is the recipient of two Hopwood Awards, among other prizes. Her writing has appeared in Ploughshares and the South Carolina Review. She worked in publicity at BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music) and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and is now a senior publicist at Dutton, Plume, and Tiny Reparations Books. Originally from St. Louis, she lives in Brooklyn.
Morrow's new novel is Little Movements.
At Lit Hub she tagged eight books that "explore performance in various ways—its power and pressures—beautifully exposing the talent and vulnerability of the characters, and turning the reader into an audience member, eager to give a standing ovation." One title on the list:
Zadie Smith, Swing TimeRead about another novel on Morrow's list.
Two young biracial women meet in a London dance class as girls—Tracey is the more technically talented, while the unnamed narrator has an emotive voice and big ideas about race and the world. While performance is a major part of their lives individually—Tracey becoming a chorus line dancer, the narrator becoming an assistant to a pop star—a performance element that is particularly striking here is the way Smith traces dance from past to present, from Africa through the diaspora. Readers are given a taste of everyone from Michael Jackson (an ongoing motif throughout the novel and self-described “slave to the rhythm”) to the Nicholas Brothers to a Kankurang dancers of West Africa (“the greatest dancer I ever saw”). I could go on forever about the layers of Black performance here—it’s, unsurprisingly, a stunner.
Swing Time is among Amanda Brainerd's eight books to take you back to the 1980s and Robert Haller's six top novels that reference pop music.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
