In the tenth episode of the series, Seamus and Mark turn to two figures of the Harlem Renaissance. Nella Larsen’s Passing is a taut, tense and tartly stylish take on the Jamesian short story, redolent with ironies and ambiguities, that feels just as relevant today. Widely considered his masterwork, Langston Hughes’s ‘Montage of a Dream Deferred’ draws on the modernist tradition, a documentarian sensibility and the freedoms of bebop to capture the multiplicity of Harlem voices.

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Further reading in the LRB:

⁠Amber Medland: They Roared with Laughter⁠

⁠Lewis Nkosi: An Unamerican in New York⁠

⁠James Campbell: White Lies⁠

⁠Joanna Biggs: What She Wasn't