Afro-Centered Futurisms: A vibrant and approachable book by award-winning authors of black speculative fiction
an essay by Eugen Bacon
It started with a read: Literary Afrofuturism in the Twenty-First Century by Isiah Lavender III and Lisa Yaszek (eds), published by Ohio State University Press. I put down this book and contemplated it.
Chapter 37
Hans wasn’t the same after the funeral. He’d died too in some deep hidden place.
The past week I was gaining so much instruction on our walks but every morning he looked a little paler, a little weaker.
Hans drank wine every night and didn’t touch his food.
Composer Erland Cooper did something unexpected with the recordings that would become his new album Carve the Runes Then Be Content With Silence: he buried them. For several years, in fact, until they were discovered by someone who’d followed the clues Cooper had left to the master tapes’ location. The result is a gorgous, melancholic array of music, interspersed with poetry and given a more textured quality from their time underground. I spoke with Cooper about this unusual process and the role of collaboration in his work.
Chapter 36
All black tents and black chairs.
Rain.
While the list of attendees was large in size and scope, it was a complete secret to anyone not invited. There was no media coverage whatsoever. The founders of every major publishing platform on the planet came in droves in total silence. The forest surrounding the estate was ghostlike, veiled in a hissing mist.
Today, we’re pleased to present an excerpt from Manu Larcenet’s graphic novel adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Its path to publication was somewhat unorthodox: Larcenet, a winner of multiple awards at the Angoulême International Comics Festival over the years, wrote to McCarthy seeking his approval for the project. (It worked.)
“I loved The Road for the atmosphere it creates. Most likely because I enjoy drawing the snow, the chilling winds, the dark clouds, the sizzling rain, tangles and snags, rust, and the damp and the humidity,” Larcenet wrote. I draw violence and kindness, wild animals, dirty skin, pits, and stagnant water. I enjoy the contrast between the characters and their environment, and as conceited as it may sound, I feel like I’m up to the task.”
“He pitches as though he’s double parked.”
-Pitcher Bob Gibson as described by announcer Vin Scully
***
Singer and guitarist Black Joe Lewis opens the show with the briefest of introductions:
“We’ve been playing like this for a while. Hope you like it. We’re not going to stop for a while.”
Moments later, he is torching the joint, soaring through an extended instrumental break, not fast or flashy, but somehow making it feel as if he’s propelled us to the middle of the set, skipping the warm up songs that bands and audiences use to acclimate, suss each other out. Lewis and his band, the Honeybears, get to the flow so quickly I lose track of conventional markers such as time and lyrics and song structures. Are they purposefully steering away from those elements in order to generate a different kind of energy? Or are they simply ready to roll, like Bob Gibson?
I’m not sure when I first picked up In the Book of Bad Ideas, the 2023 album from Ohio’s Smug Brothers, but the album made a huge impression on me from the outset. It abounds with the sort of off-kilter indie rock that’s both viscerally satisfying and singularly compelling. In advance of a tour that will bring them to Brooklyn (Young Ethel’s on November 9!), I spoke with singer-guitarist Kyle Melton about the band’s new EP, Another Bar Behind the Night, their penchant for collage, and the works of Italo Calvino.
We’re pleased to present an excerpt from the second volume of The Golem of Venice Beach, a graphic novel from writer Chanan Beizer and artist Vanessa Cardinali. There’s a Kickstarter campaign up and running as of now for the graphic novel; besides Cardinali, a host of other writers is also contributing to the volume, including Frank Quitely, Nick Dragotta, Dean Haspiel, Stan Sakai, Howard Chaykin, and Juan José Ryp.