The Short Stacks 25: Maurice Carlos Ruffin//We Cast a Shadow

Maurice Carlos Ruffin is the author of We Cast a Shadow, and joins The Short Stacks to tell us about his process in writing this satirical, speculative fiction novel. We get to talk about what music fueled this novel, how his hometown of New Orleans figures into his work, and how he finds balance between being a writer and lawyer.
There are no spoilers in this episode.

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Everything we talk about on today’s episode can be found below in the show notes and on Bookshop.org and Amazon.

• We Cast a Shadow by Maurice Carlos Ruffin
• Trayvon Martin
• Donald Glover
• A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
• The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander
• Imitation of Life (Douglas Sirk, 1959)
• The Sellout by Paul Beatty
• “All of the Lights” (Kanye West, 2010)
• The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson
• The Orange Couch (New Orleans, LA)
• Rook Coffee (New Orleans, LA)
• My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (Kanye West, 2010)
• Björk
• Joanna Newsom
• Beyonce
• Dissect (Cole Cuchna | Spotify)
• Damn (Kendrick Lamar, 2017)
• Toni Morrison
• Maya Angelou
• Virginia Woolf
• The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom
• 2019 National Book Awards
• Pym by Mat Johnson
• Jesmyn Ward
• Kiese Laymon
• Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
• Black Card by Chris L. Terry
• The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen
• Black No More by  George S. Schuyler
• Slave Play (Jeremy Harris, 2019)
• Ibram X. Kendi
• How to be an Anti-Racist by Ibram X. Kendi
• Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram X. Kendi
• “What are You Reading? with Ibram X. Kendi” (The Longreads Podcast, Longreads)

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