Harlem is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America - Tapa blanda

A walker, a reader and a gazer, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts is also a skilled talker whose impromptu kerbside exchanges with Harlem's most colourful residents are transmuted into a slippery, silky set of observations on what change and opportunity have wrought in this small corner of a big city, Harlem, with its outsize reputation and even-larger influence. Hers is a beguilingly well-written meditation on the essence of black Harlem, as it teeters on the brink of seeing its poorer residents and their rich histories turfed out by commercial developers intent on providing swish condos for cool-seeking (and mostly white) gentrifiers. In a mix of oral history, conversations with scholars and hobos, thoughtful musings on notable antecedents and illustrious Harlemites of the twentieth century, and her own story of migration (from Texas to Harlem via Harvard), Rhodes-Pitts exhibits a sensitivity and subtlety and stillness in her writing that is very impressive and very promising. There are echoes of Joan Didion's distinctive rhythms and pauses in her prose, without it ever feeling derivative. This is an exceptionally striking and alluring debut.

Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts was born in Texas in 198x, and arrived in Harlem in 2002, shortly after graduating from Harvard, where she read African-American Studies. A former Fulbright scholar at the University of St Andrews, a laureate at the Centre International des Recollets, and the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writers' Award and a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, now 31, has contributed articles to, amongst other publications, the New York Times, Boston Globe, Nation, and Vogue.