I can’t say much more without pre-empting your “ahh” moments, but I will say that the structure itself, with the ancient Greek-like choruses of artists’ conversations and fishing and woodworking metaphorical tales only solidifies the truth in my prior P.

The jacket copy made each one sound great, blurbs from established literary icons told me why I should like it.Monk is supposedly beyond race, and beyond shame, but in the intimacy of his own room at night, we find that maybe he’s not as far above it all as he would hope. Come on, a novel in which Aristophanes and Euripides kill a younger, more talented dramatist, then contemplate the death of metaphysics? The nerves of the players have been stretched just enough that they are on the verge of a breakdown from any minute now. I ended up impressed with how Jefferson nimbly incorporates metafictional commentary on adapting novel to film. In case you weren’t aware, the upcoming film AMERICAN FICTION is based on the source material of ERASURE.

Scathing, funny, and prescient, 20 years after its initial release Erasure remains one of the American literary giant's most striking and beloved works. In 2023, it was adapted by Cord Jefferson as a film titled American Fiction, starring Jeffrey Wright.Monk is also slowly losing his mother to Altzheimer's disease, played out in tragic / comic scenes that were utterly devastating to read. What we do have in American Fiction in place of all that literary history and critical bickering is an impressive depiction of the writing process, this strange ventriloquism of inventing fictional characters and putting words in their mouths.

A frustrated author and professor whose name pays homage to two Black American legends — author Ralph Ellison and jazz pianist and composer Thelonious Monk — the middle-aged and aptly nicknamed "Monk" is a man of uncompromising artistic standards and dwindling financial prospects.Is a black artist black, then an artist, an artist, then black, or is this just a dumb ass question that people need to finally stop asking? Victims shouldn’t take them personally, contend the perpetrators; such behaviour is the consequence of multi-cultural society and must be tolerated. Hailed as an authentic representation of the African American experience, the book is a national bestseller and its author feted on the Kenya Dunston television show.