Kinohi Nishikawa

Melvin Van Peebles remembers that it was 1963 or 1964 when his boss at the weekly news magazine France-O bservateur assigned him to do a story on someone “who had just won some big French crime writing prize.” That someone happened to be another Black American writer living in Paris, Chester Himes—although he had won the Grand prix de littérature policière in 1958, not recently. The award honored For Love of Imabelle (1957),

© 2019 Johns Hopkins University Press The endpapers of Liesl Olson’s new book are disorienting. We see a map of a city bisected by lines and organized into grids. Heavier lines punctuated by circles indicate public transportation routes and their stops. A jagged shoreline appears at the bottom, cutting off the geometric exactness of the lines. But the lines grow less dense toward the top of the papers, indicating where the suburbs begin (or end) on the map. In the lower nook of the binding...