” he says. “Ascension felt like a really great way to describe continually crawling towards and beyond these ages that I had not anticipated myself getting to.”
Abdurraqib homes in on the basketball culture of his native and predominantly Black East Columbus, Ohio, neighborhood. It features the stories of several local and regional basketball players, many of whom never made it to the NBA. He chronicles the careers of local stars like Kenny Gregory, who was welcomed home from games by a parade of kids who followed his car in praise; and Estaban Weaver, whose posters hung in the homes of Eastside Columbus kids “who idolized him then, who idolize him always.” People like Coach Bruce Howard, who led Abdurraqib’s high school’s team to its first title win and who “never forgot a face,” transcend time.
These are names you are unlikely to find in basketball history books, on an ESPN debate show or on basketball Twitter. In a world that only values those who reach mainstream-determined peaks, such figures get left out of the historical record. For Abdurraqib, this reflects a misunderstanding of the nature of basketball culture and the power of storytelling in Black communities.
“I think there is a real purpose in living a life where you build a mythology around yourself that carries through generations,” he says. “It passes through young people saying ‘I saw this thing that you would not believe. Can I tell you about this thing I saw that you would not believe?’ You grow a legacy and mythology through word of mouth, through storytelling.”
For Abdurraqib, the basketball culture of East Columbus was a convener that cut across social and economic lines to bring disparate players and fans into a shared space: “There was this real democratization of the space. Kenny Gregory and Michael Red were high-school All-Americans, but they are playing alongside a guy who’s like a second-string point guard for the high-school team. Everybody’s coming from somewhere different, but that’s the team.”
There’s Always This Year is also about the power of place and community. East Columbus figures heavily in the text—not just as the backdrop for activity, but as a living, breathing organism animated by intergenerational connections, shared worldviews and vital creative energy. “I’m grateful not only to be from the east side of Columbus, but to grow up at the time I grew up,” Abdurraqib says. “I grew up in a neighborhood that was definitely poor or working class. But it never felt that way from inside.”
Though concerned with ascension, this is also a story of rootedness. Abdurraqib’s examination of a local community eschews common narratives that suggest that success for Black people requires an escape from home. Staying, for those from East Columbus, means remaining connected to a culturally vibrant community. “I still live on the east side of Columbus,” Abdurraqib says. “I never wanted this feeling of exodus. I began to think really hard about what it is to not want to make it out and, through that not making it out, redefine staying as something beyond failure.”
Basketball icon LeBron James exemplifies this tension between home and ascension. Known as one of the GOATs of the sport, LeBron’s skilled physical and cerebral play has translated to several NBA championships, personal awards, incredible wealth and one of the most recognizable names in popular culture. Abdurraqib offers an intimate depiction of LeBron’s rise from nearby Akron, Ohio, to global stardom, one that reflects LeBron’s symbolic meaning for Black Ohioans. “I do have an unshakable affection for LeBron’s rise,” says the author. “There’s a miraculous nature to the way his shadow cast over the state that I love.”
Despite his cultural ascendancy, LeBron also stands out as one of the most polarizing figures in professional athletics. A significant body of fans either downplay his accomplishments or want to see him fail. “Not only are there people waiting for him to fail,” says Abdurraqib, “but people are waiting for him to fail in a very specific way that aligns with this kind of thirst for the downfall of the Black megastar. They want these tragic endings that serve as a kind of performance for white audiences who hunger for these kinds of failures.”
“I write in hopes that my larger world becomes a little less lonely.”
In the book, Abdurraqib effectively synthesizes stories that differ in nature, scale and time. He also carefully weaves in details from his own life, using it as a connecting force that affirms and complicates key themes. He shares private episodes of love and loss, his relationship with his father, his experience with the criminal justice system and a period of being unhoused. Through his very public vulnerability, Abdurraqib wants to disrupt our black-and-white moral sensibilities. “I think people enjoy a rehabilitative story of someone who did bad things once and now is in better and giving to the world,” he says. “I don’t think that, internally, I am a better person. I am a more resourced person than I was, but I don’t think I’m better. I wanted to write to upset this binary of bad person makes good. Instead, we should be asking, ‘What are we subjecting ‘good people’ to?’”
The clock does eventually run out. But in the end, There’s Always This Year transcends time. “We go on living,” Abdurraqib writes, “while a past version of ourselves remains locked, peacefully, in a euphoric dream.”
This book is a revelatory addition to Abdurraqib’s incredible body of work, which has touched many souls and reoriented worldviews over the past decade. His own ascendancy is remarkable. His creative drive and cultural impact are the products of a very personal and heartfelt intention. “I feel like my purpose for myself is to reframe this kind of world that a lot of people feel brutally isolated from, or a world that cannot translate people’s desire to be seen within it or be held within it or be loved or thought of within it,” he says.
“I just hope my work does other people kindness. I just hope it shrinks all of our aches and all of our absences and all of our hungers a bit more if it can.”
Essayist, novelist and Seattle University professor Sonora Jha follows up her acclaimed memoir, How to Raise a Feminist Son (2021), with her second novel, The Laughter, a masterfully told, thrilling investigation of privilege, heritage and exoticisation set against the backdrop of the American college campus.
