AB: A huge theme in the book is performativity and masking, face painting. Also, his own looks – he dresses very fancily in the book. In my own studies of history, just looking back through American history, I recognized that a lot of our issues are cyclical. Lexington, Kentucky Under her uniform, the nurse’s breast is pressed against the crook of my leg. ZP: Exactly, and it sort of traces the trajectory of Italians becoming “White” in America. LITERARY FICTION So, in every scene, not even every chapter, but every scene, I could say, well, what works well right now? Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse. You don’t see this every day in film. Listen. He lives and writes in Lexington. In my heart, he won the Oscar already. All this is expertly paced, unfurling before the book is half finished; a reader can guess what is coming. This was a vision that has some truth to it because, you know, the actual continent of Africa, I’m sure there are wars going on, but there’s wars in every continent. A lot of people want to call it speculative fiction, but it’s not really that. It’s sort of hard to put it into one of these categories. He starts out this meek college student and becomes the Godfather, essentially. She doesn’t see the problems that our son, who is half-white and half-black, is facing. AB: So, Zeke and I were talking about how much you love Easter eggs and and we were just wondering if you had a favorite Easter egg in the book. Just because, for me, it was so path-breaking, the idea that you could have a movie that cost a couple of hundred million dollars to make starring a black lead and a largely black cast, giving us these protagonists who control their own fates but a whole new version of what blackness is in the world. New Orleans is a place where it’s not so big that you can’t know your neighbors and it’s not so small that you are always in each other’s laps. MR: Ideology. I think that it’s sort of a metaphor for choices that we all make in our lives. But his intensely rhythmic and colorful voice … He just was wonderful. Life has taught me that, if I’m in a store, and there’s a store manager and he’s looking at me, I need to make sure that I smile at him. We have these sort-of nadirs, and we have these sort-of pinnacles, and we go back and forth. I mean he just created something that—this is what I found out, just yesterday, that people are buying the book in big numbers, but they’re buying it in a higher proportion of physical copies than digital or audio copies than normal. Even towards the end of the book, he’s still sort of thinking, ‘this one idea I had is the only right idea.’ There’s almost a religious zealotry to the way he approaches his mission. Co-Editor-in-Chief:Emily Goldsmith I just…I don’t know. MR: Yeah, I think that’s one hundred percent correct. But there’s also a lot great technology, a lot of great art, a lot of great music, and so this movie sort of brings that truth to the forefront, and of course, it was good-looking, and it was fantastic, and it was very entertaining. Whether they're caused by delusion, naiveté, dread, rage, or some combination thereof, the narrator’s excesses sometimes make him as hard for the reader to endure as he is for those who either love or barely tolerate him. Please do not see this review as a non-endorsement. His fiction, essays and interviews have appeared in HobartPulp, Entropy, Queen Mobs Tea House, and forthcoming in Peauxdunque Review. Fiction Editor: Chantel Kelly There are two examples of groups purportedly standing up for the black community in “The City”. But obviously that sort of life wouldn’t be available for most people in the Tiko [the expanding, fenced-in black ghetto in the novel]. For me, it was a lot of fun to have this commune in the end where, for these characters, this was a pretty good solution. Is it surrealist? People have been looking at stars for millennium. If you believe something in your heart, nobody can change your mind about it. So, I remember when I started this book in 2012, Barack Obama was still our president, and there had been a discussion for years about whether or not we had solved the race problem. There’s a lot of things happening that are mysterious or shocking or strange. MR: Well, I think it comes down, in part, to my personal experience in New Orleans having a very big community. I think we’re lucky to live in the modern era, and we have access to all of the forms throughout history. 1215 Patterson Office Tower His work has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, AGNI, TheKenyon Review, TheMassachusetts Review, and Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas. I should’ve had them say something like, “It’s as good as cocaine!” I’m sorry Marion Barry. There’s something about a desire for post-racialist society and the desire to keep this guy’s son alive by basically converting him into a white man — he kind of kills his soul in this narrative. But I thought at least I could give representation to different approaches to the problem. We Cast a Shadow is well-written. While I recognize that these books bring important truths into the world and allow black voices to be heard, if I’m reading fiction I cannot immerse myself in the evils that I am already drowning in every day in the real world. It’s kind of one of those domino-type deals where you know knock over one and it knocks over the next. We’re glad you found a book that interests you! Maurice Carlos Ruffin At home he is married to a white woman and they have a biracial son with a birthmark that gets bigger every day; the blackness that he has given him that grows to overtake the whiteness. Jude, so black that strangers routinely stare, is unrecognizable to her aunt. First Place Winner of the 2019 Ada Limón Autumn Poetry Contest judged by Julia Johnson. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). AB: Thank you so much for coming and hanging out with us and answering all of our questions. © Copyright 2020 Kirkus Media LLC. RELEASE DATE: Feb. 17, 1985. So, they’re just shipping out lots of these books because people want it on the shelf. I don’t feel like I’m in a position to see this all presented in this way and be able to appreciate it. I think people really responded. But that’s not the one I wanted to get to. So, I just wonder what your thoughts were in approaching that in the book, and what you hoped to accomplish by using that as one of your central themes, and what you hope people take away from that. I found that in order to make the text move very quickly, and to not have any dull parts in it, I would say to the character that it’s like we’re on a plane right now, and you’re trying to get my attention. Like one example is, there’s one scene where the main character is working for BEG and he’s trying to convince white folks to take a pamphlet from him. Bennett is deeply engaged in the unknowability of other people and the scourge of colorism. In the book, part of the construction of how the city works is that almost all the characters know each other. ‧ And sometimes it creates something that is bigger than the sum of its parts. He thinks his son’s only safety in the world is if he’s a white person, and he’s willing to give anything up for that. Start studying Cast Two Shadows Chapter 1. MR: Hmm. But, on Sorry to Bother You, I love that movie so much because it was just so willing to be itself. Sometimes your mind wanders and you say what you are thinking. Ash is an MFA Candidate in Fiction, focusing on short stories, and also a regular contributor to the film podcast and website Cinematary. ‧ One of the things is that the book is set in the future and I was thinking maybe we have evolved more when it comes to things like meat and sustainability so, Nigel, the son who is only like 8 years old, is like, “we can do better in terms of what we consume as human’s in America”. I don’t wanna get too deep into the Easter eggs but the point is that the characters all know each other and the incidents all effect other. It’s like Scheherazade. ZP: I read this book as a sort of regression story for this unnamed narrator. Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). He compromises a lot. I mean, it shifts tones throughout from straight, to surrealist, to metaphysical, to, like, blacksploitation almost at times, and my brain was lit up the entire time. Because of that he knows that he can’t just talk her into understanding so he’s making a kind of executive decision to go around her. Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length. The host offers him an African garb costume from her in-house museum-esque collection, and through a silly African dance and subsequent nudity when the costume falls off, he runs out of the house and into a promotion to the head of the diversity committee for community outreach. It is important to understand the difference between when something is not good and when something is not written for you. But we can say that it’s certainly not the world that we’re living in now. Zeke Perkins: From a craft perspective, the book starts at an incredibly fast pace and doesn’t let up. I’d be saying, “do this thing”. He knows that things are falling apart. Categories: Zeke Perkins has spent most of his working life fighting for social justice as part of the labor movement. MR: Oh wow.

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