Between the World and Me Ta-Nehisi Coates Published by Spiegel & Grau July 14, 2015 ABOUT THE BOOK “This is your country, this is your world, this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it.” In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation’s history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of “race,” a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men—bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden? Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s attempt to answer these...

Looking ahead to Halloween, a holiday I love by the way, we're writing about fear on the Blood-Red Pencil all this month. This is a time we think about all the things that used to scare us on All-Hallows Eve - ghosts and goblins and witches and now zombies – as well as other things that grab us by the throat and hold us immobile. Jason wrote about his fear of being able to get back to writing after the birth of his child in a two-part series that began with Fear Beyond Words . An apt title for a topic to which those of us who juggled kids and words can relate. Will we ever have time to write again? However, that is not what I want to write about in this post today. A Facebook friend recently advised me to be cautious about what I post on social media that could be controversial, such as political issues, as it may not help my career to get in the middle of contentious debates. Not that I want to get in the middle of an ongoing rant, but I do like to speak my mind, and perhap...