The novel centers on Dr. Oliver Harding, a middle-aged white male professor at a liberal arts university in Seattle. Oliver is an accomplished academic, best known for his research into the early 20th-century English writer G.K. Chesterton. Oliver’s personal life, however, is solitary and unfulfilling. His strained relationship with his daughter is his only meaningful one.
Oliver becomes fixated on Ruhaba Khan, a Muslim professor in the university’s law school and a political firestarter on campus. Ruhaba has recently taken in Adil Alam, her teenage nephew from France who is seeking to distance himself from some trouble back home. Oliver begins mentoring Adil in an effort to impress Ruhaba, through privately Oliver exhibits contempt for and mistrust of their Muslim heritage.
In addition to their personal entanglement, Oliver and Ruhaba find themselves on opposite sides of a political upheaval on campus, where an energized and diverse collective of students is attempting to seize power from privileged white faculty members who fear their own irrelevancy. These personal and political matters lead to a heartbreaking conclusion, one which readers have been warned is coming but is made no less shocking by its inevitability.
Deeply complex and meaningful yet still an enthralling read, The Laughter is an ambitious novel that explores American social dynamics while never being preachy or overbearing. Jha’s characters represent vastly disparate political ideas, but she handles each of them with great precision and care. With this novel, she offers us a creative window into the sociopolitical dynamics that continue to reinforce cultural divisions in this country. It’s a must-read for those seeking to understand today and dream of a better tomorrow.
Sonora Jha’s characters represent vastly disparate political ideas, but she handles each of them with great precision and care. With this novel, she offers us a creative window into the sociopolitical dynamics that continue to reinforce cultural divisions in this country.
“It’s important for me to transgress. It’s important for me to be subversive,” says novelist, essayist and professor Sonora Jha (How to Raise a Feminist Son) during a video call to her home in Seattle, Washington. “For those of us on the margins, I think having our agency and transgressing like crazy will better everything.”
The Laughter is subversive in its approach, form and content. As an authentic and nuanced character study, it demands that readers grapple with issues of race, sexuality, power, tradition and academia. It carefully and systematically explores how conflicts over privilege and control are enacted on our minds and bodies.
The story centers on Oliver Harding, a middle-aged white male English professor at a liberal arts college in Seattle. Oliver is a decorated academic whose personal and professional identity is wrapped up in the focus of his research, the early 20th-century British writer G.K. Chesterton. Divorced from his wife, his relationship with his daughter strained, Oliver turns his focus on Ruhaba Khan, a Muslim law professor at the university. Ruhaba is dealing with the reality of being a woman of color on a predominately white campus while building a relationship with Adil Alam, her nephew who recently emigrated from France after getting into some trouble.
Both Oliver and Ruhaba find themselves caught up in social upheaval on campus, as a multicultural student movement demanding progressive transformations draws ire of aging white faculty. This mixture of personal and political turmoil makes for a contemplative yet thrilling and ultimately devastating read.
While certainly a work of fiction, The Laughter pulls from Jha’s journalistic background, her experiences as a faculty member at Seattle University and her life as an American immigrant. (She grew up in Mumbai, India.) The seeds of the book were planted in 2016, after Jha learned that French towns were beginning to ban burkinis, swimwear that covers both the head and body to align with Muslim values. The bans appeared after a terrorist attack in Nice and reflected forced Muslim assimilation into French secular culture. This attempt to regulate Muslim identity prompted her to consider the visceral impact of both anti-Muslim conditioning and cultural marginalization in general, both central themes in The Laughter. “I definitely wanted to build a story around them. And I kept visualizing this image of this boy watching his mother being asked to take off her hijab,” she says.
Jha explains that Oliver is the type of man who obsessively fights for control, both in his personal life and in society at large. He’s seemingly at odds with himself, and due to his own personal failings, he lives a lonely life. Despite this, he exhibits an intense sense of entitlement and a need for authority over both Ruhaba and the on-campus protests.
Men like Oliver, says Jha, “are all around us. They’re in academia. They’re our friends. I have felt that sense of control [from them], especially the moments in which they feel like they are losing that control or handing it over to someone else. This happens even if they were encouraging you all along. I’ve had experiences where mentors of mine, when I finally came into my power, were like, ‘Wait, you’re supposed to be grateful. You’re supposed to take up just enough space as I give to you.’ . . . It’s almost like they will mentor you and give you just enough, but they want to still be in charge.”
“It was creepy that this voice already existed and is the literary voice in my imagination.”
A reader could wonder how Jha, a woman of Indian descent, was able to provide such a richly authentic first-person portrayal of a privileged middle-aged white man. She notes that she first attempted to write the novel in third person, but almost in an instinctive way, the first-person voice began to take over her writing. She believes that it emerged, forcefully, out of a lifetime of engaging with Western literature.
