The authoritative American edition of The New York Times named the ten best books of 2015. The specialized edition of the publication chose the most significant books in two categories - fiction and journalism.
Fiction
1. Magda Szabo "The Door"
The novel by one of Hungary's most recognized writers was first published in 1987. The story of the author's complex relationship with his servant - an aged woman who went from complete indifference to inexplicable generosity, to passionate, ruthless rage. In a new translation, this work provides an opportunity to take a fresh look at the life story of two women in a socialist country of the twentieth century, acquiring a new sound, it does not lose its topicality. A mixture of black humor and an extreme degree of absurdity very well conveys the history of the country and the tragic story of life.
2. Lucia Berlin Cleaners' Guide: Selected Stories
The writer, who died in 2004, left a real treasure of stories that were published during her lifetime only in literary magazines and small-circulation collections. This edition includes 43 stories, presenting the author to a wide audience as an uncompromising and generous observer. Her sympathies are on the side of smart, talkative women who are trying to get more out of life - like Berlin herself, an alcoholic who raised four sons on her own.
Subtle, extraordinary and extremely intelligent, this novel is Kask's eighth work and a series of one-sided conversations. The heroine - a divorced woman traveling through Greece - talks to, or rather listens to, the people who cross her path, reliving their stories of love, loss, lies, pride and stupidity. Cheating, divorce, emptiness take on a truly frightening image in Kask, and her gaze leaves the reader with the feeling that he is in danger of colliding with everything described in his life.
The most hilarious and daring satire of the year. A young black man wants to start school segregation and bring back slavery - and this is after America's black population has struggled for more than 400 years to survive. The author's sharp mind and implausible profanity make this novel a fearless, metaphorical and multicultural explosive mixture.
5. Elena Ferrante "The Story of a Lost Child: Book 4. Neapolitan novels: Maturity, old age"
Like the previous three books in the series, the fourth is also about reckless female friendship as opposed to poverty, ambition, violence and political strife. Elena and Lila, rivals since their youth, are halfway through family life and motherhood, and Ferrante explores the topic of modern female identity, especially vividly portraying the struggle of a creative woman with her biological and social fate destined for her.
Publicism
Written in the form of a letter from the author to his teenage son, this short but relevant piece tells the story of what it means to grow up as a black man in a country based on slave labor and the "destruction" of black people. Coates writes incredibly realistically, writes about the beautiful and terrible struggle that is forever ingrained in the flesh and blood.
7. Sven Beckert Cotton Empire: A World History
If sugar was the defining commodity in the 18th century, and oil in the 20th century, then cotton was the main one in the 19th century. In his deep, sweeping, and mind-boggling study, Beckert takes the reader through the stages of a global industry that was supported by millions of unfortunate slaves, sharecroppers, and spinners. Industrialization was based on violence. This is a story about the development of the modern world. Even today, says Beckert, industry based on cheap labor is engaged in a "race to the bottom".
8. Helen Macdonald "I mean hawk"
A captivating memoir by a poet, historian and falconer, where she talks about the ferocious essence of a predator. Devastated by the death of her father, McDonald decided to shut herself off from the world and single-handedly raise and train a young hawk, a fierce predator. The bird accompanied her in despair and grief, changed her own nature, brightened the darkest corners of her soul, paving the way to creativity and, ultimately, to spiritual purification.
Alexander von Humboldt was the pre-eminent scientist of his time, the most famous person after Napoleon, although his reputation was not at its best outside of his native Germany. Woolf's book revives his ideas through a story about his travels and discoveries, recalling his main testament: the Earth is a single, interconnected organism that can suffer a catastrophe as a result of our careless actions.
Norwegian journalist Seijerstad created a masterpiece of reporting, managing to show the dark side of Scandinavia through the life and crime of Anders Breivik, who killed 77 people on July 22, 2011. He did this as a protest against women's rights, cultural diversity and the spread of Islam. Most of the dead were teenagers. Talking about them, the author leaves Breivik with his failed childhood as the central character, which makes the book unbearably heavy.
This year's Booker Prize went to American writer Paul Beatty for The Sale. This is a satirical novel about a black man who wants to bring back racial segregation in schools and slavery. 54-year-old Paul Beatty received an award of 50 thousand pounds. His acceptance speech was filled with emotion. “I hate writing,” he admitted. - This is a difficult book. It was difficult for me to write it, and I know that it is difficult to read.” What books are also worth attention, according to the jury of the award, read below.
