Darryl Pinckney on Memoir, Friendship, and Elizabeth Hardwick
In the first episode of our podcast Private Life, Darryl Pinckney talks with host Jarrett Earnest about his close friend and former teacher Elizabeth Hardwick. Pinckney discusses her inimitable voice...
View ArticleLove’s Anguish and Force and Terror
Not long after World War II a young black American writer made his escape from what he knew to an unknown he feared less and there found the courage to project this fabulous creation, James Baldwin....
View ArticleMornings with Murray
Thirty years ago or more, when on my way home to Indiana or on my way back to England, I would stop off in New York City. Barbara Epstein would put me up at her home on West 67th Street. Sometimes I...
View ArticleBaldwin’s Spell
Harlem histories tell us that the black churches followed their congregations uptown after World War I. I used to put on a suit on Sundays in order to blend in with worshipers at the Abyssinian Baptist...
View ArticleOutstanding Personalities
In our May 9 issue, Darryl Pinckney reviews an extensive survey of “the Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “If anything,” he writes, “the exhibition...
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‘Who Shall Describe Beauty?’
Manhattan was the capital of the twentieth century and Harlem as the Mecca of the New Negro helped to make it so. In Black Manhattan (1930), James Weldon Johnson, poet and NAACP executive secretary,...
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Black Talk on the Move
Private collection Bill Traylor: Red House with Figures, 1939 James Weldon Johnson was critical of dialect because it had only two stops: pathos and humor. Mark Twain may have listened to how the...
View ArticleZimbabwe’s Wounds of Empire
The mental derangement of colonialism was Doris Lessing’s first subject. In her early stories, set in Southern Rhodesia, where she grew up nearly a century ago, racism is learned behavior. The white...
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Georgia’s Battle Over the Ballot
A line of early voters at the Citizens Service Center, Columbus, Georgia, October 17, 2022 Democracy can get a good person up in the middle of the night to read the newspapers online. When the news is...
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‘She Captured All Before Her’
Elizabeth Peyton: Balmoral (Queen Elizabeth II in the 70’s), 2002 Queen Elizabeth II was seated in St. Edward’s Chair so long ago that her character defined the monarchy, not the other way around. Her...
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Our Lady of Deadpan
Joan Didion, 1987; photographs by Dominique Nabokov Let sadness tell you what to read. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Joan Didion begins her essay “The White Album” by recalling a time...
View ArticleJournalism in a Time of Crisis
On February 24, 2021, The New York Review of Books and Community Bookstore presented a conversation with Mark Danner, Elizabeth Bruenig, Howard French, and Justine van der Leun, moderated by Darryl...
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A Gift for the Long Game
Barack Obama, Grayslake, Illinois, 2004; photograph by Phil McAuliffe, from the exhibition ‘Phil McAuliffe: Witness,’ on view at Gallery 270, Westwood, New Jersey, through March 14, 2021 Barack Obama’s...
View ArticleA Society on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
I am too hurt by 2016 to trust. Four years of outrages against the Republic and Us, the People, from the chief crony on Pennsylvania Avenue have made the United States of America another...
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‘We Must Act Out Our Freedom’
Amandla BarakaAmandla Baraka: We Keep Us Safe, June 2020 I will look for you in the stories of new kings. Juneteenth isn’t mentioned in the writings of W.E.B. Du Bois or Carter Woodson, the founder of...
View ArticleMr. Carla Blank
To the Editors: Only in the United States is my partner, the distinguished choreographer, author, teacher, and director Carla Blank, referred to as my “white wife.” Not only was the designation used in...
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Escaping Blackness
Dominique NabokovThomas Chatterton Williams, New York City, 2019 The black individual passing for white in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American fiction by white writers is usually a woman, and...
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Survivor
Warner Bros. PicturesBradley Cooper and Lady Gaga in A Star Is Born The excitement of A Star Is Born is in the music. The songs are kicking, or, when needed, haunting. Of the seventeen original songs,...
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Miss Aretha Franklin
Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesAretha Franklin, circa 1971 Aretha Franklin was not among my mother’s Sarah Vaughan albums, or my father’s Ella Fitzgerald and Dinah Washington albums. Soul was...
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Ma’am’s Life and Loves
Lichfield/Getty ImagesPrincess Margaret at her house on the West Indian island of Mustique, April 1976 When HRH The Princess Margaret was born in 1930, she was fourth in line to the British throne. In...
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