“This white male voice is so dominant in my imagination because this is who we read when I was growing up in India,” she says. “It was creepy that this voice already existed and is the literary voice in my imagination.” To further capture the voice, she immersed herself in the white male literary canon. “As the rest of the world was starting to read more women of color, I was reading the likes of John Updike and Saul Bellow,” she quips.
From Oliver’s perspective, we witness his insidious exoticization, shown most prominently through his sexual attraction to Ruhaba and his suspicions of Adil. Oliver fixes his sexual gaze on the parts of Ruhaba’s appearance that are nonwhite; he has both a figurative and literal fetish for her Indian-ness. At the same time, he responds to her nonphysical differences with confusion and disgust. Similarly, Oliver perceives Adil’s identity as a dangerous “otherness” that needs to be surveilled, tested and controlled.
Jha explains that this two-faced response is a common conflict that immigrants face in their interpersonal relationships. “You have to be exotic enough for me to fetishize you, but not so much that it’s a whole other thing that I have to deal with,” she says. “I will provide for you, and I will protect you from your own kind who are not good for you, but to be in my protection, you have to be a little bit more like me.”
“That’s the part of me that is maybe reflected in Ruhaba, that I exist on the fringes of every sense of community.”
Despite Oliver’s control over the narrative, Ruhaba emerges as a deeply complicated character full of internal conflicts. As a Muslim immigrant woman, she exhibits a seemingly naive hope about the possibilities of American life that’s at odds with the fetishizing, distrust and exclusion that is enacted upon her. She also wears a hijab despite her complicated feelings about her Muslim heritage.
Author Sonora Jha
“For immigrant women, I think there’s the excitement of coming to a place that promises all kinds of freedoms, but there’s also the pressure to conform to a certain sort of cultural performance, because we need community,” Jha says. “That’s the part of me that is maybe reflected in Ruhaba, that I exist on the fringes of every sense of community. We crave belonging and community, but we don’t want it to be prescribed for us. So Ruhaba’s relationship with the hijab is a way to control her own appearance and her own relationships with people, on campus or otherwise.”
Adil is also a beautifully crafted character who exhibits a level of complexity that we rarely see in depictions of young men of color. A teenage boy who is as sensitive as he is intelligent, Adil is willing to be open about his hopes and his fears. At the same time, his urge to protect is what upends his life on multiple occasions. In the spirit of How to Raise a Feminist Son, Jha uses Adil’s character to explore and challenge constructions of masculinity. “When can we tell our boys that you don’t have to connect with this toxic masculinity of protector and provider?” Jha asks. “I wanted Adil to have that tenderness, and even a refusal of that kind of masculinity.”
“When can we tell our boys that you don’t have to connect with this toxic masculinity of protector and provider?”
The college campus is very much a character in the novel as well. It is a force with its own nuances and actions, and competing groups of social actors seek to harness this energy to execute their own visions of the future. Political dialogue is often reduced to simply right versus left, but Jha’s depiction of campus life complicates this, showing how political conflicts are often rooted in issues of power and privilege. Innovative graduate students are attempting to transform the campus into a more inclusive and progressive space. Meanwhile, white middle-aged tenured professors, who once considered themselves progressive, are actively resisting this change. This results in a series of microaggressions and racist commentaries that undermine the college’s purported liberalism.
“I think what’s happening with white folks in academia is a sense of displacement, the worry that fun can be had without them, that there’s a lot of brilliance that is ‘not of my kind,’” Jha says. “BIPOC folks and other folks are redefining culture. So we keep hearing these white academics say, ‘We worked hard’ or ‘There are more restrictions for us’ or ‘We played by the rules,’ because any kind of displacement is going to cause discomfort, even in the life of the mind.”
“Decenter the white male narrative and the white imagination on our campuses, and it can only enrich things and make us more comfortable.”
Despite the rampant personal and political turmoil, The Laughter is not a nihilistic story, due to a throughline of hope from the student body. They channel a transformative energy. “I advise the newspaper on my campus, and the kids truly believe in something, and they truly care about change,” Jha says. The novel’s students display unapologetic ideological independence and an unflinching courage to stand up for themselves, which means sometimes standing against faculty and administration.
To BIPOC people working in academia and other white-dominated spaces, Jha offers a sharp final word of advice: “Find your own people and have your own agency, and let’s see what [we] do,” she says. “Decenter the white male narrative and the white imagination on our campuses, and it can only enrich things and make us more comfortable.”
Photos of Sonora Jha by Josiane Faubert.
The author of How to Raise a Feminist Son sharpens the campus obsession novel into a brilliant indictment of exoticization.
Margaret Wilkerson Sexton’s third novel, On the Rooftop, is a welcome disruption, both to literary trends and in her own publishing career. In a time of immense social upheaval, when many African American writers are foregrounding issues of race, economics and oppression in their books, Sexton chose to write a novel that centers on Black ambition and resiliency.
“With [my previous two novels], it felt like most of my interviews were sociological conversations,” Sexton says from her California home, “but I wanted to be talking about the work.” So for On the Rooftop, she didn’t have a rigid agenda. Instead, her novel emphasizes “the endurance and the joy of a community . . . while also drawing attention to the history of the issues and the fact that they still continue to exist.”
