
Live Through This: Heartbreak, Hope, & Humor
These three books at once tender and unsentimental, heartbreaking and humorous. Exploring grief, love, and identity, you’ll cry till you laugh and laugh till you cry. Kristen Arnett’s debut novel, Mostly Dead Things, finds Jessa grieving for her father while trying to keep the family taxidermy business afloat, trying to figure out how she fits in with her family. Profound and deceptively funny, Morgan Parker’s Magical Negro is an archive of everyday Blackness, exploring the troubling tropes and stereotypes of Black Americans and connecting themes of loneliness, displacement, grief, ancestral trauma, and objectification. Kimberly King Parsons’s debut story collection Black Light, longlisted for the National Book Award, explores the darkest hollows of desire, from first love to addiction. Moderated by Megan Labrise of Kirkus Reviews.
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Kristen Arnett
Morgan Parker
Morgan Parker is the author of the poetry collections Magical Negro, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé, and Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night. Her debut YA novel Who Put This Song On? will be published in Fall 2019 from Delacorte Press, and her debut book of nonfiction is forthcoming from One World/Random House. Park3er is the recipient of a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, winner of a Pushcart Prize, and a Cave Canem graduate fellow. She is the creator and host of Reparations, Live! at the Ace Hotel. With Tommy Pico, she co-curates the Poets with Attitude (PWA) reading series, and with Angel Nafis, she is The Other Black Girl Collective. She lives in Los Angeles.