LitHub

An excerpt from Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color, by Andrea J. Richie, just out from Beacon Press. In this chapter, subtitled, “On the disproportional impact of police violence on women of color,” Richie writes about the impact law enforcement’s common misconceptions about women of color can have on the women’s safety. In cases where mental illness is an added factor, police officers often know even less, and are violent toward women who aren’t dangerous.

A critical essay raising the question of why many in the literary world cast doubt or treat lightly Sylvia Plath’s allegations of serious abuse at the hand of her husband, poet Ted Hughes — who destroyed many of his wife’s journals from the period before her suicide. Much of her ordeal came to light in April after unpublished letters from Plath to her therapist were found.

“But the opposite of people who drag you down isn’t people who build you up and butter you up.  It’s equals who are generous but keep you accountable, true mirrors who reflect back who you are and what you are doing.”

An essay by Iranian-American novelist Porochista Khakpour (excerpted from Scratch: Writers, Money and the Art of Making a Living, edited by Manjula Martin) about the challenges of surviving financially in her early years as a writer. Her struggle was compounded by being a writer of color with an unusual name, from a country whose president was at odds with the U.S., and having to deal with clueless Americans attending her readings.

On niceness in publishing, and why we should ask men to do better.

When he moved from Jamaica to the US, writer Garnette Cadogan had to relearn how to navigate city streets.

Grief, loss, and marginalia: “I hoard evidence of her handwriting, on birthday cards or grocery lists or receipts. I cannot throw a single instance of it away.”

“In the field, we are actively, aggressively seeking to see with our own eyes the reality of war, famine, disaster—and who isn’t at least somewhat gratified when he discovers what he’s sought, at least somewhat disappointed when he doesn’t?”

“Trauma is not an ordinary condition. It implies an injured society, vulnerable to further harm. The kind of government such a society needs is not meek or modest but immense, powerful, its presence unquestionable. It is in this extraordinary condition of trauma that civil liberties might begin to look frivolous. “

The Bachelor’s Jake Pavelka, canine escape artists, William Faulkner, fire-safety tips — they’re all building blocks of one strange, beautiful book tour for Matthew Griffin, which he recounts with grace and humor. “[I]n Knoxville, we stay at a friend’s house, and when her coffee maker starts to drip with that mechanical click, the smell fills her kitchen in a way it never does at home, in my normal life, and I lean against the counter and talk to her and start to feel, really feel, like I’m in one of those Folger’s commercials where a brother in the military surprises his family by coming home at Christmas and awakening them to his presence with the smell of brewing coffee, and I am filled with goodwill and comfort and warm friendship and also a deep understanding that coffee is the most wonderful thing and a sign that maybe there might possibly be a God after all.”