Set in 1950s San Francisco, On the Rooftop focuses on the multifaceted yet endearing Vivian, who has complicated relationships with her three daughters, Ruth, Esther and Chloe. The widowed Vivian dreams of stardom for her musically gifted daughters, who sing together as the Salvations. The young women are popular performers at a local spot called the Champagne Supper Club, and Vivian has hooked the attention of an enigmatic talent manager.
However, just as the Salvations are on the cusp of fame, Vivian’s aspirations are challenged by personal trauma and their neighborhood’s changing landscape. Her daughters are also beginning to prioritize their own desires over their mother’s prescribed plan. Loosely inspired by Fiddler on the Roof and told from multiple perspectives, On the Rooftop is a masterful examination of family and community that celebrates the legacy of Black dreams and determination.
“The music really exemplified the endurance of this community. They came here with so much optimism.”
Readers of Sexton’s previous historical novels will recognize On the Rooftop‘s exploration of the often-complex relationships between mothers and daughters. “I can’t escape it,” Sexton says. “There is just so much to be mined. They are such primal relationships, and even the best ones are fraught.”
In the novel, Sexton describes Vivian’s feelings about motherhood with care and nuance, successfully avoiding tropes and instead creating a character who embodies very specific personal and cultural dynamics. Vivian is a Louisiana transplant who lost her husband, Ellis, long ago, and whose own musical dreams were stunted by her difficult life. This is not, however, your typical parent-living-through-their-child story. “I feel like Vivian has some challenges around when to let go, but I think she ultimately does learn to do so,” Sexton says. “At her best level, she has learned when it’s time to step aside, and I think that’s what parenting is—surrendering to the child’s metamorphosis into an adult.”
The distinct relationships between Vivian and each of her daughters reflect their divergent personalities, histories and ambitions. Vivian puts much of her faith in Ruth—the eldest, the quintessential rock, the de facto leader of the sisters. Ruth has a strained relationship with middle sister Esther, who dreams of making an impact but has conflicting ideas about how to do so. Chloe, the youngest daughter, yearns for her mother, sisters and community to recognize her gifts.
Sexton notes that despite their differences, all four women are ultimately searching for the same thing: security. “I love that through each of the girls, you get a different window into what security means,” she says. “The goal is for all of them to feel safe in their own separate worlds.”
The past is ever-present for each of them, and nodes of memory function as creative forces, influencing the women as they navigate generational trauma, interpersonal violence and grief. Vivian, for example, grapples with recollections from her Louisiana homeland and the aftermath of Ellis’ death. As Sexton notes, these memories catalyze Vivian’s goals for her daughters, her self-esteem and her ability to love again.
“I feel like honoring the memories that you hold is a symbol for the entire book,” she says. “For Vivian . . . she has these painful memories of segregation in the South, of humiliation in the South and of her father’s tragic death in the South. She can’t forget those memories. She can’t erase them, and she can’t bury them. She has to somehow continue to hold those memories and almost transform them into something educational for herself in order to allow this new world to enter into her space.”
Vivian’s memories were also an important factor in Sexton’s writing process. After setting her previous two novels in her hometown of New Orleans, the author wanted to explore the Bay Area, her home of 15 years. The former lawyer, who has a degree in creative writing from Dartmouth College, was cautious, however, feeling that she had yet to possess the cultural authority to imagine her adopted home. “It made sense to me to make Vivian someone who had been born in Louisiana, so we were both coming from the same place,” Sexton says. “She was basically a visitor. Her lens and my lens are not any different.”
During the 1950s, San Francisco’s Fillmore District was considered the “Harlem of the West,” a nod to its similarity to the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and ’30s. The Fillmore’s Black community began to emerge during what is known as the Great Migration, a national trend of northern and western movement as many African Americans left the South in search of new residential and occupational opportunities and to escape the horrors of Jim Crow. The predominantly Black neighborhood became the center of San Francisco’s vibrant jazz scene, where transcendent legends collaborated with local musicians in the many clubs that lined the streets.
“Our ancestors have done it, and our descendants will do it. We’re not all alone in this.”
Sexton has a personal connection to the Great Migration. Similar to her characters, members of her own family moved from Louisiana to California in the 1940s and ’50s. When Sexton arrived in the area decades later, these family members welcomed her with open arms, allowing her to immediately feel a sense of community in her new home. She inscribes this sentiment into On the Rooftop.
“I love that they brought Louisiana to the Bay Area,” Sexton says, “and that they created this mini-community that was an echo of their own that they had left back home, [where] they could access all of the sources of comfort. . . . They founded the same churches that they would have gone to back home.”
In the novel, Vivian and her daughters dream of musical stardom as a way to secure liberty in the face of racial and economic oppression, and as the Salvations channel their existential angst into jazz and blues numbers performed at Black-owned Fillmore clubs, they share stages with iconic musicians such as Dinah Washington and Lena Horne. While brief, these cameos ground the story in very real historical dynamics. From blues to jazz to gospel and hip hop, music has been the lifeblood of Black people in America, conveying emotion, building community and offering pathways to freedom. Music feels like its own character in On the Rooftop, a vibrant entity that seems to breathe, occupy space and impact social activity.
