John Livesey is a PhD candidate at University College London specializing in the work of James Baldwin. His writing has appeared in the Guardian, Little White Lies, and the Oxford Review of Books.
For over a decade, Édouard Louis has been one of France’s most perceptive writers on his country’s working class. But as he has drifted away from this milieu, he has swapped clear-eyed analysis for cliché-ridden romanticization of the suffering poor.
The defining feature of the last decade was that everything, from food to music, was politicized. All the while, our capacity to act collectively only grew weaker. Anton Jäger’s Hyperpolitics sets out to explain why.
James Baldwin shaped a generation of American writers, many of whom later dismissed his humanistic outlook as naive. Today he is once again celebrated, but a new biography shows that his life was more complex than his viral fame suggests.