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After reading Morrison's Playing in the Dark, I immediately started thinking about Moby Dick and how I had probably missed an entire United States worth of story. Somewhere along the way of confirming that, I chanced upon a description of this book - never heard of it before. Somehow missed that it's quoted in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man.

It's a short page turner, I finished it in a week and a half. Holy hell. Perhaps one of the most perfectly constructed bits of short fiction I've ever read. Melville's dramatization of real life events recalls a method of my favorite "modern" authors as well as oddly the filmmaker Herzog. All the contradictions of a country founded on freedom which simultaneously embraced slavery in the same moment crammed into a a couple hundred pages of finely crafted prose and sculpted symbolism.

I've really lucked out w/ some real bangers for the last few reads!