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Curator Reviews

1969 Book Club

Leave it to the New York Times book critic Dwight Garner to crystalize what made Iceberg Slim such a unique writer: “Iceberg Slim’s prose was, and is, as ecstatic and original as a Chuck Berry guitar solo. Mark Twain meets Malcolm X in his sentences.” Although best known for Pimp, his visceral memoir of life on the streets of Chicago, Milwaukee, and Detroit, this book has been acclaimed by The New Yorker as “arguably his finest novel,” a truly radical for it’s time portrait of a black drag queen, Otis Tilson. Slim died in 1993, and one can’t help wondering how he’d react to a show like Ryan Murphy’s Pose, set in New York’s 1980s ball scene, or the fact that a black drag queen, Ru Paul, hosts one of the most popular reality shows in America.

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