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“... M issouri Williams’s​ novels are vicious, lurid and raucously nihilistic. Her first book, The Doloriad (2022), is set outside a ruined Prague, where an incestuous clan – the only known survivors of an unspecified apocalyptic event – scramble in the dirt. At first four people remained: the Matriarch, her brother, the brother’s wife and a legless schoolmaster ...”

“... Have​ I told you about my old friend who’s married to the Republican governor of Missouri?’ Too often, the answer was yes, I had – sometimes more than once. My Sheena story was my best story, the anecdote that rarely failed, which was fortunate, because I couldn’t stop telling it, usually in the same way, even with the same pauses and hand gestures ...”

“... the appearance of Thomas Pynchon’s first book and the Beatles’ second long-player, John Williams, a professor at the University of Denver, sent his agent in New York a draft of his latest novel, which detailed the unhappy marriage, undistinguished career and early death from cancer of an imagined professor at the University of ...”

“... the lit interior of Locust Antiques, Locust, New Jersey or Houses along Broadway, Hannibal, Missouri or the faded and layered signage against a brick background of Pentimento, Galena Avenue, Dixon, Illinois, the front of the ‘Lewis’ Restaurant, Main Street, Fairmount, Indiana or the Lincoln Triplex Cinema, North Arlington, New Jersey. The light is ...”

“... to be out watching boys play midget football in the warm twilight. Our destination is Branson, Missouri, a town in the Ozarks which specialises in Christian family entertainment. Missouri is a swing state, almost evenly split between rural Republicans and urban Democrats. The economy and the war worry everyone, but many ...”

“... Soon after​ Michael Brown was shot in Ferguson, Missouri, a book called The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace was published, describing one New Jersey man’s dual existence as a top student at Yale and an incorrigible drug dealer.1 Peace was an alarmingly precocious black boy whose mother toiled in hospital kitchens to raise the money to send him to parochial schools, where he thrived ...”

“... or in his ward in the Washington asylum’), to ‘restricted and jejune Eliot’ – Over the Missouri, over the Seine,   Over the Thames, and over the Severn, The soul of white Tom   Shall float to Heaven – to Hardy’s ‘rather monotonously small follower Philip Larkin’, etc? If he despises William Carlos ...”

“... chose to do, while remaining unknown even to one another, and quite out of the public eye. W.C. Williams was a hard-working New Jersey physician. They were all originals but all in the American grain, declining the European alternatives chosen by Eliot and Pound, and all engaged in discovering idiosyncratic but American ways of being modern. Marianne ...”

“... it couldn’t afford. (When Churchill went to make his ‘iron curtain’ speech at Fulton, Missouri in March 1946 he did so on an allowance of £10 a day: no exceptions from that Spartan rule could be made for anyone.) On top of that, Attlee faced a difficult new American president, Harry Truman, who relished his own reputation for ...”

“... after the war, he could be Zapata, Napoleon, a mafia don, or Lee Clayton, swanning around the Missouri Breaks country in a dress, a bonnet and an italic Irish accent. He might be a used-up ex-boxer on the Jersey docks. Or an actor pretending to be that punchdrunk bum few of us would care to notice in life. We’d rather look away. But when it comes to ...”

“... with the sandstone in the precincts of Lake Powell, we had a medley that included Clarence Williams (‘You’re Bound to Look Like a Monkey When You Get Old’), Van Morrison (‘Caravan’ and ‘The Healing Game’), and Valaida Snow, the remarkable, hard-swinging woman jazz trumpeter and vocalist, singing ‘Nagasaki’ in July 1937: Hot ginger ...”

“... The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, published in the early 2000s by the University of Missouri Press, runs to sixteen volumes, testifying to the versatility and resourcefulness required to become one of the few Black writers of his era to make a living from his pen. Even someone as famous as Hughes struggled to work in film or television ...”

“... among the black writers who emerged during the Black Power era, such as LeRoi Jones, John A. Williams and Ishmael Reed. And his legacy now? As Jackson writes, ‘history has borne out some of his vinegary judgments.’ Today, Himes’s belief in the implacable force of white supremacism – what is now called Afro-pessimism – enjoys a growing vogue ...”