For our Villains Bracket week , a few Lit Hub staffers wrote a bit about their favorite villain from our initial group of They are well-matched though. Both are tacticians and influencers, who other characters feel through their henchmen. As a villainous foil, Karla heightens the extremes. He is dangerous, but also individually destabilizing, especially for the brilliant but constantly stepped-on Smiley.
On the other side of the curtain, the Circus is haunted by a sense of futility. Percival Everett, James. James , from its very title, is a trickster of a novel. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is an unlikely briar patch through which Percival Everett escapes every expectation of the neo-slave narrative. James is profoundly uncompromising; it refuses to sacrifice rigor in favor of plot, gravity in facility of humor, or invention in honor of the triggering chestnut.
In the antebellum landscape of these pages, chattel slavery may be the law of the land, but language is the coin of the realm. By this measure, James βand by extension, his authorβpossesses riches beyond our imagining.
Afabwaje Kurian, Before the Mango Ripens. With nods to Chinua Achebe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, Kurian depicts Nigeria in such a way that it is rendered timeless and timely at once.
Themes of faith, belonging, and self-governance intersect with the tumult and unpredictability of desire and community. Her prose shimmers as the plot simmers. Before The Mango Ripens announces a bold new voice in contemporary fiction. Tommy Orange, Wandering Stars. Every tribal nation has its own story that deserves fierce emotional and intellectual telling. Ruben Reyes Jr. Inventive and exhilarating, There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven charts the Salvadoran diaspora in a dozen dazzling stories that cross borders, genres, space, and time.
