| Hey book clubbers, February is traditionally the month of winter doldrums in much of the US, the month where you might find yourself staring glassy-eyed out the window at dirty slush and wondering whether green grass is just a myth. And that seems especially likely to be the case in 2021, as the slow and fraught vaccine rollout continues to creep along apace. So we'd like to offer a little bit of brightness to the world with our February book pick, Luster by Raven Leilani. Luster is one of those books that makes the world seem clearer and more interesting than you thought it was. It concerns 23-year-old Edie, a Black woman living in Brooklyn. After getting fired from her crappy publishing job, Edie moves in with her married white boyfriend, his white wife, and their adopted Black daughter. Leilani plays out all the psychosexual dynamics of this juicy premise with an eye for surreal dark humor. But what really makes Luster sing is Leilani's ability to evoke with precise and damning detail the hypocrisy of the smugly virtuous white liberal landscape Edie is trying to navigate. There's plenty to unpack here, and I'm excited to jump in. | | | | | We want to hear from you! We've been doing this book club experiment for 10 whole months now (oh my god), and we've made a few changes and recalibrations during that time. Take this brief survey and tell us what you've liked, what you haven't liked, and what you'd like to see us do next. | | | | | Friday, February 12: Discussion post on Luster published to Vox.com. Monday, February 22: Virtual live event with author Raven Leilani. We'll send you an RSVP link as soon as it's available. | | | | | This week, Alissa Wilkinson reviewed a new collection of Joan Didion essays and analyzed what Joan Didion, cultural icon, means to us. Meanwhile, I reviewed The Copenhagen Trilogy, a three-volume memoir by the great Danish poet Tove Ditlevsen, and found it so astonishingly good I gave it a full five stars. (For context, I give out maybe one or two five-star reviews a year.) Plus, as The Great Gatsby enters the public domain, publishers are having to reimagine that iconic "spooky eyes" original cover. I talked to three cover designers about how they're handling the challenge. And at Vox's The Highlight, we asked seven poets, including Saeed Jones, Alex Dimitrov, Mahogany L. Browne, and Patty Crane, to write us poems for the new year. As I write in the introductory essay, one of the things that poetry can do better than maybe any other art form is help us hold two apparently contradictory ideas in our heads. That feels especially vital in a moment like this one, when we'd really like a fresh start, but also starting fresh feels impossible. Happy reading, Constance | | | |
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