I started Taproot with what can only be described as a flurry (the posts, all available for free, were an interview with Joshua Cohen, a list of Godard quotations on the occasion of his death, and an obituary-of-sorts of Hilary Mantel). I have since been engaged on a few projects and haven’t posted anything in a while. I hope to get back into it soon.
In the meantime here’s a link to my latest article, which concerns the American writer Percival Everett and appears in November 3, 2022 edition of the London Review of Books. I’ve also put a list of some of the interesting stuff I encountered along the way (apart from Everett’s many books) and quote, cite, or allude to in the piece. . .
Piece
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n21/leo-robson/i-m-getting-out-of-here
Stuff I read
James Baldwin, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” Zero, no.1 (Spring 1949), collected in
J.M. Coetzee, review of John Noyes’s Colonial Space: Spatiality in the Discourse of German South West Africa 1884-1915 in Research in African Literatures, Summer, 1994, Vol. 25, No. 2, Special Issue: Caribbean Literature (Summer, 1994), pp. 169-172
– ‘The Novel Today’, Upstream 6, no. 1 (Summer 1988)
Ralph Ellison, “The World and the Jug,” New Leader 46, December 9, 1963, collected in Shadow and Act, 1964
Percival Everett, “Signing to the Blind,” Callaloo , Winter, 1991, Vol. 14, No. 1 (Winter, 1991), pp.9-11
– introduction to The Jefferson Bible, 2004
Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, 1957
Henry Louis Gates Jr, “Preface to Blackness: Text and Pretext,” 1978
Nora Zeale Hurston, “What White Publishers Won’t Print,” Negro Digest, 1950
Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind, 1949