Jim Limber News Today

At age 3, Shane McCrae was taken from his Black father by his white grandparents — a rupture he explores in a new memoir.

In the final year of the Civil War, Jefferson Davis and his wife, Varina, adopted a Black boy named Jim Limber and brought him to live with them in Richmond. Who was he and what did he really mean to them?

Image Journal. His most recent book is Longing for an Absent God: Faith and Doubt in Great American Fiction.See All Articles Sometimes I Never Suffered, the latest book by the poet Shane McCrae, enters a rich literary tradition of angels and still manages to offer a new, illuminating perspective. McCrae’s ambitious work arises from a Christian perspective, one that is not wracked with doubt but steeled in wonder. In an interview published last year by The Millions, McCrae stated, “I find ...

Top 10: the TS Eliot Prize shortlist Each year, the T S Eliot Prize offers poets a chance to win a huge sack of cash, and critics a chance to generalise about trends in poetry. So here goes: long fragmentary narratives are in, love poems are out (though Natalie Diaz unfashionably flies the flag for sensual abandon). Who’ll win the £25,000 prize? If I were judging, it’d be Sasha Dugdale or Shane McCrae. But I’m not, so I’d bet on Diaz, with a side-flutter on Bhanu Kapil. I’m sore ab...

Our contributors, from across our quarterly print issues and our website, read as widely and wildly as they write. Here, they tell us about the books that moved them most in this strange year.  It’s a privilege, of course, to spend time thinking and writing about some of my favorite books that were published during this most absurd and solitary—most mendacious, violent, American—of years, but I’m grateful to the following artists, among others, for sustaining my spirit. I...