“Inside the Catastrophe Itself”: Reviewing Danielle Evans’s new fiction collection

for America magazine:

…Evans has noticed how many of our current conflicts center on how to understand, heal from, punish, honor or make amends for past actions, from “cancel culture” to the freelance demolition of Confederate memorials to the #MeToo movement. In this collection, we meet a white girl who “goes viral” after posing in a bikini with a Confederate flag pattern, an artist who may have realized that shifting cultural sands have turned him from lothario into abuser, and two Black women who take opposing approaches to the rectification of public historical falsehoods. These are stories of forged IDs and dubious death certificates, of the aggression lurking in apologies and the truth hidden in disproven accusations. If they sometimes seem a touch too blatantly ripped from the headlines, that is likely because the headlines nowadays reflect Evans’s own concerns.

more (and there was a paragraph here about a possible lineage of Black writing which explores the boundary between documentary/archive/nonfiction and imagination/creation/fiction, which got cut due to space constraints but which will turn up in my next newsletter)