This universality woven into pure dreck makes reading it seductive and gives credence to what then happens to it publicly. Though he's facing a barrage of bad news, it's the wild commercial and critical success of a book that resembles a Mad Libs of stereotypical racial pathologies that finally sets Monk off. The title perhaps answers any question before it is raised, making it in some sense an anti-title, but a title nonetheless, thus offering the suggestion of negation. Everett left no stone unturned in his scathing takedown and mockery of the publishing world and how they commodify Black voices (and I’m picking up on a meta vibe). Scathing, funny, and prescient, 20 years after its initial release Erasure remains one of the American literary giant's most striking and beloved works.

So even as the reader is laughing and/or cringing at the exaggerated stereotypes (chapter titles written: Won, Too, Free . But let’s completely zero in on this one: ERASURE is an intelligent balance between satire, farce, social commentary, and domestic drama. But when his agent sends this literary indictment (included here in its entirety) out to publishers, it is greeted as an authentic new voice of black America. Prejudice is not an expression of culture, it is an attack on possibility that all culture is relative. People might already understand that, say, writing a negative review of Go Set a Watchman is NOT, in fact, tantamount to elder abuse*, because that's a term that means chaining your granny to the radiator, not doing your job as a reviewer by writing about a much-talked about piece of published fiction.Amusing, perhaps, only to an academic with a sense of humor, but I’d like to have five dollars for every befuddled intellectual who put shoulder to the wheel and tried to make sense of the nonsense.

It is a failed conception, an unformed fetus, seed cast into the sand, a hand without fingers, a word with no vowels. Moreover, these moments of interiority show that race really isn’t all that important to the Ellisons when they’re alone together and relate to one another as family members, not as Black people burdened with representing the race in public in front of prying white eyes, as they do in a galling scene showing them scattering Lisa’s ashes on the beach; a white male neighbor interrupts the moment to grill them about whether they have a permit to do so.It’s the story of Van Go Jenkins, tough-talking, 19-year-old father of four babies by four different mothers. There is a certain “smartest person in the room” quality to his books, which can also be very sharp and amusing.