Monthly Archives: July 2019

As with almost all of my posts these days, this one is a year overdue, but with Lesley Nneka Arimah’s recent Caine Prize win for her fantastic short story “Skinned” first published in McSweeney’s, I was reminded that I had not yet posted about my review for American Book Review of her collection of short stories What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky. Since it was published over a year ago in the May-June 2018 issue, it is quite late, but better late than never.

 

I was asked to submit the review as part of a special issue on “Harassment” edited by Amiee Armande Wilson, so my review focused a little more on that topic than I might have otherwise. Although American Book Review is behind a paywall, Amiee Armande Wilson worked to make sure that the “harassment” focus was open access. You can access a pdf of the insert here. It includes

Caitlin Newcomer’s review of Khadijah Queen’s  collection of poems, I’m So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On (pp. 4-5);

Gabrielle Bellot’s review of Carmen Maria Machado’s collection of short stories Her Body and Other Parties on pp. 5-6  (a review I found so compelling that I immediately got the audiobook out of the library and finished it in a couple of days);

Carmen McCain’s (yours truly) review of Lesley Nneka Arimah’s collection of short stories What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky (pp. 7-8);

Sarah Deer’s review of Allison Hargreaves’ monograph Violence Against Indigenous Women: Literature, Activism, Resistance (pp. 8-9);

Victoria Reynolds Farmer’s review of Laura Kipnis’s feminist critique  Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus (pp. 10-11);

Mat Wenzel’s review of Sarah Schulman’s Conflict is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility and the Duty of Repair (pp. 11-12);

Sarah Whitcomb Laiola’s review of Angela Nagle’s  Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4Chan and Tumbler to Trump and the Alt-Right (pp. 13-14)

Christopher Higg’s review of a collection of writing about sexual assault edited by Joanna C. Valente, A Shadow Map: An Anthology of Survivor’s of Sexual Assault (pp. 15).

If you haven’t yet read What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky, I highly recommend it. But read “Skinned” first. It draws attention to existing social treatment of single women by pushing things just a little bit further. What if women were only allowed to cover themselves if they were living in their father’s or husband’s houses?

(And for a follow-up on my last post–an interview with playwright, actor, and screenwriter and Africa Ukoh–there are several new performances of his play on the calendar. Charles Etubiebi who has taken a one-man performance of the play to festivals in Rio de Janeiro and Lagos  will also be bringing the one-man performance of 54 Silhouettes to the United Solo theatre festival in New York City on November 20, 2019. An excerpt of the play will also be performed in London as part of the Global Black Voices event at The Roundhouse Theatre on 10 August 2019. For those in London and New York, go see it!)