NewPages Blog

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

Theresa Runstedtler digs deep into the NBA of the 1970s to show how a group of African American basketball players brought a new style of play to the sport, honed on playgrounds rather than high school and college gyms, where white players trained. More importantly, though, she shows how these same athletes stood up to the white owners and coaches, bringing lawsuits against them when necessary, to carve out more freedom and agency for the players. Those owners had almost full control of players in the 1960s, dictating who could play for which team when and limiting player salaries and the almost non-existent benefits. One player after another, though, began to push back against that control, winning one court battle after another, while also bringing a different style of play to the courts. Near the end of the book, Runstedtler shows how these changes reinvented the NBA and led to the strong performances of the 1990s and early 2000s, but also to the more politically outspoken players of more recent years. Runstedtler brings her experience as a Toronto Raptors dancer and scholar and professor of African American history to create a readable, insightful look at an important decade of development in Black activism and labor history.

Black Ball: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Spencer Haywood, and the Generation That Saved the Soul of the NBA by Theresa Runstedtler. Bold Type Books, March 2023.

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite or kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.

Guest Post by Colm McKenna

Lizzie Davis’ translation of Juan Cárdenas’ The Devil of the Provinces is a middle finger to literary categorization; mixing elements of both horror and thriller, Cárdenas’ novel plays with conventions of both classifications, while further blurring the lines between genre and literary fiction.

The story follows a failed biologist returning to his hometown. There are some deceptively lighthearted moments early on, mostly musings about the emotional repercussions attached to going back home. A clinical fatalism is always leaking under the surface though, pulling the masks off the comforts a small town and a quiet life seem to bring: “do nothing but wander from end to end, go up and come down, out and in, open and close the fridge door, sometimes lie in front of the TV. Pure actions… completely devoid of intention.”

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

Jeff Boyd’s debut novel, The Weight, follows Julian as his life slowly begins to fall apart. The woman he’s been sleeping with is now engaged to somebody else; he’s working a job at a call center where the best way to advance in the company is to lead the morning prayer; he’s a drummer in a band that doesn’t seem to have much of a future; he’s one of a very few Black people in Portland. As the novel progresses, though, he slowly begins to learn how to put his life together, partly driven by a late-night encounter with a woman who reads him the entirety of The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy, a novella she believes he needs to hear then and there. The only complaint I have with the novel is that, like many first novels, Boyd wraps the ending up too neatly: people remain friends when perhaps they shouldn’t, and they reconcile every problem, at least superficially. Despite that complaint, Julian and his friends are an enjoyable group to spend time with, even when they’re making decisions the reader (and everybody else in the novel) knows are choices that will lead them in the wrong direction, at least until the end.

The Weight by Jeff Boyd. Simon and Schuster, April 2023.

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite or kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

In Kevin Jared Hosein’s Hungry Ghosts, Hans Saroop is a hard-working husband and father in 1940s Trinidad. Unfortunately, that work doesn’t get him much money and results in even less social status. He and his family, as well as their friends, live in the Barrack, a pieced-together building with a roof that leaks so often they don’t bother to patch it and walls so thin everybody knows what is happening—for good and ill—in everybody’s lives. Above them, both literally and metaphorically, live Dalton and Marlee Changoor, a couple who have everything those in the Barrack wish they had. Hans and two of his friends work for the Changoors, a proximity that will lead to one crisis after another, revealing the temptation of power and the realities of poverty and lack of social standing. As the title conveys, there are characters who only live in the most literal sense, while those who are dead continue to affect the living, with no respite from their haunting. Hanging over the entire novel is the threat of violence that seems embedded in the nation’s history, especially the colonization and domination of the country that continues to weave its way through the residents’ lives, just waiting for the moment to return in full force.

Hungry Ghosts by Kevin Jared Hosein. Ecco, February 2023.

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite or kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.