Black Talk, Black Feeling: Fiction Roundtable

In the second installment of Black Talk, Black Feeling, we spoke with Namwali Serpell, author of 2019’s award-winning debut novel The Old Drift (and Ismail’s very patient dissertation advisor); Brit Bennett, author of the New York Times #1 bestseller The Vanishing Half; and Whiting Award-winning author Brontez Purnell, whose story collection 100 Boyfriends is forthcoming from FSG. Our conversation started off in momentous fashion: Brit’s book had just climbed to the top of the Times’ bestseller list, and Brontez had finished his graduate program at Cal Berkeley and was celebrating his birthday. The jubilant energy set the tone for a discussion that was both lighthearted and probing. We delved into questions about what it feels like to write fiction at a time when Black fiction writers’ work is in danger (as ever) of being treated as sociology, the meaning of timeliness for work that is never actually timely, how writers balance the market against aesthetic aspiration, whether there is space for b/Black humor amid today’s political climate, and so much more. We hope you enjoy it.