Some of My Best Friends: Essays on Lip Service

A fearless and darkly comic debut essay collection about race, justice, and the limits of good intentions. In this stunning debut, Catapult editor and award-winning voice actor Tajja Isen explores the absurdity of living in a world that apologizes for structural racism, yet makes only cosmetic attempts to solve it. These nine daring essays explore the quick fixes society makes to mask systemic problems: the entertainment industry’s pivot away from colorblind casting; diverse representation in books as an answer to literary whiteness; the law’s erasure of forms of inequality; the cozy fictions of nationalism. In the spirit of Zadie Smith, Cathy Park Hong, and Jia Tolentino, Isen interlaces cultural criticism with her own lived experience to create a remarkable portrait of who we are and how we live today. Ultimately, Some of My Best Friends is interested in the discords between what we say and what we do; what we do and what we value; what we value and what we imagine to be possible.