Darin Strauss talks to Time Out New York about his new novel, More Than it Hurts You, which explores Munchausen by proxy. Strauss will be blogging his book tour for Newsweek (where his wife is a staffer), and the TONY story has this curious passage:
[T]he book—at points a careful examination of race of gender—arrives after a primary season that’s pushed those topics to the front of the national conversation. “I had black friends read it to make sure that it was, you know—that it was authentic,” Strauss says. “The way that Newsweek gives stories the ‘black read.’ ”
I know that newspaper copy editors operate in part with a mind toward locating passages and phrases that might cause offense. (You can say “conned,” but never “gypped”; it’s not OK to say that somebody is “confined to” a wheelchair.) And I’m sure that stories that address race issues in detail get extra care in that regard. But the idea of a “black read” is a new one on me.
markathitakis.com 