Margaret Wilkerson Sexton, author of ‘On the Rooftop’
“Setting [On the Rooftop] in the jazz era really enlivens the book,” Sexton says. “The music really exemplified the endurance of this community. They came here with so much optimism and so much hope, you know, to work in the shipyards. They had more money than they ever had before. They re-created this community so it felt like home. And this musical scene was part of this.”
In the book, the community’s camaraderie and stability are undermined by white businessmen who begin buying up property in the area. For these businessmen and their partners in government, the Fillmore was a blight, despite being a strong Black residential and business base. Some property owners sold out for a quick windfall, while others resisted until the seemingly benevolent offers turned into harassment. Some continued to fight, as Esther does in the novel.
This process, known as “urban renewal,” affected African American communities across the country in the 1950s and ’60s and is an antecedent to present-day gentrification. While some Black neighborhoods were wiped out through this process, others were able to persist and still exist in some form. With On the Rooftop, Sexton hoped to present a portrait of community resiliency for contemporary neighborhoods resisting gentrification.
“I want people to be aware of the fact that it’s been around for a long time and that it continues,” Sexton says. “We need to start having conversations, and we need to start creating policies that preempt it, right, that abolish it. And I want people to experience the joy and the endurance of a community that has undergone it and still continued to flourish.”
Sexton’s work entertains and inspires at the same time, and with On the Rooftop, she urges us to find comfort in the triumphs of our past. “I hope that it will relay the security of knowing that we’re not all alone in this,” she says. “Our ancestors have done it, and our descendants will do it. We’re not all alone in this. We kind of have a blueprint for how to fix it and how to heal ourselves in the process.”
Photos of Margaret Wilkerson Sexton by Smeeta Mahanti
In the third novel from the author of A Kind of Freedom and The Revisioners, the sweetest song comes from the heart of San Francisco's 1950s jazz scene.
Margaret Wilkerson Sexton’s third novel, On the Rooftop, is a creative exploration of family, community and resilience set in San Francisco’s historically Black Fillmore neighborhood in the 1950s.
Told from multiple perspectives, the novel centers on Vivian, who came to San Francisco from New Orleans after the death of her husband, the father of her children. She works a good job as a medical assistant, but past traumas and current precariousness prevent her from feeling true comfort. She puts most of her energy toward shepherding the singing careers of her three daughters, Ruth, Esther and Chloe, who perform as a group called the Salvations. Vivian dreams of more for her daughters and tirelessly pushes them to practice on their building’s rooftop in preparation for their shows at the Champagne Supper Club.
Vivian’s daughters have their own dreams, however. Their mother believes the eldest, Ruth, has the most star potential, but Ruth’s hopes are a bit more modest. Middle daughter Esther is searching for her own voice while grappling with past traumas. Chloe, the overlooked youngest, is grasping for recognition in both her professional life and personal relationships. Amid all this, their Fillmore neighborhood is being threatened by an urban renewal program that would dismantle the physical and symbolic community.
Loosely inspired by Fiddler on the Roof, On the Rooftop is a refreshing work of historical fiction that provides a window into Black life outside of the direct prism of racist oppression. While the specters of racism are present in the story, Sexton chooses to center themes of motherhood, memory, music and hope. She has carefully imagined a compelling social world built on the very real cultural dynamics of the legendary Fillmore neighborhood, known as the “Harlem of the West” for the vibrant Black community within its borders.
On the Rooftop is a quiet page turner that can serve as a beacon of hope in any trying time.
On the Rooftop is a quiet page turner that can serve as a beacon of hope in any trying time.
A year after his acclaimed bestseller, Blacktop Wasteland, S.A. Cosby returns with the equally gripping but more complex Razorblade Tears. Set in rural and urban Virginia, the story centers on the thorny partnership between ex-convicts Ike, who is Black, and Buddy Lee, who is white. The duo is drawn together by the unfathomable murder of their sons, Isiah and Derek, a married couple who lived a relatively innocuous life. Fueled by law enforcement’s lack of interest in solving the case, as well as by their own personal guilt, Ike and Buddy Lee set off to uncover who killed their sons and unleash their own brand of vigilante justice.
Razorblade Tears is simultaneously a contemplative mystery and a stunning thrill ride. A master of his craft, Cosby balances incredibly complicated characters with enveloping suspense and some of the most captivatingly violent scenes that you will ever read. At the same time, Razorblade Tears features poignant, purposeful social commentary as Cosby takes a critical yet sensitive look at homophobia, racism, classicism and toxic masculinity. Ike and Buddy Lee’s quest puts their lives at risk but also challenges their senses of self and understanding of the world. Their self-interrogation and personal transformation prompt readers to examine their own sociopolitical standpoints.
Cosby’s writing is both fearless and sympathetic, exhibiting his formidable intellect alongside vivid imagery, sharp wit and intricate plot lines. Razorblade Tears transcends genre boundaries and is a must-read for anyone looking for a mystery that provokes and thrills in equal measure.
