Download the Skolay app
.png)
I've written about the histories of medicine, religion, utopias, and chess, and I've chronicled experiences ranging from attending an execution to driving in a demolition derby. I love to talk about all of it! But I'm most proud of the work I've done – it really became more of a life mission – to discover and preserve the memory of the young, enslaved woman at the center of the origin story of modern women's health, Anarcha. I'm most keen to talk about the on-the-ground research I did to find Anarcha, and what her story means not only to the history of medicine, but to the nature of truth, facts, and history at a time when these things are under threat.
I'm excited to talk with readers because a writer's work isn't done with putting words onto a page. If writers are to return to their proper role as public intellectuals who make a contribution to society beyond mere entertainment, we must seize the opportunity to share our work, our experiences, and whatever wisdom we have acquired in every way we can.
.png)
.png)
For more than a century, Dr. J. Marion Sims was hailed as the “father of modern gynecology.” He founded a hospital in New York City and had a profitable career treating gentry and royalty in Europe, becoming one of the world’s first celebrity surgeons. Statues were built in his honor, but he wasn’t the hero he had made himself appear to be.
Say Anarcha excavates history, deconstructing the biographical smoke screen of a surgeon who has falsely been enshrined as a medical pioneer and bringing forth a heroic Black woman to her rightful place at the center of the creation story of modern women’s health care.
"[A] truly astounding tale. . . . Say Anarcha is an important book and deserves to be widely read. . . . In the introduction, Hallman tells us that his goal is “to subvert every aspect of the fraudulent narrative” connected to Anarcha and to “excavate the life story of a young, enslaved woman who changed history, only to be forgotten by it.” He has accomplished that and more."
— New York Times Book Review
A funny, frisky, often outrageous book about love, literature, and modern life.
Nearly twenty-five years ago, Nicholson Baker published U and I, the fretful and handwringing—but also groundbreaking—tale of his literary relationship with John Updike. U and I inspired a whole sub-genre of engaging, entertaining writing about reading, but what no story of this type has ever done is tell its tale from the moment of conception, that moment when you realize that there is a writer out there in the world that you must read—so you read them. B & Me is that story, the story of Hallman discovering and reading Nicholson Baker, and discovering himself in the process.
"A fascinating thing to behold: literary criticism that’s deeply personal, hysterically funny and starkly honest in addition to being scholarly and trenchant.”
— Washington Post
