I SMAIL Muhammad, the criticism editor at the Believer, is one of the sharpest young critics working today. Pick up any recent issue of the bimonthly literary magazine, published by the Black Mountain Institute in Las Vegas, and you’ll get a sense of his curatorial eye; for an inspiring jolt from his exquisite writing style, check out his recent Paris Review Daily essay, “On John Coltrane’s ‘Alabama,’” and his 2019 essay on Literary Hub, “Walking With the Ghosts of Black Los Angeles.”
Muhammad is also a contributing editor of ZYZZYVA, a contributing writer at the Nation, and a member of the board of the National Book Critics Circle. His work, which focuses on literature, art, identity, and Black popular and visual culture, has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, Slate, New Republic, Dissent, Bookforum, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. In addition to writing long-form pieces on James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, and Toni Morrison, he has reviewed books by Durga Chew-Bose, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Teju Cole, Harry Dodge, Ottessa Moshfegh, Jenny Offill, and Jesmyn Ward, among others.
Muhammad grew up in South Los Angeles and attended Columbia University. After teaching middle school in Los Angeles, he enrolled in the English PhD program at the University of California in Berkeley. A recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Emerging Critics Fellowship and a Simpson Family Literary Fellow, and a participant in workshops at VONA (Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation) and Tin House, he is currently working on a novel about the Great Migration and queer archives of Black history.
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der September - October 2020-Ausgabe von Poets & Writers Magazine.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der September - October 2020-Ausgabe von Poets & Writers Magazine.
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Literary MagNet
When Greg Marshall began writing the essays that would become his memoir, Leg: The Story of a Limb and the Boy Who Grew From It (Abrams Press, June 2023), he wanted to explore growing up in Utah and what he calls \"the oddball occurrences in my oddball family.\" He says, \"I wanted to call the book Long-Term Side Effects of Accutane and pitch it as Six Feet Under meets The Wonder Years.\" But in 2014 he discovered his diagnosis of cerebral palsy, information his family had withheld from him for nearly thirty years, telling him he had \"tight tendons\" in his leg. This revelation shifted the focus of the project, which became an \"investigation into selfhood, uncovering the untold story of my body,\" says Marshall. Irreverent and playful, Leg reckons with disability, illness, queerness, and the process of understanding our families and ourselves.
THE MEUSEUM OF HUMAN HISTORY
READING The Museum of Human History felt like listening to a great harmonic hum. After I finished it I found the hum lingering in my ears. Its echo continued for days.
The Sea Elephants
SHASTRI Akella's poised, elegant debut, The Sea Elephants, is a bildungsroman of a young man who joins a street theater group in India after fleeing his father's violent disapproval, the death of his twin sisters, and his mother's unfathomable grief.
The History of a Difficult Child
MIHRET Sibhat's debut novel begins with God dumping rain on a small Ethiopian town as though. He were mad at somebody.
The Sorrows of Others
AS I read each story in Ada Zhang’s brilliant collection, The Sorrows of Others, within the first few paragraphs— sometimes the first few sentences— I felt I understood the characters intimately and profoundly, such that every choice they made, no matter how radical, ill-advised, or baffling to those around them, seemed inevitable and true to me.
We Are a Haunting
TYRIEK White’s debut novel, We Are a Haunting, strikes me as both a love letter to New York City and a kind of elegy.
RADICAL ATTENTION
IN HER LATEST BOOK, THE LIGHT ROOM: ON ART AND CARE, PUBLISHED BY RIVERHEAD BOOKS IN JULY, KATE ZAMBRENO CELEBRATES THE ETHICAL WORK OF CAREGIVING, THE SMALL JOYS OF ORDINARY LIFE, AND AN ENGAGEMENT WITH THE NATURAL WORLD WITHIN HUMAN SPACES.
The Fine Print
HOW TO READ YOUR BOOK CONTRACT
First
GINA CHUNG'S SEA CHANGE
Blooming how she must
WITH ROOTS IN NATURE WRITING, ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE, POETRY, AND PHOTOGRAPHY, CAMILLE T. DUNGY'S NEW BOOK, SOIL: THE STORY OF A BLACK MOTHER'S GARDEN, DELVES INTO THE PERSONAL AND POLITICAL ACT OF CULTIVATING AND DIVERSIFYING A GARDEN OF HERBS, VEGETABLES, FLOWERS, AND OTHER PLANTS IN THE PREDOMINANTLY WHITE COMMUNITY OF FORT COLLINS, COLORADO.
