Interfictions 2 Reading at Magers & Quinn

For the locals: Friday at 7:30, myself, Alan DeNiro, Will Alexander, and Kelly Barnhill will be reading from the Interfictions 2 anthology. Please come! Magers & Quinn is located at 3038 Hennepin Avenue South in Minneapolis. More details here.

2010 Reading #7: Bad Boy Brawly Brown

1. Young Adult Novel by Daniel Pinkwater
2. Avilion by Robert Holdstock.
3. Passing by Nella Larsen.
4. A Little Yellow Dog by Walter Mosley.
5. Gone Fishin' by Walter Mosley.
6. Lavondyss by Robert Holdstock.

7. Bad Boy Brawly Brown by Walter Mosley. Y'all must be tired of me saying the same thing about these books by now (in essence, that is: you should read these books), and happily Bad Boy Brawly Brown contains a passage in which Easy explains himself better than I ever could, so I'll just excerpt a bit of that:

"I thought you were a janitor," Lakeland said. "But you sound like some kind of detective."

"Do you know how to sew, Officer?" I asked in response.

"What?"

"I don't mean darn," I said. "I mean could you piece together a pattern and stitch the seams of a shirt or a pair of pants?"

"No."

"Can you bake a cake from scratch or lay a floor in an unfinished room?" I continued. "Or lay bricks or tan leather from a dead animal? . . . I can do all those things. . . . I can tell you when a man's about to go crazy or when a thug's really a coward or a blowhard. I can glance around a room and tell you if you have to worry about gettin' robbed. All that I get from bein' poor and black in this country you so proud'a savin' from the Koreans and Vietnamese. Where I come from they don't have dark-skinned private detectives. If a man needs a hand, he goes to someone who does it on the side. I'm that man, Colonel. . . . What I do I do because it's a part of me. I studied in the streets and back alleys. What I know most cops would give their eyeteeth to understand. So don't worry about how I got here or how to explain what I do. Just listen to me and you might learn somethin'."

I saw a blog post yesterday about a talk in which Mosley said that the genre he writes in is "Black Male Heroes," and that he's the only one writing in it. I'm not sure that's true, but Easy certainly fits that mold.