Sale
Paul Beaty
The satirical novel, which The New York Times Book Review and the Wall Street Journal named one of last year's best, tells the story of a black slave owner facing trial before the Supreme Court.
Hot milk
Deborah Levy
Sophia, a young scientist-anthropologist, spends most of her life trying to unravel the mystery of her mother's inexplicable illness. Together they travel to the south of Spain to meet with a famous consultant - their last hope, who may be able to save a woman from paralysis of the limbs.
Eileen
Ottessa Moshfeig
The story described in the book takes place in the 60s of the last century. A lonely young woman working in a boys' prison finds herself embroiled in a horrific crime. Otessa Moshfeig's book is her debut and extremely successful, the writer has already been dubbed one of the brightest voices in fiction.
The whole essence of man
David Szali
Nine people. Each of them is away from home - someone in the suburbs of Prague, someone in an alpine village, someone in a dirty motel in Cyprus - and seeks to understand what it means to be alive here and now.
Madeleine Tien
Don't say we have nothing
Tien introduces the reader to one family in China, showing the life of its subsequent two generations - those who survived the "cultural revolution" of Mao Zedong in the middle of the last century; and children of survivors who became students participating in the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989.
His bloody project
Graeme Macri Barnet
The book is set in 1869. A 17-year-old boy from the village is arrested for the brutal murder of three people. There is no doubt that it was he who committed the murder. But why did he do it? Is he crazy? Who to believe? And will this guy hang for the crime he committed? Critics recognize Barnet's book as an exciting and truly brilliant thriller.
For Althea Amrik Wasow
PROLOGUE
This may be hard to believe, coming from a black man, but I've never stolen anything. Never cheated on my taxes or at cards. Never snuck into the movies or failed to give back the extra change to a drugstore cashier indifferent to the ways of mercantilism and minimum-wage expectations. I've never burgled a house. Hold up a liquor store. Never boarded a crowded bus or subway car, sat in a seat reserved for the elderly, pulled out my gigantic penis and masturbated to satisfaction with a perverted, yet somehow crestfallen, look on my face. But here I am, in the cavernous chambers of the Supreme Court of the United States of America, my car illegally and somewhat ironically parked on Constitution Avenue, my hands cuffed and crossed behind my back, my right to remain silent long since waived and said goodbye to as I sit in a thickly padded chair that, much like this country, isn't quite as comfortable as it looks.
Summoned here by an officious-looking envelope stamped IMPORTANT! in large, sweepstakes-red letters, I haven't stopped squirming since I arrived in this city.
“Dear Sir,” the letter read.
“Congratulations, you may already be a winner! Your case has been selected from hundreds of other appellate cases to be heard by the Supreme Court of the United States of America. What a glorious honour! It’s highly recommended that you arrive at least two hours early for your hearing scheduled for 10:00 a.m. on the morning of March 19, the year of our Lord…” The letter closed with directions to the Supreme Court building from the airport, the train station, I-95, and a set of clip-out coupons to various attractions, restaurants, bed-and-breakfasts, and the like. There was no signature. It just ended…
Sincerely yours,
The People of the United States of America
Washington, D.C., with its wide streets, confounding roundabouts, marble statues, Doric columns, and domes, is supposed to feel like ancient Rome (that is, if the streets of ancient Rome were lined with homeless black people, bomb-sniffing dogs, tour buses, and cherry blossoms). Yesterday afternoon, like some sandal-shod Ethiop from the sticks of the darkest of the Los Angeles jungles, I ventured from the hotel and joined the hajj of blue-jeaned yokels that paraded slowly and patriotically past the empire’s historic landmarks. I stared in awe at the Lincoln Memorial. If Honest Abe had come to life and somehow managed to lift his bony twenty-three-foot, four-inch frame from his throne, what would he say? What would he do? Would he break-dance? Would he pitch pennies against the curbside? Would he read the paper and see that the Union he saved was now a dysfunctional plutocracy, that the people he freed were now slaves to rhythm, rap, and predatory lending, and that today his skill set would be better suited to the basketball court than the White House? There he could catch the rock on the break, pull up for a bearded three-pointer, hold the pose, and talk shit as the ball popped the net. The Great Emancipator, you can't stop him, you can only hope to contain him.
