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Showing posts from April, 2018

Kiese Laymon, “And So On” (McSweeney’s 49)

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Kiese Laymon’s “And So On” is one of McSweeney’s 49’s cover stories, modeled after Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants.” The story is structured around a wonderful, oblique, direct, cutting dialogue between Chanda Stewart and the narrator, two African American professors in a predominantly white college in Middletown, Massachusetts. They are roommates and have had sex once. Chanda is a great character, forceful, blunt, loving, determined. She has been dating Doug E. Brovani, a 23-year-old juvenile delinquent who posts videos of himself having sex with white women. The narrator hates her for falling for Doug.