Yaa Gyasi is a brilliant novelist whose debut work, Homegoing, spans generations of characters, giving us a 300-year depiction of “the afterlife of the Atlantic slave trade.” Her poignant article on the 2020 Black Lives Matter marches gives context to this contemporary movement.
I encourage you to read it as well as her two beautiful, powerful novels.
Pulitzer Prize finalist Adam Haslett on his prescient novel he finished the week Lehman Brothers collapsed in the 2008 crash:
It’s a book not about the actual crash but the culture that lead to it. I spent 5 years wondering if anybody would think it mattered what banks did, but unfortunately history solved that problem.
The novel started out turning international financial scandals into entertaining satirical fiction then hit me with some of the darkest, most emotionally invasive gay sex scenes out of nowhere 😂
After reading a few of his novels, I really appreciate this trope he uses of a doomed revolutionary minded character who is chronically misunderstood.
Here are excerpts of each of the three main characters read with video elements: