Tochi Onyebuchi is far too interesting and thoughtful a writer to have achieved his final form with his fifth novel, but I do get the sense that the success of his most recent novella, Riot Baby, and his continuing development as a writer bought him the leeway he needed to write his wonderful, genre-crossing new novel, Goliath. Even if the thing they become doesn’t quite align with my tastes and I have to hop off the train, it’s still a very cool process to witness a writer achieving their final form. Ideally, with supportive agents and editors, and the sales to support it (sob, capitalism is a hellscape), writers go through their careers becoming more and more like themselves, writing books that are more and more the exact thing they want to write. This is fun because when they hit it big, I get to be a hipster about it (in a few years I’m going to be a nightmare about Micaiah Johnson and y’all will all be tired of me), but it’s also fun because I get to see their development as writers. When I feel a bit sad about my reading/blogging focus having shifted to focus so heavily on recent releases, I comfort myself with a reminder that reading recent releases gets me in on the ground floor of new authors.
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