Not surprisingly, there's nothing to do at the Pentagon except start a war. Tourists aren't even allowed to take photos with the building in the background, so when the sailor-suited family of Navy veterans four generations deep handed me a disposable camera and asked me to follow at a distance and secretly take photos of them while they snapped to attention, saluted, and flashed peace signs for no apparent reason, I was only too happy to serve my country. At the National Mall there was a one-man march on Washington. A lone white boy lay on the grass, fucking with the depth perception in such a way that the distant Washington Monument looked like a massive, pointy-tipped, Caucasian hard-on streaming from his unzipped trousers. He joked with passersby, smiling into their camera phones and stroking his trick photography priapism.
At the zoo, I stood in front of the primate cage listening to a woman marvel at how “presidential” the four-hundred-pound gorilla looked sitting astride a shorn oaken limb, keeping a watchful eye over his caged brood. When her boyfriend, his finger tapping the informational placard, pointed out the “presidential” silverback's name coincidentally was Baraka, the woman laughed aloud, until she saw me, the other four-hundred-pound gorilla in the room, stuffing something that might have been the last of a Big Stick Popsicle or a Chiquita banana in my mouth. Then she became disconsolate, crying and apologizing for having spoken her mind and my having been born. “Some of my best friends are monkeys,” she said accidentally. It was my turn to laugh. I understood where she was coming from. This whole city's a Freudian slip of the tongue, a concrete hard-on for America's deeds and misdeeds. Slavery? Manifest Destiny? Laverne & Shirley? Standing by idly while Germany tried to kill every Jew in Europe? Why some of my best friends are the Museum of African Art, the Holocaust Museum, the Museum of the American Indian, the National Museum of Women in the Arts. And furthermore, I'll have you know, my sister's daughter is married to an orangutan.
All it takes is a day trip through Georgetown and Chinatown. A slow saunter past the White House, Phoenix House, Blair House, and the local crackhouse for the message to become abundantly clear. Be it ancient Rome or modern-day America, you're either citizen or slave. Lion or Jew. Guilty or innocent. Comfortable or uncomfortable. And here, in the Supreme Court of the United States of America, fuck if between the handcuffs and the slipperiness of this chair's leather upholstery, the only way I can keep from spilling my ass ignominiously onto the goddamn floor is to lean back until I' m reclined at an angle just short of detention-room nonchalance, but definitely well past courtroom contempt.
Work keys jangling like sleigh bells, the Court officers march into the chambers like a two-by-two wagonless team of crew-cut Clydesdales harnessed together by a love of God and country. The lead dray, a proud Budweiser of a woman with a brightly colored sash of citations rainbowed across her chest, taps the back of my seat. She wants me to sit up straight, but the legendary civil disobedient that I am, I defiantly tilt myself even farther back in the chair, only to crash to the floor in a painful pratfall of inept nonviolent resistance. She dangles a handcuff key in my face and, with one thick hairless arm, hoists me upright, scooting my chair in so close to the table that I can see my suit and tie’s reflection in its shiny, lemony-fresh mahogany finish. I’ve never worn a suit before, and the man who sold me this one said, “You’re going to like the way you look. I guarantee it.” But the face in the table staring back at me looks like what any business-suit-wearing, cornrowed, dreadlocked, bald-headed, corporate Afro'd black man whose name you don't know and whose face you don't recognize looks like - he looks like a criminal.
“When you look good, you feel good,” the salesman also promised me. Guaranteed it. So when I get home I'm going to ask for my $129 back, because I don't like the way I look. The way I feel. I feel like my suit - cheap, itchy, and coming apart at the seams.
Most times cops expect to be thanked. Whether they’ve just given you directions to the post office, beaten your ass in the backseat of the patrol car, or, in my case, uncuffed you, returned your weed, drug paraphernalia, and provided you with the traditional Supreme Court quill. But this one has had a look of pity on her face, ever since this morning, when she and her posse met me atop the Supreme Court's vaunted forty-fourth stair. Under a pediment inscribed with the words EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW they stood shoulder-to-shoulder, squinting into the morning sun, windbreakers dotted with the dandruff of fallen cherry blossoms, blocking my entrance into the building. We all knew that this was a charade, a last-minute meaningless show of power by the state. The only one not in on the joke was the Cocker Spaniel. His retractable leash whirring behind him, he bounded up to me, excitedly sniffed my shoes and my pant legs, nuzzled my crotch with his wet snot-encrusted nose, then obediently sat down beside me, his tail proudly pounding the ground. I've been charged with a crime so heinous that busting me for possession of marijuana on federal property would be like charging Hitler with loitering and a multinational oil company like British Petroleum with littering after fifty years of exploding refineries, toxic spills and emissions, and a shamelessly disingenuous advertising campaign. So I clear my pipe with two loud raps on the mahogany table. Brush and blow the gummy resin onto the floor, stuff the bowl with homegrown, and like a firing squad commander lighting a deserter's last cigarette, the lady cop obligingly flicks her BIC and sparks me up. I refuse the blindfold and take the most glorious toke ever taken in the history of pot smoking. Call every racially profiled, abortion-denied, flag-burning, Fifth Amendment taker and tell them to demand a retrial, because I’m getting high in the highest court in the land. The officers stare at me in amazement. I'm the Scopes monkey, the missing link in the evolution of African-American jurisprudence come to life. I can hear the cocker spaniel whimpering in the corridor, pawing at the door, as I blow an A-bomb mushroom-cloud-sized plume of smoke into the faces that line the giant friezes on the ceiling. Hammurabi, Moses, Solomon - these veined Spanish marble incantations of democracy and fair play - Muhammad, Napoleon, Charlemagne, and some buffed ancient Greek frat boy in a toga stand above me, casting their stony judgmental gazes down upon me. I wonder if they looked at the Scottsboro Boys and Al Gore, Jr., with the same disdain.
The unnamed protagonist of the book, whose last name is Ya, is a marijuana and watermelon grower. I want to re-establish separate education for colored and white people in America, and to bring slavery back into practice.
The novel by the black writer Paul Beatty was noted by literary criticism as an extremely ironic description of the racial situation in modern America. Beatty mocks stereotypes, skillfully turns a sensitive area of American culture into the object of thousands of jokes, and manages to get away with it without vulgarity.
The first 100 pages of the novel are the most scathing and angry 100 pages in the last 10 years of American romance. I stopped underlining great passages because my arm hurt.
from The New York Times review
Deborah Levy - "Hot Milk"
Poet and playwright Deborah Levy's "Hot Milk" tells the story of a girl traveling to a distant Spanish village in search of a cure for her mother's mysterious form of paralysis. Upon finding the mystical Dr. Gomez, mother and daughter begin not only a strange healing process that doesn't look much like medicine per se, but also a new acquaintance with each other.
Levy in her book explores the nature of women deeper than many of her colleagues in the pen. She was especially able to capture the complexity of maternal bonding with her daughters in relationships where there is no father - Levi's parents divorced when she was 15 years old. Critics unanimously consider the book the "women's choice" for the Booker Prize, and female reviewers are sure that any man will fall asleep already on the fifth page.
Graham McRae Burnet - "His Bloody Project"
The documentary novel, whose full title is "His Bloody Project: The Rodrick McRae Case Papers," retells the true story of a triple murder committed by a 17-year-old boy, Rodrik McRae, in 1869. The novel paints a picture of a murder in a detached way: medical reports, court records and newspaper clippings are used. The book, in particular, explains why McRae did not cover his tracks in any way and why he did not deny the accusations against him.
A revenge tragedy and courtroom drama wrapped in the skin of a masterfully written psychological thriller
From The Guardian review
Otessa Moshfegh - "Eileen"
The heroine of the novel, Eileen Dunlop, works as a secretary in a juvenile prison. She cares for her alcoholic father, fantasizes about kinky sex, and keeps an eye on Randy, a security guard she likes a lot. At some point, she runs into new prison worker Rebecca St. John, a cheerful and kind Harvard graduate. A new acquaintance turns out quite unexpectedly for Eileen - she becomes an accomplice in crime.
Criticism extremely boldly compared Moshfegh simultaneously with the author of the novel "Gone Girl" Gillian Flynn, Vladimir Nabokov and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Masterfully creating tension style, endless December snowstorm around the characters and a special touch of hopelessness - the press is waiting for the next Moshfegh novel, just like her heroines are waiting for Christmas.
David Zeley - " All that is a man"
If Deborah Levy is praised by critics for the fact that she managed to show the internal conflicts of all women on earth with just two characters, then David Zeley managed to tell the same about men with the help of nine characters.
One - in the suburbs of Prague, the other - in an alpine village, the third in Cyprus, and so on - a kaleidoscope of manifestations of masculinity in modern Europe. Their destinies do not intersect in any way, but together they create a general picture of what it means to be a man in the 21st century.
Great novel - original, incredibly poignant and amazingly, heartbreakingly sad
William Boyd, writer and critic
Madeleine Tien - "Don't Say We Have Nothing"
Tien's novel tells the story of life in China before and after the events in Tiananmen Square, when a hundred people died as a result of the suppression of civil protests in 1989, and thousands were executed or are still in prison.
The most dramatic page in Chinese history, which, by the way, the Chinese themselves are forbidden to remember by their government under the threat of severe punishments, is told by Madeleine through the fate of a large Chinese family and a mysterious composer named Sparrow.
Tien's light style, with which she approaches complex events in the history of one of the oldest countries in the world, has secured her recognition from reviewers. In places where "Don't Say" becomes difficult to read, this happens not because of the style of the writer, but because of a lump in the throat - the plot, frankly, is not the most joyful.
Paul Beatty
For Althea Amrik Wasow
PROLOGUE
This may be hard to believe, coming from a black man, but I've never stolen anything. Never cheated on my taxes or at cards. Never snuck into the movies or failed to give back the extra change to a drugstore cashier indifferent to the ways of mercantilism and minimum-wage expectations. I've never burgled a house. Hold up a liquor store. Never boarded a crowded bus or subway car, sat in a seat reserved for the elderly, pulled out my gigantic penis and masturbated to satisfaction with a perverted, yet somehow crestfallen, look on my face. But here I am, in the cavernous chambers of the Supreme Court of the United States of America, my car illegally and somewhat ironically parked on Constitution Avenue, my hands cuffed and crossed behind my back, my right to remain silent long since waived and said goodbye to as I sit in a thickly padded chair that, much like this country, isn't quite as comfortable as it looks.
Summoned here by an officious-looking envelope stamped IMPORTANT! in large, sweepstakes-red letters, I haven't stopped squirming since I arrived in this city.
“Dear Sir,” the letter read.
“Congratulations, you may already be a winner! Your case has been selected from hundreds of other appellate cases to be heard by the Supreme Court of the United States of America. What a glorious honour! It’s highly recommended that you arrive at least two hours early for your hearing scheduled for 10:00 a.m. on the morning of March 19, the year of our Lord…” The letter closed with directions to the Supreme Court building from the airport, the train station, I-95, and a set of clip-out coupons to various attractions, restaurants, bed-and-breakfasts, and the like. There was no signature. It just ended…
Sincerely yours,
The People of the United States of America
Washington, D.C., with its wide streets, confounding roundabouts, marble statues, Doric columns, and domes, is supposed to feel like ancient Rome (that is, if the streets of ancient Rome were lined with homeless black people, bomb-sniffing dogs, tour buses, and cherry blossoms). Yesterday afternoon, like some sandal-shod Ethiop from the sticks of the darkest of the Los Angeles jungles, I ventured from the hotel and joined the hajj of blue-jeaned yokels that paraded slowly and patriotically past the empire’s historic landmarks. I stared in awe at the Lincoln Memorial. If Honest Abe had come to life and somehow managed to lift his bony twenty-three-foot, four-inch frame from his throne, what would he say? What would he do? Would he break-dance? Would he pitch pennies against the curbside? Would he read the paper and see that the Union he saved was now a dysfunctional plutocracy, that the people he freed were now slaves to rhythm, rap, and predatory lending, and that today his skill set would be better suited to the basketball court than the White House? There he could catch the rock on the break, pull up for a bearded three-pointer, hold the pose, and talk shit as the ball popped the net. The Great Emancipator, you can't stop him, you can only hope to contain him.
Not surprisingly, there's nothing to do at the Pentagon except start a war. Tourists aren't even allowed to take photos with the building in the background, so when the sailor-suited family of Navy veterans four generations deep handed me a disposable camera and asked me to follow at a distance and secretly take photos of them while they snapped to attention, saluted, and flashed peace signs for no apparent reason, I was only too happy to serve my country. At the National Mall there was a one-man march on Washington. A lone white boy lay on the grass, fucking with the depth perception in such a way that the distant Washington Monument looked like a massive, pointy-tipped, Caucasian hard-on streaming from his unzipped trousers. He joked with passersby, smiling into their camera phones and stroking his trick photography priapism.
