I Just Keep Talking Nell Irvin Painter BOOK TOUR

Date	City/State	Venue	Time
CLOSED EVENT — April 8, 2024	New York, New York	Columbia University Journalism School w/ Jelani Cobb	6:30 pm
April 24, 2024	Princeton, NJ	Labyrinth Books & Princeton Library@ Labyrinth Books w/ Ruha Benjamin	6 pm
April 25, 2024	Harrisburg, PA	Midtown Scholar Bookstore w/ Zinzi Clemmons	7 pm
April 30, 2024	Brooklyn, NY	Center for Fiction w/ Doreen St. Felix	7 pm
May 1, 2024	Maplewood, NJ	Words Bookstore w/ Morgan Jerkins	7 pm
May 3, 2024	Cambridge, MA	Harvard Book Store w/ Farah Stockman	7 pm
May 4, 2024	Montclair, NJ	Montclair Literary Festival @ Montclair Public Library w/ Ira Wagner	2:45 pm
May 9, 2024	Hudson, NY	Time and Space Limited w/ Sarah M. Broom	7 pm

Time magazine: "Here Are the 12 New Books You Should Read in April" includes I Just Keep Talking

I Just Keep Talking—A Life in Essays by Nell Irvin Painter.
Nell’s newest book (to be published April 23, 2024 by Doubleday) is a comprehensive new collection of essays spanning art, politics, and the legacy of racism that shapes American history as we know it.

I Just Keep Talking assembles her writing for the first time into a single volume, displaying the breadth and depth of Painter’s decades-long historical inquiry and the evolution of Black political thought—and includes a dazzling new introduction and coda. Along with Painter’s writing, this collection features her original artwork, threaded throughout the book as counterpoint.

See more below — Reviews, Praise, Contacts, and About Nell Irvin Painter

Buy I Just Keep Talking
See the order links on Doubleday:
(Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books A Million, Bookshop.org, Hudson Booksellers, Powell's, Target, Walmart).

Also available as an Audiobook from many audiobook retailers: see Penguin Random House Audio for links.

Synopsis from Dust Jacket

From the New York Times bestselling author of The History of White People and Old in Art School, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, comes a comprehensive new collection of essays spanning art, politics, and the legacy of racism that shapes American history as we know it.

Throughout her prolific writing career, Nell Irvin Painter has published works on such luminaries as Sojourner Truth, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Malcolm X. Her unique vantage on American history pushes the boundaries of personal narrative and academic authorship. Led by an unbridled curiosity for her subjects, Painter asks readers to reconsider ideas of race, politics, and identity. I Just Keep Talking assembles her writing for the first time into a single volume, displaying the breadth and depth of Painter’s decades-long historical inquiry and the evolution of Black political thought—and includes a dazzling new introduction and coda. From her mining of figures like Carrie Buck and Martin Delany for their resonance today, to a deep dive into the history of exclusion through the work of Toni Morrison, to a discussion of the American political landscape after the 2016 election, Painter nimbly portrays the trials of a country frequently at war with itself.

Along with Painter’s writing, this collection features her original artwork, threaded throughout the book as counterpoint. Her visual art shows a deft mind that contemplates the tragedy and humor of her subjects; pulling from newspapers, personal records, and original sketches, Painter’s artwork testifies to the dialectic of tremendous change and stasis that continues to shape American history.

These essays resist easy answers in favor of complexity, the inescapable sense of our country’s potential being thwarted by its failures. I Just Keep Talking will surely solidify Painter’s place among the finest critics and writers of the last century.

• Time magazine:  "Here Are the 12 New Books You Should Read in April" includes I Just Keep Talking
• "Razor-sharp analysis lights up every page…[I Just Keep Talking] affirms Painter’s reputation as a historian and political commentator par excellence." —Publisher’s Weekly *starred review* (also see full review text on this page)
• "Painter…gathers more than 40 previously published essays, framed by a new introduction and coda, reflecting her shrewd analyses of issues including race, class, and gender; history and historiography; police brutality and poverty; art, education, and politics…A vibrant, insightful collection from an indispensable voice." —Kirkus Reviews, *starred review* (see full review text on this page)

Praise for I Just Keep Talking—A Life in Essays

"Nell Irvin Painter is one of the most versatile American historians of the last half century. This stunning array of essays, following on her earlier memoir of turning to art, contains a potent autobiographical sizzle from introduction to end. She settles scores, shows her brilliant chops as a historian devoted to specifics and to the uniqueness of Southern history, and ranges into politics, social affairs, identity, and whiteness, and finally her own turn to visual art. Prolific, provocative, and with a voice all her own, Painter reveals with admirable vulnerability a mind in transit through time."
—DAVID W. BLIGHT, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

"Nell Irvin Painter is one of the most important, influential, and prolific historians of the United States…I Just Keep Talking is a gorgeously written journey through her life, from her birth as a daughter of the great migration to her retirement from academe and beyond…Readers will learn a great deal about the country and just as much about how to craft a life of purpose and joy."
—IMANI PERRY, National Book Award–winning author of South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation

"Nell Irvin Painter is a historian, a journalist, and a visual artist. Whatever her subject—race, gender, class, art, politics—she finds the surprising complication [and] ponders the unresolved question. Race, she writes, is ‘an ongoing discourse.’ So is this vibrant, compelling book."
—MARGO JEFFERSON, National Book Critics Circle Award winner and author of Constructing a Nervous System

"Consistently brilliant, restlessly curious, and profoundly empathetic, Nell Irvin Painter’s voice is simply indispensable. This decades-spanning collection pulls together some of her most elegant, engaged, and urgent work. With a historian’s sense of context and a poet’s gift of language, she lays bare truths we’ve collectively ignored and points us toward the democratic possibilities we have yet to realize."
—JELANI COBB, dean of the Columbia Journalism School and author of The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress

"Give thanks that Nell Irvin Painter won’t stop talking—and thinking and writing and bringing the truth. And give thanks for these sage words on art, on history, on Blackness, on America, on survival from this bone-strong woman who keeps on keeping on, in glorious insistence."
—HONORÉE FANONNE JEFFERS, author of The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois

"Nell Irvin Painter has never minced words. Here, as she puts it, she keeps talking—in essays and artwork ranging from the 1980s to our own fraught moment, in explorations of Blackness and Whiteness, of the past and the present, of the verbal and the visual. This is a book filled with four decades of insights from one of America’s most important historians. We all need to listen—and to see."
—DREW GILPIN FAUST, author of Necessary Trouble and former president of Harvard University

"I Just Keep Talking reads like an intellectual adventure story. Nell Irvin Painter moves from Oakland to Ghana, Harvard, Princeton, and—late in the game—art school, grappling with subjects ranging from Southern plantation gender relations and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Viking obsession to the founding of MoMA and the real meaning of MAGA. She writes that readers may be ‘amused’ by her book’s title and what it suggests about her persistence; just as likely, it will leave them wanting to hear more."
—AMY DAVIDSON SORKIN

Contacts—Doubleday

Published by Doubleday, doubleday.com
Also available from Penguin Random House Audio

About Nell Irvin Painter

NELL IRVIN PAINTER, Edwards Professor of American History, Emerita, Princeton University, is the author of books of history including the New York Times bestseller The History of White People; Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol; and the National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2007, she has received honorary degrees from Yale, Wesleyan, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Dartmouth. After earning a PhD in history from Harvard, she also completed degrees in painting from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers and the Rhode Island School of Design. Painter lives and works in East Orange, New Jersey, and has made artist’s books in residencies such as MacDowell, Yaddo, Ucross, and Bogliasco. She currently serves as Madam Chairman of MacDowell.

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