Love for Sale

Clifford Thompson's is the author of What It Is: Race, Family, and One Thinking Black Man's Blues (2019), which Time magazine named as one of the "most anticipated books" of the season, and which NPR called "captivating." He is the author and illustrator of the graphic novel Big Man and the Little Men, which is "slim in size and substantial in impact," in the words of the Times Literary Supplement. Thompson received a Whiting Writers’ Award for nonfiction in 2013 for Love for Sale and Other Essays, published by Autumn House Press, which has also published his memoir, Twin of Blackness (2015). For over a dozen years he served as the editor of Current Biography, and he has taught creative nonfiction writing at The Bennington Writing Seminars, Sarah Lawrence College, Columbia University, Queens College, and New York University. Since 2015 he has been a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities. He lives in Brooklyn.​

"Clifford Thompson’s eclectic collection of personal reflections and commentaries on books, music, film, and art reveals clarifying perceptions about American culture in a compelling voice of enthusiasm, honesty, humility, and balance." —San Antonio Express-News"The triumph of this deeply satisfying essay collection is its presentation of a whole human being: immensely cultivated, likable because unfailingly honest, reasonable, mature, witty, and never less than eloquent. Clifford Thompson’s perspective is that of a humane African-American male who is wary of any condescending sentimentality or group-rant, who loves jazz, movies, books, and the oddities of daily life. His prose style is consistently thoughtful, surprising and unobtrusively elegant, and the voice navigates with remarkable smoothness between personal experience and critical analysis. With this selection, he vaults to the front ranks of essayists of his generation." —Phillip Lopate