... sharp.

... wander[s] and wonder[s] and suppose[s] more than it state[s] outright.

In Stranger Faces, Harvard professor Namwali Serpell uses semiotics to describe her version of a 'failed face.' An award-winning novelist, Serpell’s writing spans literary criticism, short stories, and film reviews, and Stranger Faces adds to her skill in writing across genres. The second book in the Undelivered Lectures series, Stranger Faces reads more like a collection of intellectually rigorous long-form blog posts than an academic monograph.

... a brilliant essay collection that, informed by semiotics, proposes a way of thinking about the human face that views each person’s countenance as possessed of culturally and individually constructed meaning that can change radically according to the beholder.

Serpell is one of our brightest new fiction writers and essayists.