Staff Picks: Book Festivals, Benefactors, and Broken Buttonholes
Terrance Hayes’s abiding interest in Etheridge Knight has perhaps long been established, but Wave Books just this month published To Float in the Space Between, a multifaceted, multi-genre work that ultimately lands somewhere between biography and criticism. Hayes’s meditation on Knight’s legacy and impact on American poetry and the Black Arts Movement is conveyed dynamically and with emotionally weighted nuance through excerpts, criticism, anecdotes, and illustrations. The true pleasure of this book is the perennial one of being allowed the clearance to standby and listen as a brilliant poet thinks deeply and at length about another brilliant poet. —Lauren Kane
Often when I travel I keep a notebook and fill it with little moments: sharing vending machine tea with a bespectacled British chemist on the train to Osaka, or chatting with a Florentine chef, hours after his restaurant closed for“Most of the tales in this collection are based on true stories told to me over the course of my travels,” Van Booy tells us. While his stories are often distanced from each other in time and setting (picked up in different countries, in different times), all still resonate in theme. A family is given a second chance by a mysterious, unknown benefactor. A man invites a teenage mugger out to dinner. A hitchhiker struggles with the absence of a person that defines him. Each of these eight stories, while burdened by loss, are also limned with a more hopeful light. Van Booy captures the rare flashbulb memories of trauma, heartbreak, and melancholy, in the lives of people he’s met, but his writing basks in the healing afterglow of what follows. In the sparsely furnished prose of Van Booy’s stories it is easy to pour oneself into his characters, who I delight to know are real people, existing somewhere far away.
