American Fiction
Story Stream
Satire’s Trojan Horse June 21, 2024
Writer and professor Thelonious “Monk” Ellison has a successful yet dysfunctional Black family. So dysfunctional that after he’s chastised at an emergency faculty meeting for tormenting his undergraduate students by exposing them to a short story by ...
The Novel Has a Problem With Fat People June 10, 2024
I can’t pinpoint exactly when I began to see fatphobia everywhere in American fiction. It did not come all at once, but little by little. I saw it when I was in graduate school and a man turned in a story where a boy looks at a fat girl and thinks no...
The Duplicity of Percival Everett’s Literary Worlds April 08, 2024
The name of Percival Everett’s twelfth novel Erasure (2001), upon which last year’s American Fiction, the debut film by Cord Jefferson is based, is ambiguous in ways that may not immediately seem obvious. A whole industry exists to draw attention to ...
Is Black Trauma Porn Over? March 12, 2024
Monk Ellison, a struggling black college professor, writes My Pafology as a prank: the stereotype-laden novel is a clapback at the publishers who equate “Black stories” with tropes of poverty, brutality, and violence.But the joke, as it turns out, is...
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men—Or Not March 08, 2024
The year 2023 was a good one for movies, the best in several years at a minimum. All of Us Strangers, American Fiction, Anatomy of a Fall, May December, Perfect Days, The Boy and the Heron, and The Zone of Interest are all films that are going to sta...
An Encore for Italian-American Fiction March 04, 2024
A LITTLE OVER A CENTURY AGO, on Good Friday 1923, New York City firemen worked frantically to clear the rubble of a tenement that had collapsed, trapping over a dozen laborers in its basement. Father Patrick O’Connor, the fire department’s chaplain, ...
‘American Fiction’ and the Wet Eyes of the Sentimentalist February 20, 2024
We tell ourselves stories to feed our delusions. It’s an ugly world out there, and so many Americans prefer the easy way out. We genuflect to the guru and the influencer; we admire the charlatans who can captivate a crowd and turn a quick buck. We pr...
The Problem with 'American Fiction' February 07, 2024
Like many theatergoers and critics, I found much to admire in Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction. Having read Percival Everett’s Erasure several years before, I was excited to see how such a wonderfully acidic novel was adapted for the screen. And unl...
The Cynical In-Joke of ‘American Fiction’ January 31, 2024
In recent decades, the American culture industry has been fixated on the need to lift up “POC voices”—so long as these voices tell a particular type of story focused on marginality, deprivation, and oppression. The Oscar-nominated, critically acclaim...
Bestseller Reparations January 25, 2024
On January 23rd, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced that Cord Jefferson’s debut film, American Fiction, has been nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Adapted Screenplay. Jefferson’s fi...
