A young Black girl dreams big in Mecca Jamilah Sullivan’s lyrical new novel.

On this week’s episode, Mecca Jamilah Sullivan discusses Big Girl (Liveright, July 12), “a lyrical and important coming-of-age novel” set in 1990s Harlem, centering on a young Black girl who “learns—and redefines—what it means to take up space” (Kirkus). Sullivan is the author of The Poetics of Difference: Queer Feminist Forms in the African Diaspora (Univ. of Illinois) and the short story collection Blue Talk and Love (Riverdale Avenue Books), an associate professor of English at Georgetown University, and a proud Harlem native.

Here’s a bit more from Kirkus’ review of Big Girl: “Eight-year-old Malaya Clondon weighs 168 pounds. It’s also true that she is Black, that her family recently moved from a tiny apartment on the Lower East Side to a brownstone uptown, and that she attends Galton Elementary Academy for the Gifted, but her weight seems to be the most important fact about her to most of the people around her.…Sullivan writes with tenderness and uses the language of poetry to communicate her protagonist’s inner life. In difficult moments, Malaya escapes into fantasy, and she uses drawing and painting as emotional outlets. But what begins as dissociation evolves into a more confident relationship with her art, just as Malaya will ultimately learn to inhabit her body with a sense of license and possibility.”

Sullivan introduces Big Girl as a novel about “Black women, Black girls, Black, queer people, and women in general” and “the paths we…find ways to make space for our bodies and for ourselves.” She and host Megan Labrise talk about unforgettable main character Malaya Clondon; how Malaya’s Harlem changes over the course of the novel; the deep relationship between place and identity; how girls learn the “rules” of womanhood; how the pandemic changed reading; writing from a limited third-person perspective; how music pervades all of Sullivan’s work; Lambda Literary’s LGBTQ Writers in Schools program; and much more.

Then editors Mahnaz Dar, Eric Liebetrau, and Laurie Muchnick share their top picks in books for the week.

Editors’ Picks:

Jigsaw by Bob Graham (Candlewick)

Endless Forms: The Secret World of Wasps by Seirian Sumner (Harper/HarperCollins)

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin (Knopf)

Also mentioned on this episode:

The Last Beekeeper by Pablo Cartaya (Harper/HarperCollins)

The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival by John Vaillant (Vintage)

No Beast So Fierce: The Terrifying True Story of the Champawat Tiger, the Deadliest Animal in History by Dane Huckelbridge (Morrow/HarperCollins)

Big Cats by Tyus D. Williams (Neon Squid/Macmillan)

Rabbits by Terry Miles (Del Rey)

Fathoms: The World in the Whale by Rebecca Giggs (Simon & Schuster)

Thanks to our advertisers:

She Who Rides Horses by Sarah V. Barnes

Circle of Ash by Sterling Magleby

Nimue: Freeing Merlin by Ayn Cates Sullivan, PhD

From Shreds to Riches by David Fisher and Cal Orey

Fully Booked is produced by Cabel Adkins Audio and Megan Labrise.