Racism

Show Don’t Tell, a collection of 12 short stories by the American writer Curtis Sittenfeld, explores marriage, sex, money, racism, literature and friendship from the 1990s to the present. There is a fine line here between memoir and fiction, with many of the female protagonists being Midwestern, bookish Democrats – quite like Sittenfeld herself. In the eponymous story, Ruthie, a writer, dismisses the notion that ‘women’s fiction’ is perceived as giving off ‘the vibe of ten-year-old girls at a slumber party’. She reflects on internalised misogyny: ‘It took a long time, but eventually I stopped seeing women as inherently ridiculous.

Jonathan Meades is, you might say, a baroque artist in a mannerist age. Whereas today’s younger and more widely feted writers think small – a Brooklyn sublet, a Camden Town love nest, the cracked mirror of the self – Meades goes big. And not just in physical terms (Empty Wigs tips the scales at nearly 3lb), but in scope. Where his contemporaries’ prose can be affectless and somehow skinless (a Paris Review interviewer said of Rachel Cusk, with apparent admiration, that her writing ‘feels contemporary, swift and “clean”’), Meades piles on the style, packing in metaphors, coinages and allusions until the crystals can’t take it, swooping between social classes, doing the police in different voices.

There is something wonderful about a novel being rescued from obscurity. Robert Plunket’s My Search for Warren Harding was first published in 1983, given a few decent reviews and then disappeared. Occasionally admirers – including rather influential ones like Amy Sedaris and Larry David – would lend a weathered copy to friends, insisting they read it. And so here we are. Elliot Weiner, a third-rate academic (in fact the word ‘academic’ barely seems to apply), hears that Rebekah Kinney, a former mistress of Warren G. Harding, president of the United States from 1921 to 1923, is living in a decrepit mansion in Los Angeles.

Richard Price’s tenth novel follows four characters in the wake of a tenement building collapse in Harlem that kills six people and leaves others missing. Detective Mary Roe is on a mission to find a missing resident whose wife was among the dead. Royal Davis is a funeral home director hoping to drum up much-needed business from the tragedy, going so far as to dispatch his young son to hand out business cards at the site. Felix Pearl is a freelance photographer searching for meaning as he documents the aftermath. The titular resurrected man is Anthony Carter, a 42-year-old former schoolteacher, six months clean of a cocaine addiction that has cost him his job and relationship with his wife and stepdaughter.

Wagner’s Ring is an ambitious cycle of four operas relating world history from Primal Swirl to End of Days. It took 26 years to write, takes 15 hours to perform, a double-size orchestra to play and a specially built opera house to stage. Michael Downes, the director of music at St Andrews University, places the fons et origo of the epic in Wagner’s frustration as a kapellmeister, when he wrote, unsolicited, to his boss the King of Saxony, proposing a total revamp of the royal music scene. No reply was forthcoming. A second proposal was also blanked. Furious, Wagner flung himself into the Dresden uprising of 1848, financing the manufacture of hand grenades and giving bloodthirsty speeches from the barricades.

Eliza Clark’s first novel, Boy Parts, centred on a self-destructive woman taking explicit photographs of men. Her second, Penance, was about a journalist constructing a ‘definitive account’ of a seaside murder. Last year she was named one of Granta’s best young novelists; but she has now produced a sadly uneven short story collection. These 11 tales do not hang together thematically, aside from a broad emphasis on the corporeal. The good ones are full of brio: ‘The Shadow Over Little Chitaly’ is composed entirely of hilarious reviews of a takeway that offers Chinese food alongside pizza. The feedback is bizarre from the start: the first mentions that the restaurant is 125 miles away and the customer complains that they rang 117 times for a refund.

They were known as song catchers: New York-based chancers with recording equipment packed in the back of the van, heading south in search of hill country music that could make the record company (and, relatively, the recorder) rich. The singer would get a flat fee of $30. Among themselves, over a beer, the catchers called it panning for gold, diving for pearls, trapping fireflies in a jar. Their territory was the far beyond, where ‘people played banjos and fiddles, washboards and dulcimers… Songs poured through the hills like migrating salmon.

For many years the academic sociologist Frank Furedi has been among the strongest conservative voices in the front line of the culture wars. The target of his latest book is the systematic campaign to discredit the history of the West in the interest of a modern political agenda. The vandalising of statues, the ‘decolonisation’ of institutions and curricula, the recasting of museums and the rearrangement of libraries are all symptoms of something more fundamental. Furedi argues that historical memory is the foundation of western identity and culture. The object of the campaigners is to discredit the West’s ideals and achievements.

Huddie Ledbetter, better known by the prison moniker Lead Belly, was a musical genius born in the southern United States just as Jim Crow laws were starting to bite. He fell foul of an unapologetically racist legal system and ended up serving on a chain gang in 1915, later doing time in state penitentiaries in Texas (1918-25), Louisiana (1930-34) and at Rikers Island in New York (1939). Sheila Curran Bernard takes as her focus the years 1933 to 1935 when, after years of imprisonment, Ledbetter took an academic, John Lomax, to be his manager and organise his entrance into the larger musical world of northern America.