summary Comedy: American Style is a tragedy. The title is the first irony. Fauset's 1933 novel follows Olivia Cary, a mother so consumed by the desire to pass as white that she destroys everyone around her — her daughter's future, her son's sense of worth, her family's coherence. Fauset was literary editor of The Crisis under W.E.B. Du Bois, the architect of the Harlem Renaissance's literary infrastructure, the editor who first published Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston,

summary Quake by Kitty Mrosovsky almost didn't survive. Written in the late 1980s, unpublished in her lifetime, composed after an HIV diagnosis — it is her last and most powerful work. The novel follows a woman named Olivia through an erotic odyssey, written without taboo, with the precision of a Flaubert translator and the hunger of someone who knows time is short. Mrosovsky was 48 when she died. That the book exists at all is the point. Big thank you to McNally for sending

Summary Influence: How to Exert It is a 1916 self-help classic with a literary mystery at its center. The book was published under the name "Yoritomo-Tashi" — presented to readers as the wisdom of a great Japanese Shogun — but scholars have since established that "Yoritomo-Tashi" was actually a fictional persona created by a French woman named Berthe Blanchard, who used "B. Dangennes" as one of her pseudonyms. Whether the book's argument came from a 12th-century statesman or

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84. Little Deaths/Delights Hello beautiful people of the Hot Literati Digital Universe. I have taken up a mind to observe the Sabbath. My perceptions of the Sabbath are related to reading Little House on the Prairie as a child and identifying with the children's restlessness in the book. Now as an adult, I sort of like the idea of a day where you aren't allowed to work, or even think about work. So yesterday, I went to church, sitting in my little pew surrounded by couples an

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Their Eyes Were Watching God and Sarah Lawrence Good morning cuties, angels, and lovers. I am drinking "cowboy coffee," which is when you have one cup of grounds and hot water and let the grounds float to the bottom. I think cowboy coffee is a nice reminder that things can actually be really simple. On Friday, I gave a reading at Sarah Lawrence and answered a lot of questions about Hot Literati. They were wonderful hosts and I had an amazing time. This week we're starting boo

What to do When it Won't Stop Snowing Hello hello. It is the afternoon of New York's second big snow storm this year. What I did not stock up in in groceries, I have happily countered with books. This is the sort of weather that makes you grateful for remote work, even if it is a little lonely. The sort of weather that makes a hot cup of coffee especially delightful and makes peeking outside an act of awe. I'm sort of like a child in the sense that I love being outside and I

There are many lonely little girls in the world; the same way there are lonely little boys and lonely little adults. Notebook, 19th Century Germany, vis Art Institute of Chicago We cope with this loneliness in different ways: drugs, sex, work, books, music, movies, pets, thinking, writing, dreaming, crying. As a lonely little girl who grew up to be a lonely little girl who grew to be a lonely little adult, none of these things ever made the feeling go away. I’ve experimented