Dead at 88: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/06/book ... -dead.html

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Why are only 14 percent of black CPS 11th-graders proficient in English?

The curse of the Doors.

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"All crowds boycotting football games shouldn't care who sings or takes a knee because they aren't watching." - Nas

Holy shit. I only read her first five novels, and then her famous lecture on the implied audience in American literature. Definitely a giant. The first PC cause célèbre I can remember, after the Miss Saigon debacle.

She was a goddamn giant, both in my own reading and in various sub-cultures. She deserved everything she got.

Weird fangirls, though. If you're a white male, don't dare say you connect to her work unless you are at least gay and maybe have a little Injun in you and perhaps even had real mean parents. At least that, otherwise, they'll come after you. Kind of like Beyoncé's fans.

"song of solomon" is a true classic.

This guy knows his stuff.

I'd add Beloved.

My favorite is The Bluest Eye.

This is the chick Shakes banged on Love Cruise, right?

I didn't know she was a writer.

On another note: Tommy, have you ever read anything by Stuart Dybek? If not, give him a whirl, starting with Childhood and Other Neighborhoods. Just as Morrison bent Faulkner's modernism to suit her magical realist ends, Dybek reframes Chicago's naturalist literary tradition within a redemptive aesthetic. Definitely worth checking out.

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Definitely. Someone gave me a copy of The Coast of Chicago when I was nineteen and I was shocked at how local he was and how good of a writer he was. Read another book of stories and some poetry. I just wish he hadn't gone to St. Rita.

The naturalist writer from Mount Carmel--I mean, I love the guy, but by the end of Studs Lonigan, I want to kill myself. In any case, Dybek is just as you have described him.