Download or read book A Visitation of Spirits written by Randall Kenan and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 2022-05-17 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “With A Visitation of Spirits, Randall Kenan continues James Baldwin’s legendary tradition of ‘telling it on the mountain.’”—San Francisco Chronicle When A Visitation of Spirits was published, Randall Kenan (1963-2020) was instantly recognized as a writer of significance, and one who brought into literary fiction the southern Black, gay experience, one of the first such writers to achieve mainstream success. His groundbreaking first novel, A Visitation of Spirits, is the powerful story of Horace Cross, a popular and high-achieving sixteen-year-old boy, who wrestles with the guilt of discovering who he is, a young man attracted to other men and yearning to escape the narrow confines of the small town of Tims Creek, North Carolina, where he grew up. Raised on stories of prophets, revelations, and dreams, his internal struggles take shape in his mind as demons and angels battling for his soul, culminating in one night of horrible and tragic transformation. A Visitation of Spirits established Randall Kenan as a literary master, and his influence continues to be felt. Now in Grove paperback and with an introduction by Tarell Alvin McCraney, Oscar-winning writer of Moonlight, A Visitation of Spirits is a classic novel of growing up from a literary giant.
Download or read book If I Had Two Wings Stories written by Randall Kenan and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2020-08-04 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction Longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction Finalist for the 2021 Aspen Words Literary Prize Mingling the earthy with the otherworldly, these ten stories chronicle ineffable events in ordinary lives. In Kenan’s fictional territory of Tims Creek, North Carolina, an old man rages in his nursing home, a parson beats up an adulterer, a rich man is haunted by a hog, and an elderly woman turns unwitting miracle worker. A retired plumber travels to Manhattan, where Billy Idol sweeps him into his entourage. An architect who lost his famous lover to AIDS reconnects with a high-school fling. Howard Hughes seeks out the woman who once cooked him butter beans. Shot through with humor and seasoned by inventiveness and maturity, Kenan riffs on appetites of all kinds, on the eerie persistence of history, and on unstoppable lovers and unexpected salvations. If I Had Two Wings is a rich chorus of voices and visions, dreams and prophecies, marked by physicality and spirit. Kenan’s prose is nothing short of wondrous.
Download or read book Let the Dead Bury Their Dead and Other Stories written by Randall Kenan and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 1992 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This remarkable collection of twelve short stories is about the diverse folk--black and white, young and old, rich and poor, rural and sophisticated--who live in the eastern North Carolina town of Tims Creek. Among the memorable characters are Clarence Pickett, who at age three began receiving messages from beyond the grave and whose gift seems tied to a hog's ability to talk; matronly Ida Perry, haunted by a boy her judge husband may have drowned years before; Dean Williams, hired to seduce the richest black man in Times Creek, yearning after innocence while he betrays love.
Download or read book The Cross of Redemption written by James Baldwin and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-09-06 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From one of the most brilliant and provocative literary figures of the past century—a collection of essays, articles, reviews, and interviews that have never before been gathered in a single volume. “An absorbing portrait of Baldwin’s time—and of him.” —New York Review of Books James Baldwin was an American literary master, renowned for his fierce engagement with issues haunting our common history. In The Cross of Redemption we have Baldwin discoursing on, among other subjects, the possibility of an African-American president and what it might mean; the hypocrisy of American religious fundamentalism; the black church in America; the trials and tribulations of black nationalism; anti-Semitism; the blues and boxing; Russian literary masters; and the role of the writer in our society. Prophetic and bracing, The Cross of Redemption is a welcome and important addition to the works of a cosmopolitan and canonical American writer who still has much to teach us about race, democracy, and personal and national identity. As Michael Ondaatje has remarked, “If van Gogh was our nineteenth-century artist-saint, Baldwin [was] our twentieth-century one.”
