wayward lives beautiful experiments sparknotes

* Lynn Nottage, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Sweat and Ruined *įantastic, really amazing. In her impeccably researched new book, Hartman breathes glorious life into these true survival tales with the precision and invention of a master storyteller. Wayward Lives is a series of adventure stories that take the reader through the travails and triumphs of a multitude of black women, as they negotiate the perilous path of self-discovery at the turn of the twentieth century. With urgency and compassion, Hartman rescues the lives of young black women from the margins of history. * Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow * Yet now, Hartman challenges us to see, finally, who they really were: beautiful, complex, and multidimensional-whole people - who dared to live by their own rules, somehow making a way out of no way at all. These remarkable black women were shamed, scorned, criminalized, studied, diagnosed and then erased from history. Wayward Lives is a startling, dazzling act of resurrection. * Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts * a beautiful experiment in its own right, to be set beside the many attempts at living free that Hartman here chronicles with a keen sense of history, imagination, and love. Parul Sehgal * New York Times *Īmbitious, original. rigor and restraint give her writing its distinctive electricity and tension.This kind of beautiful, immersive narration exists for its own sake but it also counteracts the most common depictions of black urban life from this time. This is scholarship as art * New Inquiry *Įxhilarating.A rich resurrection of a forgotten history. Leslie Jamison * New York Times Book Review *

mode is intimate, radical and always alive to the details. I was inspired, surprised and deeply moved. She basically invents a new genre - Carmen Maria Machado * New Statesman * Infuses the history of black women and queer radicals with incredible life and urgency.

She's a theorist and writer who actually changes what's possible in my thought patterns - Claudia Rankine One of our most brilliant contemporary thinkers.

Wayward lives beautiful experiments sparknotes