Margo Jefferson

'Jefferson's eye for details yields some devastatingly honest and painful insights' The Times 'Captivating... Charm is this book's watchword' Colin Grant, Guardian The daughter of a successful paediatrician and a fashionable socialite, Margo Jefferson spent her childhood among Chicago's black elite. She calls this society 'Negroland': 'a small region of Negro America where residents were sheltered by a certain amount of privilege and plenty'. With privilege came expectation. Reckoning with the limits and demands of Negroland at crucial historical moments - the civil rights movement, the dawn of feminism, the fallacy of post-racial America - Jefferson brilliantly charts the twists and turns of a life informed by psychological and moral contradictions. Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. 'Negroland is a sharp-eyed cultural commentary on an era of America that has often been too simply told' Aminatta Forna, Guardian 'Jefferson writes with piercing clarity of a childhood which was full of love and opportunity at home, but also saturated by contradictions, confusions and a racism which corrodes, like rust, to the heart's core' Observer 'Utterly compelling... a remarkable achievement' Sunday Times

När Gwendolyn Brooks 1950 tilldelades Pulitzerpriset för sin andra diktsamling var hon den första afrikan-amerikanen som mottog det. Tre år senare utkom "Maud Martha", hennes enda roman. Nu kommer den för första gången på svenska.Maud Martha Brown är en liten flicka som växer upp på sydsidan i tjugotalets Chicago. Bland ruffiga krogar och förvildade bakgårdar drömmer hon: om New York, romantik, sin framtid. Hon beundrar maskrosor, lär sig dricka kaffe, förälskar sig, inreder sin kokvrålägenhet, hör föredrag på universitetsområdet, tar ur en kyckling, köper hattar, föder ett barn. Men hennes mer ljushyade make när också drömmar: om Foxy Cats Club, andra kvinnor.Och "skärvorna av förstummat hat" - när en säljare säger ett visst ord, det där biobesöket, grymheten hos en varuhustomte - är hela tiden närvarande."Maud Martha" är ett djärvt poetiskt kollage och ett enastående porträtt av ett vanligt liv: ett liv levt i vishet, humor, protest, vrede, värdighet och glädje.

WINNER OF THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023 FROM THE PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING CRITIC AND ACCLAIMED AUTHOR OF NEGROLAND 'This is one of the most imaginative - and therefore moving - memoirs I have ever read' - Vivian Gornick, author of Fierce Attachments Margo Jefferson boldly and brilliantly fuses cultural analysis and memoir to probe race, class, family and art. Taking in the jazz and blues icons whom Jefferson idolised as a child in the 1950s, ideas of what the female body could be - as incarnated by trailblazing Black dancers and athletes - Harriet Beecher Stowe's Topsy reimagined in the artworks of Kara Walker, white supremacy in the novels of Willa Cather, and more, this breathtakingly eloquent account is both a critique and a vindication of the constructed self. 'Margo Jefferson's Constructing a Nervous System is as electric as its title suggests. It takes vital risks, tosses away rungs of the ladder as it climbs, and offers an indispensable, rollicking account of the enchantments, pleasures, costs, and complexities of "imagin[ing] and interpret[ing] what had not imagined you' - Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts 'If you want to know who we are and where we've been, read Margo Jefferson' - Edmund White, author of A Previous Life 'This is a moving portrait of the life of a brilliant African American woman's mind. Margo Jefferson is so real, her sensibility so literary, her learning such a joy. The gifts of reading her are many' - Darryl Pinckney, author of Sold and Gone

A NEW YORK TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR - From "one of our most nuanced thinkers on the intersections of race, class, and feminism" (Cathy Park Hong, New York Times bestselling author of Minor Feelings) comes a memoir "as electric as the title suggests" (Maggie Nelson, author of On Freedom). A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times, TIME Magazine, Oprah Daily, The New Yorker, Washington Post, Vulture, Buzzfeed, Publishers WeeklyThe Pulitzer Prize-winning critic and memoirist Margo Jefferson has lived in the thrall of a cast of others--her parents and maternal grandmother, jazz luminaries, writers, artists, athletes, and stars. These are the figures who thrill and trouble her, and who have made up her sense of self as a person and as a writer. In her much-anticipated follow-up to Negroland, Jefferson brings these figures to life in a memoir of stunning originality, a performance of the elements that comprise and occupy the mind of one of our foremost critics. In Constructing a Nervous System, Jefferson shatters her self into pieces and recombines them into a new and vital apparatus on the page, fusing the criticism that she is known for, fragments of the family members she grieves for, and signal moments from her life, as well as the words of those who have peopled her past and accompanied her in her solitude, dramatized here like never before. Bing Crosby and Ike Turner are among the author's alter egos. The sounds of a jazz LP emerge as the intimate and instructive sounds of a parent's voice. W. E. B. Du Bois and George Eliot meet illicitly. The muscles and movements of a ballerina are spliced with those of an Olympic runner, becoming a template for what a black female body can be. The result is a wildly innovative work of depth and stirring beauty. It is defined by fractures and dissonance, longing and ecstasy, and a persistent searching. Jefferson interrogates her own self as well as the act of writing memoir, and probes the fissures at the center of American cultural life.

