Evidence Of Things Seen: Taking true crime personally
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Sarah Weinman: And then the next anthology is basically Unspeakable Acts, but if the third section was the entire book. So it's much more about systemic injustice and trying to reckon with the past few years in particular. I think the current title is Evidence of Things Seen. So it's a big reference to that Baldwin book.
Sarah D. Bunting: Well, how do you feel about that? That's a big hem to be standing on.
Oh, it was my choice, because that's all I was thinking about when I pitched it in the summer of '20, it was right around all the protests. And I just could not get Baldwin's book outta my head. Yeah. And I think that it's really one of the unheralded true-crime classics, even though he would never have considered himself a true-crime writer.
Right. Should be required reading for all.
Yeah. It's basically a book about systemic inequities and it's Baldwin's prose and it's marvelous and it's woolly and you just have to kind of go with it.
The exchange above comes from an interview I did with Sarah Weinman last year about Scoundrel (and, as always with our convos, about half a hundred other things). “That Baldwin book” is, of course, The Evidence Of Things Not Seen, and my take on Weinman’s titling choice at that time is that I would not have the gonads to put my work in conversation with James Baldwin’s, but I had zero kick with Weinman doing it.