A year after his acclaimed bestseller, Blacktop Wasteland, S.A. Cosby returns with the equally gripping but more complex Razorblade Tears.
In his debut novel, Mateo Askaripour offers a witty yet thrilling examination of the complexities of race in corporate America. The novel centers on Darren Vender, a 22-year-old Black man who shares a Brooklyn brownstone with his mother and works as a shift leader at Starbucks. Despite graduating at the top of his high school class, Darren did not go to college and seems to lack ambition. That changes after a chance encounter with Rhett, the CEO of a buzzy tech startup called Sumwun, who invites Darren into the ruthless world of corporate sales.
At Sumwun, Darren’s attempt to climb the corporate ladder is met with multidimensional racist resistance. Sumwun’s director of sales and Darren’s direct supervisor, Clyde, is a quintessential racist. He disproportionately criticizes Darren and employs incredibly demeaning language while doing so. However, Sumwun also features more subtle forms of racism. For example, white employees often remark that Darren resembles Black celebrities who look nothing like Darren—and who look wildly different from each other.
While fighting for his upward mobility at Sumwun, Darren risks alienating his family, friends and himself. Eventually, an unfortunate incident rattles the foundation of Sumwun and sends Darren on a life-changing and culture-shifting journey that is full of twists, turns and some truly profound messages.
Black Buck is an ambitious book. While being an intellectual and captivating work of satire, it also serves as an instruction manual for Black and brown people working in white-dominated spaces. Askaripour embeds tokens of wisdom in his well-crafted plot and delivers direct messages of advice and encouragement to readers. There is great risk in such ambition, but Askaripour is a fine writer and superbly executes his vision.
This is an entertaining, accessible and thorough look at America's race problem, a book both of the moment and one for all seasons. It’s a necessary read for those living under the weight of oppressive systems as well as for those looking to better understand their complicity within them.
After learning what it takes to make it in the corporate world, Mateo Askaripour spins that knowledge into gold in his riotous first novel.
“You’re likely in for a wild ride, and you will make mistakes,” says author Mateo Askaripour via Zoom from his home in Brooklyn, New York. “But as long as you learn from them and don’t judge yourself too harshly, you can retain a sense of self and still succeed.”
Askaripour’s comments reflect the central message of his debut novel, Black Buck, in which a young Black man named Darren attempts to navigate the punishingly racist corporate tech world without losing either himself or the love of his friends and family. With a complex yet accessible plot, rich characters and Askaripour’s sharp wit, Black Buck is a page-turning satirical examination of corporate racial struggle. And with its tips and tricks for achieving success in white-dominated spaces, the book also acts as an instruction manual for Black and brown corporate climbers.
“I wrote this book so that anyone who reads it, especially Black and brown people, would be able to take away a few gems on how to advance their own lives and the lives of those who they love.”
Askaripour’s professional life began in the same corporate tech world that he thoroughly deconstructs in his novel. The Long Island native was a prodigy of sorts, moving from intern to director of sales at a tech startup within a year. When he needed an outlet from the fast-paced and ruthless world of sales, he turned to the written word. His first two attempts at a novel fell short of the mark. Then in late 2017, he decided to write from experience.
“I realized that writing something that felt true to me meant that I couldn’t shy away from the things that were closest to me in my life,” he explains. Namely, sales, race and startups. In Black Buck, Darren’s quest to establish himself in sales causes internal and external turmoil. Forced assimilation, intrusive demands on his time and the stresses of racism create rifts in his relationships, self-identity and sense of control. There are moments when the reader struggles to determine whether Darren is a hero or a villain. That’s not a sign of any misstep on Askaripour’s part, though. Rather, it reflects the existential battle that Black and brown people face in these environments.
“There were times when I felt like I was mad powerful,” Askaripour says of his sales days. “I was 24 years old, managing 30 people and making over $100K. I had all these people looking up to me. In those moments, it’s so easy to forget that you’re Black. It was so easy to forget because you have some money and people are looking up to you. But then there were times when I’d hire a new person, a white man or woman, and I could tell that the first time I would ask them to do something or tell them to do something, they’d look at me strangely. Years later, I began to understand what those initial looks meant. They were saying, I gotta listen to a Black person? Especially this dude? Some of them never had to listen to a Black person in their life before, or even a person of color.”
As Darren climbs the corporate ladder, some of the racism he encounters is overt, while other forms are stealthily inscribed into the culture of the company. Reflecting both his empirical understanding of the problem and his writing talent, Askaripour does an incredible job of showing how companies often use Black culture as a source of inspiration and mobilization while at the same time generating an internal culture of intolerance for Black people.
“They have this cognitive dissonance where they will take Black culture and use it to energize and further their interests, but how many Black people do they know?” he says. “And how willing are they to sit back and ask themselves whether they are helping or hurting these people that they never really think about?”
Despite its grounding in racial strife, Black Buck is not a pessimistic novel at all. The African diasporic philosophy “each one, teach one” undergirds the book. Brought to America from West Africa, “each one, teach one” suggests that African Americans who have effectively navigated racial subjugation should guide and open doors for others in their community.
