Recommendations from our site
“I did nearly pick Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), in part because of the sheer miraculous economy of what she manages in that book.” Read more...
“I chose Nella Larsen’s impressionistic yet mathematically-plotted book of fiction, first published in 1929, for two reasons. First, because it was, as you say, adapted in 2021 as a beautiful black-and-white film by the English director Rebecca Hall. Second, because it’s about the lack of categorical exclusivity, so to speak, that Gates insisted on. With first-wave Freudian intensity, Passing explores the psychology of racial passing, the inner dilemmas light-skinned African Americans faced when crossing the color line separating white from Black. But it distinguishes itself from the surprisingly large sub-genre of passing novels by pushing on passing from dozens of intellectual directions—and this in less than a hundred pages, in the crammed space of a novella effectively passing as a novel.” Read more...
The best books on The Harlem Renaissance
William J. Maxwell, Literary Scholar
