Staff Picks: Stories, Sociopaths, and Sada Baby
Nesrine Malik.
“Every social unit,” Nesrine Malik writes in , “from the family to the nation state, functions on the basis of mythology … Some myths are less useful than others, and some are dangerously regressive.” Over the course of a tight two hundred sixty pages, Malik discusses six of the most influential myths in our “age of discontent.” Focusing on the U.S. and the UK, Malik is keenly aware of our moment—one of “political awakening and despair, when it is becoming clear that something (is) not working, where there (is) fear and distress but also a healthy impulse to resist and mobilize.” Too often, Malik argues, we are “still fixated on the idea of returning to a time before: “it’s hard to get publishers to back books by black women that are not exclusively about the experiences of black women. An authoritative non-fiction non-first person voice is still broadly the preserve of white men. So am heartened by the support.” I am heartened, too.
