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Venita Blackburn’s First Novel Runs on Denial
With her book Dead in Long Beach, California, she takes on the kind of grief that can lead to deception.
Lean and nearly six feet tall, she is, by her own description, “built like a Barbie doll with no boobs.” Dead in Long Beach, California is poised as her breakout, her third book following her well-reviewed short-story collections Black Jesus and Other Superheroes(2017) and How to Wrestle a Girl(2021). A novel may be the publishing industry’s darling — it’s what gets you the cachet and the publicity — but in an era of six-figure book deals for first-time authors and media-savvy literary “It” girls, Blackburn says she still finds the idea of writing one “horrifying.” Dead in Long Beach, California is febrile, high concept, fragmented; in a way, it’s an anti-novel that applies her shortform philosophy to longform. She tells me “awkward Black girl” authors like ZZ Packer and Zadie Smith gave her permission to “have irreverence and a sense of humor on top of offering some really deep insight into certain kinds of worlds.” Her already economical prose densified under a new command.
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