Hoodwinked


Desiree M. Granger - 2019
    Soon to be married off to Percy Hugo Milton to keep money circulating between black families, she realizes she’s stuck in a dead end relationship where he basically, “ain’t shit”. Money matters most, marriage is nothing but a business deal, and love is nonexistent in Percy’s eyes. Not to mention he finds her particularly boring, and uninspiring. Jasmine becomes desperate when she seeks the help of a spiritual guide. An eccentric witch named Delilah Skye who grants her three things she wants in life. Friendship, great sex, and true love. Yet, the reading doesn’t go as planned when Delilah informs Jasmine that everything she wants is hidden in the man she hates the most. Percy. After a wild drunken night in Atlanta a few years ago with some girl he never planned on seeing again, Homer Skye thought he had life figured out. He had the plans laid out to propose to his long time girlfriend Nasia Stewart, move her into a house, and start his family immediately. The all american dream. That is, until he runs into his one night stand, Pia Milton, and their two year old daughter he knew nothing about. With the Moon becoming full almost every night in Atlanta, things start to turn upside down as these two stories collide at the hands of black magic, family ties, and messy drama. Determined to find true love, Jasmine takes matters into her own hands by proposing a deal to her cheating fiancé. Pia has to come to terms with tolerating her child’s father, and the black magic that runs deep in his crazy family. While Homer struggles with the thought of this woman who lied about their daughter for two years, might just be the one he’s meant to be with all along. Fine Print: This story contains a little magic, belief in the impossible, and a few other random things and people that make up the story. Might be some hood shit in here too, I don’t know. I say, just read it.

Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us about Our Past and Future


James Shapiro - 2020
    For well over two centuries now, Americans of all stripes--presidents and activists, writers and soldiers--have turned to Shakespeare's works to address the nation's political fault lines, such as manifest destiny, race, gender, immigration, and free speech. In a narrative arching across the centuries, James Shapiro traces the unparalleled role of Shakespeare's 400-year-old tragedies and comedies in making sense of so many of these issues on which American identity has turned. Reflecting on how Shakespeare has been invoked--and at times weaponized--at pivotal moments in our past, Shapiro takes us from President John Quincy Adams's disgust with Desdemona's interracial marriage to Othello, to Abraham Lincoln's and his assassin John Wilkes Booth's competing obsessions with the plays, up through the fraught debates over marriage and same-sex love at the heart of the celebrated adaptations Kiss Me Kate and Shakespeare in Love. His narrative culminates in the 2017 controversy over the staging of Julius Caesar in Central Park, in which a Trump-like leader is assassinated.Extraordinarily researched, Shakespeare in a Divided America shows that no writer has been more closely embraced by Americans, or has shed more light on the hot-button issues in our history. Indeed, it is by better understanding Shakespeare's role in American life, Shapiro argues, that we might begin to mend our bitterly divided land.

Rereadings: Seventeen Writers Revisit Books They Love


Anne Fadiman - 2005
    Her chosen authors include Sven Birkerts, Allegra Goodman, Vivian Gornick, Patricia Hampl, Phillip Lopate, and Luc Sante; the objects of their literary affections range from Pride and Prejudice to Sue Barton, Student Nurse.These essays are not conventional literary criticism; they are about relationships. Rereadings reveals at least as much about the reader as about the book: each is a miniature memoir that focuses on that most interesting of topics, the protean nature of love. And as every bibliophile knows, no love is more life-changing than the love of a book.

Lovecraft: A Look Behind The Cthulhu Mythos (Starmont Popular Culture Series, Vol 3)


Lin Carter - 1972
    Carter takes particular interest in noting the stories where particular aspects of Mythos lore first appeared, and tracing their reappearances in later tales.The book takes pains to establish whether each Lovecraft story "belongs to the Cthulhu Mythos" or not. His requirement for including a story on the list of Mythos stories is that it must "present us with a significant item of information about the background lore of the Mythos, thus contributing important information to a common body of lore."

Both Flesh and Not: Essays


David Foster Wallace - 2012
    Here, Wallace turns his critical eye with equal enthusiasm toward Roger Federer and Jorge Luis Borges; Terminator 2 and The Best of the Prose Poem; the nature of being a fiction writer and the quandary of defining the essay; the best underappreciated novels and the English language's most irksome misused words; and much more.Both Flesh and Not restores Wallace's essays as originally written, and it includes a selection from his personal vocabulary list, an assembly of unusual words and definitions.

My Life in Middlemarch


Rebecca Mead - 2014
    After gaining admission to Oxford, and moving to the United States to become a journalist, through several love affairs, then marriage and family, Mead read and reread Middlemarch. The novel, which Virginia Woolf famously described as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people," offered Mead something that modern life and literature did not.In this wise and revealing work of biography, reporting, and memoir, Rebecca Mead leads us into the life that the book made for her, as well as the many lives the novel has led since it was written. Employing a structure that deftly mirrors that of the novel, My Life in Middlemarch takes the themes of Eliot's masterpiece--the complexity of love, the meaning of marriage, the foundations of morality, and the drama of aspiration and failure--and brings them into our world. Offering both a fascinating reading of Eliot's biography and an exploration of the way aspects of Mead's life uncannily echo that of Eliot herself.