A NEW YORK TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR - From "one of our most nuanced thinkers on the intersections of race, class, and feminism" (Cathy Park Hong, New York Times bestselling author of Minor Feelings) comes a memoir "as electric as the title suggests" (Maggie Nelson, author of On Freedom). A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times, TIME Magazine, Oprah Daily, The New Yorker, Washington Post, Vulture, Buzzfeed, Publishers WeeklyThe Pulitzer Prize-winning critic and memoirist Margo Jefferson has lived in the thrall of a cast of others--her parents and maternal grandmother, jazz luminaries, writers, artists, athletes, and stars. These are the figures who thrill and trouble her, and who have made up her sense of self as a person and as a writer. In her much-anticipated follow-up to Negroland, Jefferson brings these figures to life in a memoir of stunning originality, a performance of the elements that comprise and occupy the mind of one of our foremost critics. In Constructing a Nervous System, Jefferson shatters her self into pieces and recombines them into a new and vital apparatus on the page, fusing the criticism that she is known for, fragments of the family members she grieves for, and signal moments from her life, as well as the words of those who have peopled her past and accompanied her in her solitude, dramatized here like never before. Bing Crosby and Ike Turner are among the author's alter egos. The sounds of a jazz LP emerge as the intimate and instructive sounds of a parent's voice. W. E. B. Du Bois and George Eliot meet illicitly. The muscles and movements of a ballerina are spliced with those of an Olympic runner, becoming a template for what a black female body can be. The result is a wildly innovative work of depth and stirring beauty. It is defined by fractures and dissonance, longing and ecstasy, and a persistent searching. Jefferson interrogates her own self as well as the act of writing memoir, and probes the fissures at the center of American cultural life.

Michael Jackson: provocateur, icon, enigma. Who was he, really? And how does his spectacular rise, his catastrophic fall, reflect upon those who made him, those who broke him, and those who loved him? Almost ten years on from Jackson's untimely death, here is Margo Jefferson's definitive and dazzling dissection of the King of Pop: a man admired for his music, his flair, his performances; and censured for his skin, his erratic behaviour, and, in his final years, for his relationships with children.

Part personal history, part design philosophy, and part advocacy, this volume showcases the arresting work of Oliver Munday. Employing humor and menace in equal measure, Munday wields graphic design as a tool of empowerment, activism, and resistance. Drawing from the history and utility of twentieth- century agitprop, from Russian Constructivism to the Black Panthers, Munday updates a timeless medium for the social media age with his stark and often unsettling imagery. Drawing on the madness of the 24-hour news cycle, Munday s work has been featured on the op-ed pages of the New York Times, the New Yorker, Time Magazine, and the Atlantic. Munday exploits a digital platform to poke fun at the 2016 presidential election, renounces warfare in the age of drones, and examines the tragic legacies of Trayvon Martin and Eric Garner, offering a perspective that must not be overlooked. His design, reflecting influences from Paul Rand to Globe Poster, champions a think more, design less philosophy with the ultimate goal to provoke contem-plation and even meaningful action.

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE WINNER - NATIONAL BESTSELLER - An extraordinary look at privilege, discrimination, and the fallacy of post-racial America by the renowned Pulitzer Prize-winning cultural critic Jefferson takes us into an insular and discerning society: "I call it Negroland," she writes, "because I still find 'Negro' a word of wonders, glorious and terrible." Margo Jefferson was born in 1947 into upper-crust black Chicago. Her father was head of pediatrics at Provident Hospital, while her mother was a socialite. Negroland's pedigree dates back generations, having originated with antebellum free blacks who made their fortunes among the plantations of the South. It evolved into a world of exclusive sororities, fraternities, networks, and clubs--a world in which skin color and hair texture were relentlessly evaluated alongside scholarly and professional achievements, where the Talented Tenth positioned themselves as a third race between whites and "the masses of Negros," and where the motto was "Achievement. Invulnerability. Comportment." Jefferson brilliantly charts the twists and turns of a life informed by psychological and moral contradictions, while reckoning with the strictures and demands of Negroland at crucial historical moments--the civil rights movement, the dawn of feminism, the falsehood of post-racial America.

A Pulizer Prize-winning culture critic reflects on the cultural and social significance of Michael Jackson, exploring the diverse ways in which the spectacle of Jackson's life and musical talents have shaped American social and popular culture and why we continue to be fascinated by the enigmatic phenomenon of Michael Jackson. Reprint.