I’m the author of seven novels, including Soul Catcher, a Booksense and Historical Novels Review selection; A Brother’s Blood, which was a New York Times Book Review Notable Book and an Edgar Award Finalist; The Blind Side of the Heart, A Dream of Wolves, and The Garden of Martyrs, a Connecticut Book Award finalist and made into an opera. My historical novel Beautiful Assassin won the 2011 Connecticut Book Award for Fiction. I’ve also published a collection of his short stories, Marked Men, in addition to over 50 short stories in national journals. I was the founding editor of two magazines, American Fiction and Dogwood, as well as the founder and former director of Fairfield University's MFA Creative Writing Program. I’ve just completed a new historical novel set during the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.
I wrote...
Soul Catcher
By
Michael C. White
What is my book about?
Augustus Cain is a man with a past he wants to forget, a present without prospect or fortune, and an uncertain future marred by the loss of his most prized possession: the horse that has been his working companion for years. He is also a man haunted by a terrible skill—the ability to track people who don’t want to be found. Rosetta is a runaway slave fueled by the passion and determination only a mother can feel. Her flight is her one shot at freedom, and she would rather die than return to the living hell that she has left behind.
In the perilous years before the Civil War, the fates of these two remarkable people will intertwine in an extraordinary adventure—a journey of hardship and redemption that will take them from Virginia to Boston and back—and one that will become an extraordinary test of character and will, mercy and compassion. It is an odyssey that will change them both forever.
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The Books I Picked & Why
The Confessions of Nat Turner
By
William Styron
Why this book?
A great and controversial novel—aren’t great novels always controversial?—The Confessions of Nat Turner takes as its starting point the mind of a slave, Nat Turner, as he awaits his execution for leading a failed slave rebellion in 1831. Even when it was published in 1967, the novel inspired a strong backlash from the African-American community, who were upset, in part, because of the portrayal of a Black man lusting after a White woman. Written by a Southern White, the novel is a powerful story, powerfully told, one that remains as relevant today as it did when it was first published.
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The Underground Railroad
By
Colson Whitehead
Why this book?
The reason I so love this novel is that it seamlessly blends the horrific elements of a realistic portrayal of slavery, with a beautifully rendered fantasy/symbolic element. The two merge flawlessly to form a world that is at once brutal and appalling with another that is highly symbolic, fantastical, and lyrical in its beauty. The most obvious and compelling example of the latter element is referred to in the title itself—the mythically depicted underground railroad. Unlike the real one (run by heroes like Harriet Tubman), Whitehead’s symbolic railroad develops on an imaginative and magical level, which suggests the “underground” reality of a slave’s rich psychical and imaginative world.
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Beloved
By
Toni Morrison
Why this book?
In both raw and densely poetical language, Morrison’s novel sets out to shock readers, especially white readers, about the horrors of the South’s “peculiar institution,” as well as the North’s often quiet complicity. It sets up a mythical, almost Sophoclean tragedy: namely, how far will an escaped slave mother go to prevent her child from suffering what she had to. The answer lies at the heart of this powerful novel.
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The Known World
By
Edward P. Jones
Why this book?
This novel takes for its premise the little-known fact that freed slaves in the South sometimes themselves owned slaves. While slavery was and is primarily a white institution, Jones wants to focus on larger questions of human trafficking, human dignity, and the broad culpability of slavery. But what I find most interesting about this novel is that it brings the question of slavery into a modern context, where it exists not just as a historical fact but as a contemporary plague that haunts us today. The multiple characters—White and Black—force us to question what each of us would do if slavery still existed.
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Cloudsplitter
By
Russell Banks
Why this book?
What makes this immense novel (768 pages) so engrossing is that we get a very inside view of the great (or demonic—depending on your perspective) figure of John Brown. Told by his son Owen, the novel gives us both a panoramic view of Brown, his vision of slavery, his tumultuous times, and his quest to eradicate slavery by any means, as well as a very intimate portrait of the myth of John Brown as opposed to man and father.
