This Month's Articles
A MEMOIR
An Excerpt from a Memoir
By Fred Beauford
CHAPTER 15
The Day I Saved Michael Jackson’s Career
I have always been a glutton for work. As I have described in an earlier chapter, my first job was delivering newspapers as a ten-year-old, in cold, snowy Buffalo. I have been working ever since, and.....Read More
Distant Voices
Write Me A Letter...
Dear Fred
Having been simultaneously inspired by your editorial encouraging letter-writing and Brenda M. Greene’s review of Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, I feel compelled to write you regarding my own experience with the Pulitzer Prize-winning author. While studying in Argentina...Read More
REVIEWING
Happy People Need Love, Too
Generosity: An Enhancement
By Richard Powers
Review By Jan Alexander
Everybody loves Thassadit Amzwar. She is champagne and sunshine, always effervescent, perpetually radiant. Her creative nonfiction classmates at fictitious Mesquakie College in Chicago nickname her Miss Generosity. She gives away happiness, free of charge or obligation, to everyone around her. Still more amazing, her happiness is not a detriment to her artistic inclinations. She wanders through .....Read More
REVIEWING
Poets at the Crossroads
The 5th Inning by E. Ethelbert Miller and Something Like Beautiful by asha bandele
Review by Brenda M. Greene
Two poets, E.Ethelbert Miller and asha bandele (spelled with lower case letters) have new memoirs out, both examining the suffering that comes with the need for love. In both cases these are followup....Read More
REVIEWING
The Woman who Brought us Fundamentalism
Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America
by Matthew Avery Sutton
Review by Jane M. McCabe
In parts the life story depicted in Aimee Semple McPhersom and the Resurrection of Christian America reads like a harlequin romance (not that I read them) replete with a still-famous kidnapping and a trial that provided daily fodder for the news media, particularly in her home town of Los Angeles. But really, McPherson, one of America’s early 20th century charismatic evangelists, left her legacy in more lasting ways. She virtually set the template......Read More
BEYOND BOOKS: HUMOR
Adultery and Africa
By Geoffrey Fox
It’s cold and damp and any way I turn my shirt tickles, my knees my toes the air everything is cold and damp and it’s not fair because we rent this house in East Hampton mostly for weekends and here it’s June and.....Read More
ESSAY
Barnes & Ignoble
By Peter Aaron
“Peter, I’m Detective Vincelli of the Paramus Police Department,” began the serious man in the tan blazer. He showed me his badge, as if I might not believe him. “This is Detective Milano. We’d like to ask you a few questions....Read More
REPORT
Smut Lit Comes to Harlem
Herb Boyd
Call it what you will—ghetto lit, chick lit, hood lit, smut, slut lit, Black erotica, underground lit, street lit, urban or hip hop fiction, or even clit lit—African Americans are reading more than ever, and seemingly enjoying every sexy,.....Read More
BEYOND BOOKS: HOLLYWOOD
RONA’S REEL TAKE
Identifying with Stardom: Is it Real or Is it Memorex?
By Rona Edwards
It happens all the time. But it never ceases to amaze me. That when a celebrity of stature dies, the whole world falls to its knees. Even though it’s true, they never knew him. And yes, sometimes they made fun of her. But when someone we’ve grown accustomed to seeing, whether on stage, in sports, on the big screen or on television, is cut down way before their time or even when they have lived past their prime, the public adorns them, grieves them and feels such loss, as if their own brother, sister, father, mother or....Read More
REVIEWING
Da Brick Wall
Hittin' the Bricks: An Urban Erotic Tale by Noire
Review By Loretta H. Campbell
When a self-hating Black person, or a white person pretending to be black, writes a book, the book is Hittin' the Bricks. Unfortunately, it goes downhill from there. Urban has become the code word for Black neighborhoods and culture. Except for the dialect, there is very little that is uniquely Black about this novel.
As to that which is erotic, are stories about women, whatever their race, being raped, tortured, and shot to death considered sexually arousing? True, publishers have made millions .....Read More