sistas overseas

So my latest bedtime book is Andrea Lee's Interesting Women. I have long been interested in Andrea Lee, a writer from Philly who crafts tales of sistas overseas involved in trysts and marriages with hot French or Italian men. That's putting it a bit lightly: she actually complicates our ideas of blackness via class and travel. (There, that's better) Lee herself lives in Italy with her husband so she has an intimate view into the lives of expats (black, white and other) and nationals.

I learned of Lee a few years ago after picking up her first novel Sarah Phillips. Besides being a travel bee myself, it's refreshing to read literature that advances the cosmopolitanism of some of our early pensmiths like Jessie Redmon Fauset and Nella Larsen. And Interesting Women has certainly whet my appetite for adventure. It's the perfect little bedtime collection that enables me to drift off to sleep thinking of Italy or some other fabulous place Lee's intriguing female characters happen to be in. (Big sigh) I'm feeling a little landlocked. Time to cook up a travel adventure of my own.