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Contemporary Fiction Views: Harriet Tubman and hip hop are a winning combination [1]
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Date: 2025-03-25
Some renowned figures in history have returned to the present day. Cleopatra is giving celebrities famous for being famous a run for their money, while Rockefeller is winning spending battles with tech bros. Harriet Tubman and a band of people she has freed from being enslaved or who were abolitionists in her day want to make music.
So they have found Darnell, a hip-hop writer and producer who has fallen on hard times. Harriet wants him to help craft their stories into music and make a record. She wants him to help her and her band bridge the gap between then and now, to keep their stories alive so they will be heard.
And what stories they have to tell in Harriet Tubman: Live in Concert. Harriet sets the record straight on matters of legend, including Frederick Douglass and John Brown. She is in control at all times, sipping coffee quietly all day and night. She looks right into people's souls when she looks into their eyes. She is the definition of tough love.
She wears pain, pride, and dignity on her face all at once.
Among her bandmates is Odessa, who was enslaved as a house worker because of her beauty and lighter skin, who sets the record straight on how abhorrent her duties were while trying to avoid the randy master and his son. A Quaker, DJ Quakes, brings the perspective of Christians who knew enslaving other people was a sin.
Harriet's guitarist Buck, has a huge strong body and a gentle heart. Her baby brother, Moses, waited for her to come back to lead him to freedom. And she did.
Darnell, who narrates the first novel by Bob the Drag Queen, a RuPaul's Drag Race winner, has a lot of baggage. When Harriet Tubman -- the Harriet Tubman -- tells him she will help him get to the promised land, she is talking about Darnell letting go of that baggage to live in his own power.
As a gay Black man in hip hop, Darnell tried living in secret. There's a reason why he didn't go forward when he was on the brink of commercial success. And that reason behind that reason plays a role in the novel as well.
Harriet Tubman: Live in Concert, which comes out today, is audacious, vibrant and moving. It lives in the world of Black history, in the world of hip hop and commercial music, in the world of LGBTQ+ reality, in the world of trying to be one's own self when raised by a single mother who was a fierce warrior of rights.
Bob the Drag Queen has created a fast-paced novel that fits a lot into its exhilarating stories. The goodness in his characters, their endurance and their true hearts, are balm in these crazy times. This may be the author's first novel, but please don't let it be the last one.
Another debut novel that publishes today features a young Black man learning from his ancestors. Behind the Waterline by Kionna Walker LeMalle vividly shows what it was like to stay in New Orleans during Katrina and its aftermath.
Eric and his grandmother, called Crazy Ruth by the neighbors, are among those who don't flee their homes as the hurricane approaches. In the following days, Eric learns how resilient and resourceful his grandmother is. He also, whether via dreams or the device of magic realism, finds a room behind his closet wall where artifacts and those who have gone before have life lessons they can teach him.
As institutions again fail people, especially People of Color, the novel is a solid reminder of how bad Katrina was and how traumatic the racial history of New Orleans has been.
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Other fiction being published this week, with links to The Literate Lizard and descriptions by the publishers.
The Unwanted by Boris Fishman
Susanna, George, and their eight-year-old daughter, Dina, have been lucky, so far, in these four years since war broke out in their country. Even as their fellow "minority-sect" neighbors and classmates are murdered or imprisoned, George’s loyal work teaching "dominant-sect" literature has kept them fed and protected. But then the day comes: the university fires George—despite his years of collaboration, he is no longer safe. Left without money or allies, it is time for the family to run.
Embarking on a harrowing trip through refugee camps and across the sea, both George and Susanna are forced in their own ways to make sacrifices to keep Dina safe, while Dina fights to understand the chaotic world crashing down around her. But with each member of the family struggling to survive in circumstances beyond their control, lies and betrayals multiply until it seems impossible for any of them to reach across the abyss.
Barbara by Joni Murphy
Barbara is born shortly before World War II and lives through the conflict as a desert child trailing her father, an engineer in the famed and infamous Manhattan Project. When Barbara is thirteen, her beautiful, sensitive mother commits suicide. From that point on, these twin poles—the historic and the personal, the political and the violently intimate—vie for control of Barbara’s consciousness.
