Restless Reads "Passing" This May

Our first virtual book club was a wonderful transcontinental meeting of book people (the best people). Let’s do it again! This time we are thrilled to be co-presenting with Jones Library, a fantastic public library in Amherst, MA. We polled you and you picked Nella Larsen’s Passing as our May book club pick, to which we say: yes, yes, yes. Charged with psychological depth and homoerotic longing, it’s an overlooked masterpiece of the Harlem Renaissance, by a black woman whose heyday as a writer was bright but far too brief. Passing may or may not have been on your college syllabi, but it deserves our attention now. 

A profound modernist take on a well-worn theme in American culture, Passing brings us inside the intimate lives of two black women, Irene and Clare. Childhood acquaintances, they meet again by chance as adults on divergent paths: Irene lives in Harlem and passes only occasionally, when there’s a whites-only restaurant she wants to go to; Clare is married to a racist white man who doesn’t know that she’s black at all. Both disturbed by and irresistibly attracted to Clare’s masquerade, Irene is drawn into an intense friendship that simmers over into violence.

Nella Larsen was the daughter of a white Danish woman and a black man from the Danish West Indies. She spent her life moving back and forth between North and South, Europe and America, Harlem and Greenwich Village, never quite at home anywhere. After Passing, she won a Guggenheim, the first African American woman ever to do so. She went on to write another novel and a handful of short stories, but they were never published—as Darryl Pinckney observes, “few writers of the Negro Awakening were able to sustain careers once the Great Depression took hold and the vogue for things Negro, as Langston Hughes called it, came to an end.” She died in obscurity, but her novels were reprinted in the 1970s, and we’re happy to see another wave of interest in her work: a film adaptation of Passing is in the works, starring Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga (!); she finally received an obituary in the New York Times; and several new editions of Passing have come out in recent years (including ours!).

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Our Restless Classics edition features these truly gorgeous cut-out illustrations by Malachi Lily, a nonbinary black artist based in Philadelphia.

Here’s how to join us:

1. Get your copy of Passing. Our Restless Classics edition is here on Bookshop, which is a great place to buy books these days—they’re a new platform that gives over 75% of its profit margin straight to independent bookstores. 

2. Join us for two virtual book club meetings via Zoom, led by our publisher and literature scholar Ilan Stavans:

Thursday, May 14 at 8 pm EDT
What to read: chapter 1 of Part Two: Re-encounter (p. 71 in our edition)
Register here.

Thursday, May 21 at 8 pm EDT
What to read: chapter 2 of part 2 through Part 3: The Finale (pp. 73–141 in our edition)
Register here.

We’re excited to discover Passing with you.

About the Book

About the Author

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Nella Larsen was born Nellie Walker in 1891 in Chicago. Her mother was a Danish immigrant and her father an immigrant from the Danish West Indies. Larsen attended school in all white environments in Chicago until she moved to Nashville to attend high school. Larsen later practiced nursing, and from 1922 to 1926, served as a librarian at the New York Public Library. After resigning from this position, Larsen began her literary career by writing her first novel, Quicksand (1928), which won her the Harmon Foundation’s bronze medal. After the publication of her second novel, Passing (1929), Larsen was awarded the first Guggenheim Fellowship given to an African American woman, establishing her as a premier novelist of the Harlem Renaissance. Nella Larsen died in New York in 1964.

About the Introducer

© Dominique Nabokov

Darryl Pinckney, a longtime contributor to The New York Review of Books, is the author of two novels, Black Deutschland and High Cotton, and two works of nonfiction, Blackballed: The Black Vote and US Democracy and Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature.

About the Illustrator

© Connie Vandarakis

Malachi Lily is a shapeshifting, black, nonbinary artist and moth from Philadelphia, PA. Seeking to combat our present day cravings for instant gratification and toxic individualism, they create works of art, literature, and programming that resonate spiritual light. They hope their work causes you to want to curl up in the sun and ponder, ideally with a cat.