Why Marlon James Decided to Write an African “Game of Thrones”
The New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino profiles Marlon James, a gay Jamaican fantasy writer who experienced a religious crisis as an evangelical Christian in the early 2000s. James’s new book, Black Leopard, Red Wolf, which has been compared to both Black Panther and Game of Thrones, is set to be released in February. Tolentino writes, “I asked him about the spiritual question that reverberates through Black Leopard, whose world is thickly enchanted but whose characters don’t really believe in anything; this is one of the challenges the book poses to its genre’s metaphysics. ‘I do think I am still in the middle of a religious crisis,’ he said.”