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 Written in the late 1980s, unpublished in her lifetime, composed after an HIV diagnosis — it is her last and most powerful work.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