Summary

The chapter “The Harper’s Columns” is comprised of a series of columns for Harper’s Magazine that Smith agreed to write, despite having given birth four months prior. She notes in a footnote below the title that she lasted only six months. The first Harper’s column included is titled “On Harlem, Hatred and Javier,” and includes an analysis of the book, Harlem Is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America. Although Smith is disappointed by the lack of historical specificity, she likes the book for its meditations on bibliophily. She also writes in this first column about Thomas Bernhard’s My Prizes. She judges Bernhard harshly for being overly ironic and behaving “like an Internet troll, never in the wrong, constantly changing the parameters to suit his own sense of virtue...