Matt Snee is a writer based in Phoenix, Arizona.
Currently reading – A Raisin in the Sun, by Lorraine Hansberry. Born in 1930, Hansberry was the first African-American playwright to have a play performed on Broadway. Had she not died of pancreatic cancer at age 34, there is no telling what she could have accomplished.
Currently reading – The Pugilist at Rest, by Thom Jones. Born in 1945, Jones was an American writer. This collection of short stories, his first book, was nominated for the National Book Award in 1993. Jones died in 2016.
Currently reading – Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity, by Porochista Khakpour. Born in Tehran in 1978, Khakpour is an Iranian-American writer whose family fled Iran for Southern California when she was a child.
Currently reading – Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, a play by Tony Kushner. Born in 1956, Kushner is a Pulitzer Prize winning playwright and a recipient of the National Medal of Arts. Watching “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” got me started thinking about plays.
Currently reading – Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty, by Jacqueline Rose. Born in 1949, Rose is a British academic focused on the relationships between psychoanalysis, feminism and literature. This book examines the pressures and cruelties society inflicts upon mothers.
Currently reading – Saga, Volumes 6 and 7, by Fiona Staples and Brian K. Vaughan. Fiona Staples is an Eisner Award winning Canadian artist and Brian K. Vaughan is an Eisner Award winning writer. Almost done with this series.
Currently reading – The Sellout, by Paul Beatty. Beatty is an American writer born in 1962. This comic novel, about a man who tries to reinstitute segregation in Los Angeles and keep a slave in a debacle that ends up in the Supreme Court, won the Man Booker Prize in 2016 – the first American novel to do so.
Currently reading – You Must Change Your Life: The Story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin, by Rachel Corbett. Born in 1984, Corbett is an American writer and journalist. This book is about the life changing friendship between the older sculptor Rodin and the young poet Rilke.
Currently reading – Exhalation: Stories, by Ted Chiang. Born in 1967, Chiang is an award-winning science fiction writer, and some of his stories have been adapted into Hollywood films.
Currently reading – Kant’s Little Prussian Head & Other Reasons Why I Write, by Claire Messud. Born in 1966, Messud is an American novelist. This book consists of essays about books that have effected Messud’s writing and her life.