As Barbara grows up and becomes a successful actress, traveling the world between film sets and love affairs, she takes on and sheds various roles—vampire’s victim and frontier prostitute; a saint and a bored housewife. She marries and divorces and marries again, the second time to a visionary director who proves to be the love of her life. Though they are not faithful to each other, their relationship provides the most enduring anchor in a remarkable life turbulent with friction.
The Colors of April : Fiction on the Vietnam War’s Legacy 50 Years Later edited by Quan Manh Ha
Fifty years after the end of the Vietnam War, literary voices of the Vietnamese-American diaspora as well as Vietnam-based authors speak to the experience of those who left and those who stayed in THE COLORS OF APRIL, a collection of new short fiction curated by award-winning translators and editors Quan Manh Ha and Cab Tran.
For much of the twentieth century, Vietnam played an outsized role on the global stage, charting the destinies of superpowers and reshaping the world’s politics. Now fifty years after the end of the Vietnam War comes an anthology of fiction that finally speaks to the global Vietnamese experience: voices of both those who left and those who stayed, what was gained and lost in the half century since, and—for the generations that followed—what it means to be Vietnamese.
More than two dozen distinct literary voices are featured in this collection, including Viet Thanh Nguyen (Pulitzer Prize winner, The Sympathizer), Andrew Lam (PEN/Beyond Margins Award winner, Perfume Dreams), Barbara Tran (Lannan Foundation Award winner, In the Mynah Bird's Own Words), Vu Tran (Whiting Award winner, Dragonfish) and many more.
Twist by Colum McCann
Anthony Fennell, an Irish journalist and playwright, is assigned to cover the underwater cables that carry the world’s information. The sum of human existence—words, images, transactions, memes, voices, viruses—travels through the tiny fiber-optic tubes. But sometimes the tubes break, at an unfathomable depth.
Fennell’s journey brings him to the west coast of Africa, where he uncovers a story about the raw human labor behind the dazzling veneer of the technological world. He meets a fellow Irishman, John Conway, the chief of mission on a cable repair ship. The mysterious Conway is a skilled engineer and a freediver capable of reaching extraordinary depths. He is also in love with a South African actress, Zanele, who must leave to go on her own literary adventure to London.
When the ship is sent up the coast to repair a series of major underwater breaks, both men learn that the very cables they seek to fix carry the news that may cause their lives to unravel. At sea, they are forced to confront the most elemental questions of life, love, absence, belonging, and the perils of our severed connections.
The Evening Shades by Lee Martin
The highly anticipated follow-up to Pulitzer Prize finalist The Bright Forever, The Evening Shades tells the story of two lonely people in a small Midwestern town and the dark secrets tormenting them . . .
One afternoon in the autumn of 1972, a lonely widow in Mt. Gilead, Illinois, makes the impromptu decision to rent out a room in her house to a stranger who has come to town. It is risky—she doesn’t know anything about him. But Edith Green can no longer bear a life lived alone. And Henry Dees is haunted by the past he carries with him from another small town, particularly by the death of a little girl that some people think was his fault.
And slowly, Henry and Edith's suspenseful dance between secrets and trust leads them to start revealing things to each other — and themselves.
Stories from the Edge of the Sea by Andrew Lam
The fourteen pieces in Stories from the Edge of the Sea explore love and loss, lust and grief, longing and heartbreaks through the lives of Vietnamese immigrants and their children in California. A younger dancer is haunted by memories of almost dying on a boat when they escaped from Vietnam, a widow processes her husband’s death through frantic Facebook postings, a writer enters an old lover’s home and sees a ghost at twilight. If the human heart is a vast, open-ended terrain, then Andrew Lam’s short stories are its mountains, valleys, and lakes. Together they seek to chart barely explored country.
Lucky Night by Eliza Kennedy
They're married to other people. But tonight, after six years of casual sex, a couple is trapped in a hotel room. As a fire rages below them, they are forced to confront the lies they've told their spouses, each other—and themselves—in this edge of your seat, witty, sharply observed novel.
Nick Holloway is forty-six. He is the picture of success: a successful partner at a law firm, with a gorgeous wife, a precious daughter, and a house in the suburbs. If he also has gnawing disappointments, secret yearnings, and a creeping sense of opportunities wasted, well, that’s nobody’s fault but his own.
Jenny Parrish is forty years old. She has two lovely sons, a devoted if somewhat hapless husband, and recently has gained success as a wildly popular young adult author. It’s a dream come true, a perfect life! So perfect, she can’t help but wonder sometimes whether it’s all going to come crashing down.
