'A standout memoir that digs into vital contemporary questions of race and self-image' Kirkus starred review A reckoning with the way we choose to see and define ourselves, Self-Portrait in Black and White is the searching story of one American family's multi-generational transformation from what is called black to what is assumed to be white. Thomas Chatterton Williams, the son of a 'black' father from the segregated South and a 'white' mother from the West, spent his whole life believing the dictum that a single drop of 'black blood' makes a person black. This was so fundamental to his self-conception that he'd never rigorously reflected on its foundations - but the shock of his experience as the black father of two extremely white-looking children led him to question these long-held convictions. It is not that he has come to believe that he is no longer black or that his daughter is white, Williams notes. It is that these categories cannot adequately capture either of them - or anyone else, for that matter. Beautifully written and bound to upset received opinions on race, Self-Portrait in Black and White is an urgent work for our time.
Into Williams's childhood home-a one-story ranch house-his father crammed more books than the local library could hold. "Pappy" used some of these volumes to run an academic prep service; the rest he used in his unending pursuit of wisdom.
Lee Friedlander's surreal sensibility is on full display in this set of photographs, originally published in 1970. Here Friedlander focuses on the role of his own physical presence in his...
Diane de Poitiers could haveand should havebeen Queen of France.
By the time of his death in 1964, Carl Van Vechten had been a far-sighted journalist, a best-selling novelist, a consummate host, an exhaustive archivist, a prescient photographer, and a Negrophile bar non.
Longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize “Fabulously written, this spellbinding debut novel is a real page-turner.
The films were turned over to the press censor in Rome. The precious package went off “red bag” in the official Army pouch to Naples airport, from which it would go by air to Washington. Two or three days later, I went back to Rome, ...
"Fraught and deeply moving...the work of a genuinely exciting new talent." —Booker Prize winner, George Saunders. “Aimee Pokwatka’s Self-Portrait with Nothing is tantalizing and elusive lacework, delicately balanced between the ...
Self-Portrait tells the artist's story in her own words, drawn from early journal entries as well as memory, of her childhood in India and her days as a art student at London's Slade School of Fine Art; of her intense decades-long ...
It's a sick twisted Wonderland, and I'm Alice. Here is a story like no other: The unforgettable chronicle of a season spent walking the razor-sharp line between painful innocence and the allure of the abyss.
During a 90-minute flight, a woman looks back on an affair with a composer in a cerebral, feminist, Bernhardian debut.