Lote by Shola Von Reinhold / Duke University Press

This tasty bit of literary confectionery centers on the transfixions of Matilda, a Black researcher enraptured by the decadent pleasures of the Bright Young Things, particularly the glimmering traces left behind by Hermia Druitt, a Black woman who was a poet, possible resurrector of a lost cult of luxuries, and seemingly unforgettable, except that she has almost disappeared from the archive. Then Matilda is accepted to a residency of ascetic “thought artists” who seemingly stand in opposition to everything Druitt represents yet are somehow mysteriously and inextricably bound to her (non)existence. It’s heady and gossipy and poppily academic and feels very much in dialogue with the work of Saidiya Hartman in its imaginings of the possibilities of historical gaps in conjuring different ways to exist and of fiction as the necessary net to catch the quicksilver lives the archive cannot hold.