This month, Dan Kois, David Haglund, and Emily Bazelon discuss James McBride’s National Book Award winner for fiction, The Good Lord Bird. The novel makes a farcical cross-dressing comedy of John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, paints Frederick Douglass as a drunken letch, and generally takes an irreverent view of the entire pre–Civil War era. Dan wondered how McBride kept up that kind of verbal energy for 350 pages; Emily thought the novel had remarkable things to say about manhood in the slave era; and David wondered whether the novel suffered from an incomplete portrait of Old John Brown himself. Listen along! Continue reading at 'Slate'
[ Slate | 2014-01-10 00:00:00 UTC ]