For the Voiceless and the Invisible
SUSAN JAMES profiles the life and work of Ann Petry: ‘She wrote about black lives, but her characters weren’t heroes or martyrs. They were flawed. They struggled, and they were often desperate…’
Remote from Delight
In Arthur Morrison’s collection Tales of Mean Streets, MIKE SMITH finds that the characters are ‘victims of their own inadequacies, rather than of the injustices of the wider world. To some, this must seem an unsympathetic gaze – the brutality certainly shocked his contemporaries – but we are used to brutality now… How should we see these stories?’