Eschew the narrated for the experiential. We must do as all great fiction demands and select. “And we must do so not through just slapping random physical facts or bits of information into our stories. “I think we must return our characters to their bodies,” Taylor writes. Stamina’s what happens between those two sentences.”īrandon Taylor, the author of the novel Real Life and the story collection Filthy Animals, recently gave a talk on “character vapor” in fiction, which he has adapted as a newsletter post. To my eyes, it was impossible to make sense of the structural logic and foundational character of racism without reckoning with slavery.” At the New Yorker, you can read an adapted version of Keeanga Yamahtta-Taylor’s foreword to the new edition of the 1997 book.Īt the Sewanee Review, the poet Carl Phillips shares an excerpt from his book My Trade Is Mystery about talent, ambition, and stamina: “‘I can’t go on, I’ll go on,’ goes the line from Beckett’s The Unnamable. To understand that substrate of Black life, I began to research slavery. Hartman discusses her unexpected path to writing the book: “I started out writing a dissertation on the blues. MacArthur Foundationįor The Nation, Elias Rodriques interviews Saidiya Hartman on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary republication of her book Scenes of Subjection.
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