McSweeney’s is launching a new series of books that aims to “illuminate 20th-century Black voices that we know will resonate deeply and differently in the contemporary world,” the publisher said in a news release.
The series, called “Of the Diaspora,” will kick off next year with a reissue of Tragic Magic by Wesley Brown. The 1978 novel, edited by Toni Morrison when she was an editor at Random House, tells the story of a Black man imprisoned for being a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War. Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy, will write a foreword for the book.
McSweeney’s announced two more books that will be published next year: Paule Marshall’s novel Praisesong for the Widow, originally published in 1982, and Captioning the Archives, a collaboration between photographer Lester Sloan and his daughter, essayist Aisha Sabatini Sloan.
The series is the brainchild of Erica Vital-Lazare, a creative writing professor at the College of Southern Nevada. “We hope to have gathered a cross-section of stories that take us back and slingshot us forward, so that we meet ourselves as mothers and fathers, lovers and leavers, historians and schemers, pilots and pirates, violinists and conduits of violence, astronomers and crash survivors eternally, and alternately, revisiting and loosing ourselves from the vast ship where so many of our bodies were held,” Vital-Lazare said.
The first book in the series, Tragic Magic, is slated for publication on Feb. 23, 2021, with Praisesong for the Widow following on March 23 and Captioning the Archives on Sept. 21.
Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.