“I think we need to realize that until we’re in a position where Black and brown people are giving other Black and brown people those life-changing opportunities at such an exponential rate, there is going to be an obvious disparity, and there is going to be an imbalance. And that needs to change,” Askaripour says. “The ‘each one, teach one’ mentality is definitely a way to change that.”
For Askaripour, Black Buck is a form of service, an intentional attempt to positively affect the material circumstances of Black and brown people. “I wrote this book so that anyone who reads it, especially Black and brown people, would be able to take away a few gems on how to advance their own lives and the lives of those who they love,” he says. “It doubles as a sales manual for that very real reason. I feel hopeful that if someone reads this book and understands its journey, they would be able to better their lives and probably get an entry-level sales job. Yeah, man, ‘each one, teach one’ is not just essential to the book. It’s at the core of my life right now.”
Author photo by Andrew “FifthGod” Askaripour
After learning what it takes to make it in the corporate world, Mateo Askaripour spins that knowledge into gold in his riotous first novel, Black Buck.
In Deacon King Kong, the venerable James McBride’s first novel since winning the National Book Award in 2013 for The Good Lord Bird, a grief-stricken church deacon nicknamed Sportcoat shoots Deems, a 19-year-old drug dealer, at a Brooklyn-area housing project called the Cause Houses in 1969.
The shooting shocks the community of the Causes Houses and nearby Five Ends Baptist Church and triggers a chain of subplots that McBride explores in touching and intriguing ways. Such a web of interconnected relationships could produce confusion when from the pen of a less talented writer. McBride, however, gives every character finely tuned identities and experiences. Aside from Sportcoat and Deems, there is Officer Potts Mullen, a worn-down white beat cop who yearns for the heart of cynical yet warm-hearted African American pastor’s wife Sister Gee. Soup is a recently released ex-convict and Nation of Islam convert who seeks to heal the community that he used to hurt. Italian mobster Tommy Elephante, also known as the Elephant, is the neighborhood boogeyman who is pursuing a treasure hunt left behind by his deceased father. These subplots are tied together by a mysterious link that reveals itself over time.
These are just a few of the threads that comprise the web of experiences that generate the book’s ultimate protagonist, the Cause Houses. The characters are mere microorganisms; the Cause is the body. McBride imagines the project building not just as a setting but also as a living being that speaks, laughs, cries and, most importantly, loves.
Deacon King Kong engages with serious issues including grief, poverty, drug use and gun violence, among others. At the same time, it is an incredibly funny novel. McBride’s comedic language and timing are precise and dynamic. Comedy is cultural, and in a truly exceptional move, he gives authentic comedic voices to characters with wide-ranging racial and cultural backgrounds.
Deacon King Kong finds a literary master at work, and reading the book’s 384 pages feels like both an invigorating short sprint and an engrossing marathon. It is a deeply meditative novel that leaves the reader swept up in a wave of concurrent and conflicting emotions. Deacon King Kong reaffirms James McBride’s position among the greatest American storytellers of our time.
Deacon King Kong finds a literary master at work, and reading the book’s 384 pages feels like both an invigorating short sprint and an engrossing marathon. It is a deeply meditative novel that leaves the reader swept up in a wave of concurrent and conflicting emotions.
Leif Enger’s third novel, Virgil Wander, centers on the eponymous protagonist who lives in the quaint, rustic town of Greenstone, Minnesota. By day, Virgil begrudgingly works as the town clerk, but by night, he is the proprietor of the Empress, a fledgling movie theater that specializes in projecting its exclusive and illegal film collection. During a drive one snowy evening, Virgil’s car skids off the road and crashes into Lake Superior. Luckily, he is a saved by Marcus Jetty, the owner of the local junkyard. Virgil emerges from the accident with a fleeting grasp of language and flickering memories of his former life.
After his near-death experience, Virgil embarks on a journey of rediscovery through interactions with fellow townspeople, each of whom are engaged in their own respective voyages. There’s Rune, the affable Finnish kite-maker who is in town seeking information about his deceased son, Alec Sandstrom, whose death is central to Greenstone lore. Nadine is Alec’s widow, whom Virgil not so secretly pines for. Nadine’s son, Bjorn, seeks to both engage with and escape from his father’s memory. There’s also Jerry Fandeen, the lovable yet untrustworthy handyman trapped in a vulnerable situation. These select few are among the many characters that make up the body and communal soul of the small Minnesota community.
Greenstone and its townspeople share a heartbeat that has been thrown off-cadence by a sense of hopelessness. Struggles may vary from person to person, but they add up to a central thread of suffering that permeates the entire town. However, the story suggests that there is hope in this synergy. Collective precariousness can be transformed into collective uplift.
A book like Virgil Wander, with so many characters and subplots, can make for a convoluted read. But Enger does a truly masterful job of synthesizing these various components into a compelling and easily digestible whole.
Virgil Wander is a fast-paced, humorous and mystical novel about hope, friendship, love and the relationship between a town and its people.
This article was originally published in the October 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.
