Julian Randall’s The Dead Don’t Need Reminding: In Search of Fugitives, Mississippi, and Black TV Nerd Shit is a dazzling ghost story that braids intimate narratives with cultural commentary to explore the author’s own past, present and future.

Randall, a Chicago-born poet and author, opens The Dead Don’t Need Reminding in Oxford, Mississippi, where he is attending an M.F.A. program. There, living in the South for the first time in his life, he reflects on the origins of plantation-style architecture in the university’s modern-day fraternity houses and endures violent encounters with racists. He seeks out the history of his Southern-born great-grandfather who “fled his home under threat of tar and feather.” Throughout, he riffs on Miles Morales, Jordan Peele, “BoJack Horseman” and many more cultural touchstones to tell stories of his lineage, of himself and of the places that shaped his family. 

These are the “stories that shape us. The stories we turn to out of scarcity, the cousins we make out of characters.” While there are tender notes in his writing, Randall never avoids the violence of our American history and present, writing that “white supremacy is a death cult, a religion for the feral.” And, “America is a gaping mouth with an insatiable appetite for Black suffering, Black labor, Black cool, Black flex, Black silence, Black death.”

This is a story not just about a Black man surviving a visit to the Deep South, but about him staying alive long enough to learn where he came from. Our narrator invites us to witness his vulnerability and imagination, shepherding us through time and place from Chicago to the South and back again as he shares his research into his lineage and the depths of his depression. Through smart cultural critique to rich poetic imagery, Randall’s writing moves at a quick pace that reflects his city roots; but when he slows down to describe the lands and people that haunt him, we witness a gifted Southern storyteller. And so we gather on the porch, waiting to hear this story, low and soft, drifting through the kudzu.  

Kathleen Hanna’s memoir, Rebel Girl: My Life As A Feminist Punk, is a timely refresher in resilience, the power of protest art and the tender humanity that we must not lose. Hanna, influential frontwoman of bands Bikini Kill and Le Tigre, reluctant leader of the Riot Grrrl movement of the 1990s and one of the most notable feminist artists of the past 30 years, recounts her heady and social protest-fueled life in the Seattle and Washington, D.C., music scenes. Like a comic book hero, Hanna has seemed to gather superhuman strength with every blow she receives, surviving a difficult childhood and dodging death threats during Bikini Kill’s rise to indie stardom, all while churning out ever more powerful and furious music. 

Rebel Girl unapologetically reveals the vulnerability behind that image, discussing the trauma and illness Hanna endured while being hailed as a feminist savior, assaulted by infuriated misogynists and torn down by fellow Riot Grrrls for being human. 

It’s now common to find books that document the angsty cultural soup of the ’90s, slickly packaged to inspire nostalgia for the sense of apathetic cool that’s attached to the decade. Where Rebel Girl diverges from these, and succeeds, is in Hanna’s refusal to unhook the headiness of the time from its more difficult and complicated aspects. She does not shy away from unappealing truths about the era, particularly the violence directed toward her and other women from within the overwhelmingly white and male punk scene, and the problematic aspects of the Riot Grrrl movement, with its lack of intersectionality and eventual dissolution into backbiting and purity politics. 

Hanna is equally straight-shooting when she reflects on her own failures and culpability, acknowledging them in a way that is refreshing and constructive. By illustrating how you grew, you can show others how to do the same. With Rebel Girl, Hanna intentionally busts open her feminist idol identity, liberating herself from our perceptions and serving some hard-won wisdom.