The Black male scholars within this important book are painfully aware that the brutal murder of George Floyd was not due to a few "bad apples." They understand that they are perceived as "threats" and "criminals" within a distorted white imaginary that is embedded with processes of mythopoetic construction, racial capitalism, and a deep anti-Black male social ontology. Edited by prominent philosopher George Yancy, Black Men from behind the Veil: Ontological Interrogations emphasizes the importance of Black male epistemic agency and courage to speak the truth regarding an America that values Black male life on the cheap and that attempts to control the movement of Black men, their capacity to breathe, and their being through anti-Black technologies of surveillance, confinement, policing, and white nation-building. There is no single monolithic Black male voice that dominates this crucial and necessary text. Each voice speaks of pain behind the Veil, revealing narrative specificity and an important recursive truth: Black men, within the white American psyche, are both necessary and yet disposable. The existential and sociohistorical weight of this truth is made painfully clear through the voices of these Black men.

At once criminal and savior, clown and creator, antagonist and mediator, the character of trickster has made frequent appearances in works by writers the world over. As Margaret Atwood observed, trickster gods ""stand where the door swings open on its hinges and the horizon expands; they operate where things are joined together and, thus, can also fall apart."" A shaping force in American literature, trickster has appeared in such characters as Huckleberry Finn, Rinehart, Sula, and Nanapush. Usually a figure both culturally specific and transcendent, trickster leads the way to the unconscious, the concealed, and the seemingly unattainable. Trickster Lives offers thirteen new and challenging interpretations of trickster in American writing, including essays on works by African American, Native American, Pacific Rim, and Latino writers, as well as an examination of trickster politics. This innovative collection of work conveys the trickster's unmistakable imprint on the modern world.