Let’s Talk Books with Excellent Prose

Saidiya Hartman writes incredibly beautiful prose. She describes the lives of young, urban Black women as they go about their lives. Hartman wanted to tell the story of the Black women she read about that were mentioned in passing or that appeared unnamed in photographs. She investigates their lives, researches their pasts, and invites readers to bear witness to these women who are all too often lost from history. This book is incredibly captivating and intricately crafted. I found myself mesmerized while wandering through the past.

I’ve read a lot of Leslie Jamison’s essays, and her sentences are incredibly well crafted, and her narrative voice draws me in like few others. So when I saw she had a full-length memoir/contemplation of the nature of alcoholism and art, I knew I had to read it. In The Recovering, she describes her experience with alcoholism and her slow acceptance that she needed to get sober and that she couldn’t do it on her own. She examines so many moving parts, I wondered how she would stick the landing. But she does. And so much of her writing has stayed with me.