What American Fiction Doesn’t Get Right

Mark Olmsted
3 min readMar 24, 2024

Because of my work, I actually saw “American Fiction” three times. What I liked was how determined the story was to portray a very specific, individual family with no trace of any stereotype, in direct contrast to the extremely stereotypical tropes in the bestselling book Monk (Jeffrey Wright) pens. But the portrayal of the publishing industry as demanding such content from Black authors in order to sell struck me as a…

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Mark Olmsted

Author, "Ink from the Pen: A Prison Memoir" about my time behind bars. See GQ dot com “Curious Cons of the Man Who Wouldn’t Die” for story of how I got there.