At the zoo, I stood in front of the primate cage listening to a woman marvel at how “presidential” the four-hundred-pound gorilla looked sitting astride a shorn oaken limb, keeping a watchful eye over his caged brood. When her boyfriend, his finger tapping the informational placard, pointed out the “presidential” silverback's name coincidentally was Baraka, the woman laughed aloud, until she saw me, the other four-hundred-pound gorilla in the room, stuffing something that might have been the last of a Big Stick Popsicle or a Chiquita banana in my mouth. Then she became disconsolate, crying and apologizing for having spoken her mind and my having been born. “Some of my best friends are monkeys,” she said accidentally. It was my turn to laugh. I understood where she was coming from. This whole city's a Freudian slip of the tongue, a concrete hard-on for America's deeds and misdeeds. Slavery? Manifest Destiny? Laverne & Shirley? Standing by idly while Germany tried to kill every Jew in Europe? Why some of my best friends are the Museum of African Art, the Holocaust Museum, the Museum of the American Indian, the National Museum of Women in the Arts. And furthermore, I'll have you know, my sister's daughter is married to an orangutan.
All it takes is a day trip through Georgetown and Chinatown. A slow saunter past the White House, Phoenix House, Blair House, and the local crackhouse for the message to become abundantly clear. Be it ancient Rome or modern-day America, you're either citizen or slave. Lion or Jew. Guilty or innocent. Comfortable or uncomfortable. And here, in the Supreme Court of the United States of America, fuck if between the handcuffs and the slipperiness of this chair's leather upholstery, the only way I can keep from spilling my ass ignominiously onto the goddamn floor is to lean back until I' m reclined at an angle just short of detention-room nonchalance, but definitely well past courtroom contempt.
Work keys jangling like sleigh bells, the Court officers march into the chambers like a two-by-two wagonless team of crew-cut Clydesdales harnessed together by a love of God and country. The lead dray, a proud Budweiser of a woman with a brightly colored sash of citations rainbowed across her chest, taps the back of my seat. She wants me to sit up straight, but the legendary civil disobedient that I am, I defiantly tilt myself even farther back in the chair, only to crash to the floor in a painful pratfall of inept nonviolent resistance. She dangles a handcuff key in my face and, with one thick hairless arm, hoists me upright, scooting my chair in so close to the table that I can see my suit and tie’s reflection in its shiny, lemony-fresh mahogany finish. I’ve never worn a suit before, and the man who sold me this one said, “You’re going to like the way you look. I guarantee it.” But the face in the table staring back at me looks like what any business-suit-wearing, cornrowed, dreadlocked, bald-headed, corporate Afro'd black man whose name you don't know and whose face you don't recognize looks like - he looks like a criminal.
“When you look good, you feel good,” the salesman also promised me. Guaranteed it. So when I get home I'm going to ask for my $129 back, because I don't like the way I look. The way I feel. I feel like my suit - cheap, itchy, and coming apart at the seams.
Most times cops expect to be thanked. Whether they’ve just given you directions to the post office, beaten your ass in the backseat of the patrol car, or, in my case, uncuffed you, returned your weed, drug paraphernalia, and provided you with the traditional Supreme Court quill. But this one has had a look of pity on her face, ever since this morning, when she and her posse met me atop the Supreme Court's vaunted forty-fourth stair. Under a pediment inscribed with the words EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW they stood shoulder-to-shoulder, squinting into the morning sun, windbreakers dotted with the dandruff of fallen cherry blossoms, blocking my entrance into the building. We all knew that this was a charade, a last-minute meaningless show of power by the state. The only one not in on the joke was the Cocker Spaniel. His retractable leash whirring behind him, he bounded up to me, excitedly sniffed my shoes and my pant legs, nuzzled my crotch with his wet snot-encrusted nose, then obediently sat down beside me, his tail proudly pounding the ground. I've been charged with a crime so heinous that busting me for possession of marijuana on federal property would be like charging Hitler with loitering and a multinational oil company like British Petroleum with littering after fifty years of exploding refineries, toxic spills and emissions, and a shamelessly disingenuous advertising campaign. So I clear my pipe with two loud raps on the mahogany table. Brush and blow the gummy resin onto the floor, stuff the bowl with homegrown, and like a firing squad commander lighting a deserter's last cigarette, the lady cop obligingly flicks her BIC and sparks me up. I refuse the blindfold and take the most glorious toke ever taken in the history of pot smoking. Call every racially profiled, abortion-denied, flag-burning, Fifth Amendment taker and tell them to demand a retrial, because I’m getting high in the highest court in the land. The officers stare at me in amazement. I'm the Scopes monkey, the missing link in the evolution of African-American jurisprudence come to life. I can hear the cocker spaniel whimpering in the corridor, pawing at the door, as I blow an A-bomb mushroom-cloud-sized plume of smoke into the faces that line the giant friezes o ...
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