Leif Enger’s third novel, Virgil Wander, centers on the eponymous protagonist who lives in the quaint, rustic town of Greenstone, Minnesota. By day, Virgil begrudgingly works as the town clerk, but by night, he is the proprietor of the Empress, a fledgling movie theater that specializes in projecting its exclusive and illegal film collection. During a drive one snowy evening, Virgil’s car skids off the road and crashes into Lake Superior. Luckily, he is a saved by Marcus Jetty, the owner of the local junkyard. Virgil emerges from the accident with a fleeting grasp of language and flickering memories of his former life.
Iain Reid’s philosophical sci-fi novel Foe tells the story of Junior and Henrietta, a married couple living on a farm in an undisclosed location sometime in the near future. They live a relatively isolated and quiet life that is structured around monotonous routine. Their domestic doldrums are upended by the arrival of Terrance, a mysterious figure who claims to work for a scientific outfit called OuterMore. He has come to tell the couple that Junior has been tapped to potentially participate in the Installation, a human settlement in outer space. Informed by Terrance that Junior’s involvement won’t be finalized for another few years, the couple returns to their normal existence.
Two years later, Terrance returns with news that Junior has indeed been selected to participate in the Installation program. The mission will require him to live very far away from the farm for several years. Stunned and confused, Junior is concerned about leaving Henrietta alone on their remote homestead. But Henrietta will not be alone, as OuterMore plans to replace Junior with a duplicate version of himself.
Furthermore, Terrance moves into the household to conduct interviews and collect observational data for the replacement. This new and bizarre domestic situation, as well as Henrietta’s mysteriously apathetic response to it all, perplexes Junior. The reader then follows Junior on an unsettling yet thrilling search for answers that ultimately culminates in a shocking final twist.
Foe is a philosophically bewildering and psychologically triggering novel. Reid’s depiction of Junior’s and Henrietta’s existential crises forces the reader to engage with questions of romantic relationships, identity, technology and the nature of humanity. Such an ambitious work risks being muddied. Reid, however, brilliantly executes his vision through short chapters filled with well-crafted internal and external dialogue.
With Foe, Reid has written a page-turning novel that will entertain you and have you questioning the very foundation of your existence at the exact same time.
This article was originally published in the September 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.
Iain Reid’s philosophical sci-fi novel Foe tells the story of Junior and Henrietta, a married couple living on a farm in an undisclosed location sometime in the near future. They live a relatively isolated and quiet life that is structured around monotonous routine. Their domestic doldrums are upended by the arrival of Terrance, a mysterious figure who claims to work for a scientific outfit called OuterMore. He has come to tell the couple that Junior has been tapped to potentially participate in the Installation, a human settlement in outer space. Informed by Terrance that Junior’s involvement won’t be finalized for another few years, the couple returns to their normal existence.
In Southernmost, novelist Silas House tells the story of Asher Sharp, a young preacher living in rural east Tennessee with his wife, Lydia, and their adolescent son, Justin. After a violent flood tears through their town, Asher provides shelter for a gay couple despite the religious conservatism of the area. Asher’s generosity is influenced in part by the immense guilt that remains from rejecting his gay brother, Luke, many years prior.
Lydia immediately scorns Asher’s act of charity. His church congregation does the same. These acts of rejection cause a disconnect between Asher’s moral and religious principles, leading to a crisis of conscience that upends his life. His congregation removes him as pastor, and he leaves his wife. Asher’s moral conversion is further complicated by the fact that his zealot wife is awarded full custody of Justin. Fearing the loss of his sensitive son, Asher kidnaps Justin, and the two head for Key West, Florida, in search of freedom and new understandings—and in search of Luke.
Southernmost is a well-crafted work that is both emotionally and philosophically resonant. Using detailed imagery and rich dialogue, House allows readers to witness how the transformation of one’s moral foundations, no matter how noble, can disrupt a person’s sense of community and security. It is also a story of freeing the self from the captivity of our various societal structures.
House’s depiction of the contemporary South is vivid, accessible and incredibly enchanting, even during the book’s darkest moments. His complex characters quarrel with popular preconceptions and stereotypes of the region. The South of Southernmost includes areas that are inflexibly governed by dogma, while other spaces allow for autonomy and growth.
Southernmost is a remarkable meditation on faith, morality, loss and love—a transcendent work that has the power to entertain, educate and heal at the same time.
This article was originally published in the June 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.
In Southernmost, novelist Silas House tells the story of Asher Sharp, a young preacher living in rural east Tennessee with his wife, Lydia, and their adolescent son, Justin. After a violent flood tears through their town, Asher provides shelter for a gay couple despite the religious conservatism of the area. Asher’s generosity is influenced in part by the immense guilt that remains from rejecting his gay brother, Luke, many years prior.
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As Darren climbs the corporate ladder, some of the racism he encounters is overt, while other forms are stealthily inscribed into the culture of the company. Reflecting both his empirical understanding of the problem and his writing talent, Askaripour does an incredible job of showing how companies often use Black culture as a source of inspiration and mobilization while at the same time generating an internal culture of intolerance for Black people.
