James Hannaham
“I’VE NEVER KEPT SHEEP / But it’s as if I did.” How did these two lines of Fernando Pessoa’s poetry irritate a person like me, often considered a novelist, enough to write a multigenre book full of short pieces and images called Pilot Impostor? The short answer is that the couplet collided with a swarm of issues all at once in an airplane above the Atlantic Ocean. 
My husband and I canceled our spring-break trip because of the pandemic. His parents own a vacation house on a salt pond in Rhode Island that they let us use some weekends. Bummed about the cancellation and bored at home, we headed up there for a long weekend on Wednesday, March 18, thinking we’d return that Sunday or Monday. Coincidentally, that was the week that New York became the worldwide epicenter of COVID-19. Now it’s August and we’re still here. 
Despite its obdurate title—which cribs the catchphrase made famous by Damon Wayans’s outrageous character Homey D. Clown from In Living Color—David Peisner’s Homey Don’t Play That! plays practically everything. It dodges and weaves through the biographies of many people, laying down a cultural history of late-twentieth-century black humor, television, and civil rights, even as its bite-size chapters maintain the brisk, gossipy tone of a celebrity tell-all.