Sister Europe by Nell Zink
Naema, an elderly princess dedicated to her pet causes, is in a bind: struck by a malady that maroons her in Montreux, she’s unable to host an exclusive gala dinner in Berlin to honor the author Masud al-Huzeil for his lifetime achievement in Arabic literature. Not only is she unable to attend, RSVPs have been slow to materialize, and she’s reduced to begging the ancient award winner to find some attendees at the last minute. Masud invites his old friend Demian, a native Berliner, who in turn invites his two best friends: the troubled innocent Livia and an American publisher, Toto, who will do anything for a free meal.
But Toto doesn’t come alone. In tow are his younger Internet date—she’s stood him up often enough to be nicknamed “the Flake”—and Demian’s fifteen-year-old daughter, Nicole. Not to mention the cop who’s been trailing Nicole since she left the red-light district. Presiding over the affair is Naema’s infinitely rich, endlessly disaffected grandson, Prince Radi, whose pass at Nicole culminates in an epic midnight food run that changes all their lives.
Sons and Daughters by Chaim Grade
Rabbi Sholem Shachne Katzenellenbogen’s world, the world of his forefathers, is crumbling before his eyes. And in his own home! His eldest, Bentzion, is off in Bialystok, studying to be a businessman; his daughter Bluma Rivtcha is in Vilna, at nursing school. For her older sister, Tilza, he at least managed to find a suitable young rabbi, but he can tell things are off between them. Naftali Hertz? Forget it; he’s been lost to a philosophy degree in Switzerland (and maybe even a goyish wife?). And now the rabbi’s youngest, Refael’ke, wants to run off to the Holy Land with the Zionists.
Originally serialized in the 1960s and 1970s in New York–based Yiddish newspapers, Chaim Grade’s Sons and Daughters is a precious glimpse of a way of life that is no longer—the rich Yiddish culture of Poland and Lithuania that the Holocaust would eradicate.
Paradise Logic by Sophie Kemp
It was decreed from the moment she was born. Twenty-three-year-old Reality Kahn would embark on a quest so great, so bold. She would become the greatest girlfriend of all time. She would be a zine maker, an aspiring notary, the greatest waterslide commercial actress on the Eastern Seaboard. She would receive messages from the beyond in the form of advice from the esteemed and ancient ladies magazine, Girlfriend Weekly.
When she attends a party in Gowanus at a punk venue known as “Paradise,” Reality meets Ariel, who will become her boyfriend. She bravely works for his everlasting affection and joins a clinical trial created by Dr. Zweig Altmann to help her become a more perfect girlfriend. She stars in a new commercial. She learns how to become an indelible host. But Reality will also learn that sheer will and determination, and a very open heart, are not always enough to make true love manifest.
At turns laugh-out-loud funny, tragic, and jarring, Reality’s quest grows ever complicated as the men in her life: Ariel, her waterpark commercial agent Jethro, and Dr. Altmann himself prove treacherous. Paradise Logic is a thrilling, psychosexual breakdown of our obsession with authentic true love, asking whether that is even possible in a patriarchal world.
The Colony by Annika Norlin
Burnt-out from a demanding job and a bustling life in the city, Emelie has left town to spend a few days in the country. Once there, in the peaceful, verdant hills, down by the river she encounters a mysterious group of seven people, each with personal stories full of pain, alienation, and the longing to live differently. They are misfits, each in their own way, and all led by the enigmatic and charismatic Sara.
How did they end up there? Are they content with the rigid roles they’ve been assigned? And what happens when an outsider appears and is initially drawn to their alternative lifestyle but cannot help but stir things up?
Tilt by Emma Pattee
Annie is nine months pregnant and shopping for a crib at IKEA when a massive earthquake hits Portland, Oregon. With no way to reach her husband, no phone or money, and a city left in chaos, there’s nothing to do but walk.
Making her way across the wreckage of Portland, Annie experiences human desperation and kindness: strangers offering help, a riot at a grocery store, and an unlikely friendship with a young mother. As she walks, Annie reflects on her struggling marriage, her disappointing career, and her anxiety about having a baby. If she can just make it home, she’s determined to change her life.
READERS & BOOK LOVERS SERIES SCHEDULE
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