I believe that we betray the past when we treat it as the past, and we abandon our ancestors, actual and spiritual, when we dehumanize them as denizens of history, as fundamentally different from us in terms of their lusts and appetites and political nuances and strange senses of humor and nose picking and dance moves and love. Novels, I think, are a powerful mode for understanding and perhaps even undoing the cultural patterns that would have us believe that history is behind us and that the past is not part of the forever dance of the present.
This book is, on its face, a sardonic, strange, delightful, and wild retelling of the story of John Brown from the perspective of a formerly enslaved teenager, who John Brown half rescues, half kidnaps, and who is bullied by the Old Man into pretending he is a girl. The story is phenomenally researched and brilliantly told, and the tone accomplishes the magnificent feat of being simultaneously iconoclastic and generous—perhaps even irreverent and reverent. This is a must-read.
Now a Showtime limited series starring Ethan Hawke and Daveed Diggs
Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction
From the bestselling author of The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, Deacon King Kong (an Oprah Book Club pick) and The Color of Water comes the story of a young boy born a slave who joins John Brown’s antislavery crusade—and who must pass as a girl to survive.
Henry Shackleford is a young slave living in the Kansas Territory in 1856--a battleground between anti- and pro-slavery forces--when legendary abolitionist John Brown arrives. When an argument between Brown and Henry's master turns…
This kaleidoscopic book takes a sliver of American life in the era just before the Civil War in Virginia and tells a breathtaking story of slavery, human strangeness, cruelty, and moments of decency. It is stunningly written, and I feel that reading it made my life more expansive.
Masterful, Pulitzer-prize winning literary epic about the painful and complex realities of slave life on a Southern plantation. An utterly original exploration of race, trust and the cruel truths of human nature, this is a landmark in modern American literature.
Henry Townsend, a black farmer, boot maker, and former slave, becomes proprietor of his own plantation - as well as his own slaves. When he dies, his widow, Caldonia, succumbs to profound grief, and things begin to fall apart: slaves take to escaping under the cover of night, and families who had once found love beneath the weight of slavery…
The Birthright of Sons is a collection of stories centered around the experiences of marginalized people, namely Black and LGBTQ+ men. Although the stories borrow elements from various genres (horror, suspense, romance, magical realism, etc.), they are linked by an exploration of identity and the ways personhood is shaped through…
I loved this book the first time I read it, and rereading it for the second time, I encountered yet another layer of depth, wisdom, and insight. It is a gorgeous novel about spiritual and ethical living, reflected through the lens of an elderly preacher on the brink of death, recalling his life for his young son while sifting through an ongoing conflict with his best friend's son. I cannot recommend this one highly enough.
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION and THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD
AN OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK
In 1956, towards the end of Reverend John Ames's life, he begins a letter to his young son: 'I told you last night that I might be gone sometime . . . You reached up and put your fingers on my lips and gave me that look I never in my life saw on any other face besides your mother's. It's a kind of furious pride, very passionate and stern. I'm always a little surprised to find my eyebrows unsinged after…
Incredible. Like a great Russian novel, this book asks its readers for effort, time, and patience, but it all pays off one thousand times over. It is a story about how quiet lives come up against the sky-high pile of debris known as history, the beauty of art, and kindness amidst the wreckages and catastrophes of human politics.
"In a single year, my father left us twice. The first time, to end his marriage, and the second, when he took his own life. I was ten years old."
Master storyteller Madeleine Thien takes us inside an extended family in China, showing us the lives of two successive generations-those who lived through Mao's Cultural Revolution and their children, who became the students protesting in Tiananmen Square. At the center of this epic story are two young women, Marie and Ai-Ming. Through their relationship Marie strives to piece together the tale of her fractured family in present-day Vancouver, seeking answers…
In the first century, Rome’s celebrated love poet Ovid finds himself in exile, courtesy of an irate Emperor, in the far-flung town of Tomis. Appalled at being banished to a barbarous region at the very edge of the Empire, Ovid soon discovers that he has a far more urgent -…
This novel is haunting, poetic, dense, and exquisite. It is centered around a small town in New England and wends and weaves through the strange and terrible things that happen there. Allio's writing is exquisite and melodic, and while this book nominally takes place a century ago, in so many ways, it frighteningly and fluently depicts today's world.
"An elegant, luminous, moving work of lyric prose. Every page shimmers."-Carole Maso
"Fiercely imagined, alive with incandescent imagery, Kirstin Allio's Garner is a memorable debut."-John Burnham Schwartz
Landlocked, sail-shaped Garner, New Hampshire, is a town delineated by its Puritan ethics and its "Live Free or Die" mentality. Like the forbidding landscape of Wharton's Ethan Frome, this New England outpost keeps its secrets and shapes its inhabitants. Frances Giddens, a spirited, elusive girl born at the dawn of the twentieth century and now approaching womanhood, moves through the forests and rivers that mark Garner's borders as easily as she befriends its…
My book follows two Yiddish-speaking immigrants, the sole survivors of a pogrom in their shtetl in Northeastern Ukraine, who make their way to Philadelphia in the 1930s, where they connect with a young Black writer and communist, and the three of them seek to navigate America's often nightmarish sexual and racial politics, together and separately.
Ava Winston likes her life of routine in Lexington, Kentucky. Then a tornado blows it away. Ava is safe in the basement, but when she emerges, only one corner of her home stands. Rather than crumbling under the loss, she feels a load lifted. Maybe something beyond the familiar is…
Benghazi: A New History is a look back at the enigmatic 2012 attack on the US mission in Benghazi, Libya, its long-tail causes, and devastating (and largely unexamined) consequences for US domestic politics and foreign policy. It contains information not found elsewhere, and is backed up by 40 pages of…