Download or read book Walking on Water written by Randall Kenan and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2000-02-22 with total page 689 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A meaningful panoramic view of what it means to be human...Cause for celebration." --Times-Picayune From the author of the National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Let the Dead Bury Their Dead comes a moving, cliché-shattering group portrait of African Americans at the turn of the twenty-first century. In a hypnotic blend of oral history and travel writing, Randall Kenan sets out to answer a question that has has long fascinated him: What does it mean to be black in America today? To find the answers, Kenan traveled America--from Alaska to Louisiana, from Maine to Las Vegas--over the course of six years, interviewing nearly two hundred African Americans from every conceivable walk of life. We meet a Republican congressman and an AIDS activist; a Baptist minister in Mormon Utah and an ambitious public-relations major in North Dakota; militant activists in Atlanta and movie folks in Los Angeles. The result is a marvellously sharp, full picture of contemporary African American lives and experiences.
Download or read book School Spirits written by Rachel Hawkins and published by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers. This book was released on 2013-09-24 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fans of Rachel Hawkins' Hex Hall series will shriek with joy over this dark spin-off adventure full of humor, magic, and snark! Fifteen-year-old Izzy Brannick was trained to fight monsters. For centuries, her family has hunted magical creatures. But when Izzy's older sister vanishes without a trace while on a job, Izzy's mom decides they need to take a break. Izzy and her mom move to a new town, but they soon discover it's not as normal as it appears. A series of hauntings has been plaguing the local high school, and Izzy is determined to investigate. But assuming the guise of an average teenager is easier said than done. For a tough girl who's always been on her own, it's strange to suddenly make friends and maybe even have a crush. Can Izzy trust her new friends to help find the secret behind the hauntings before more people get hurt? Rachel Hawkins brings the same delightful wit and charm captured in her New York Times best-selling Hex Hall series. Get ready for more magic, mystery and romance!
Download or read book The Fire This Time written by Randall Kenan and published by Melville House. This book was released on 2022-07-12 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Kenan continues Baldwin’s legendary tradition of ‘telling it on the mountain’ by giving a voice to the unvarnished truth.”—The San Francisco Chronicle James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time was one of the essential books of the sixties, and one of the most galvanizing statements of the American civil rights movement. In The Fire This Time, inspired by Baldwin, Kenan combines elements of memoir and commentary, casting a critical eye from his childhood to the present to observe that, while there have been dramatic advances since the sixties, some issues continue to bedevil us. Starting with W. E. B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King, Jr., Kenan expands the discussion to include many powerful Aamerican personalities, such as Oprah Winfrey, O. J. Simpson, Clarence Thomas, Rodney King, Sean “Puffy” Combs, George Foreman, and Barack Obama. Published to mark the forty-fifth anniversary of James Baldwin’s epochal work, The Fire This Time is itself a piercing consideration of the times, and an impassioned call to transcend them.
Download or read book The Discernment of Spirits written by Wendy Love Anderson and published by Mohr Siebeck. This book was released on 2011 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: [Anderson] succeeds in neatly fitting together selected pieces of the history of discernment of spirits to provide a valuable, readable description of the contours of its evolution in the late Middle Ages. -- Debra L. Stoudt, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, The Medieval Review Late medieval Christians lived in a world of visions, but they knew that not all visions came from God: angels, demons, illness, nature, or passion could also inspire an apparent divine visitation. During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the involvement of visionaries in everything from reform movements to military campaigns to papal schisms raised the political and spiritual stakes of determining whether or not a vision was truly from God. In response, a diverse group of medieval thinkers - including men and women, clergy and laity, visionaries and theologians - gradually began to transform the loose patristic readings of Pauline discretio spirituum into a system with the potential to distinguish between true and false visions and between genuine and delusional visionaries. Wendy Love Anderson chronicles the historical, political, and spiritual struggles behind the flowering of late medieval mysticism and what came to be seen as the Christian doctrine of discernment of spirits.
Download or read book Understanding Randall Kenan written by James A. Crank and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2019-03-28 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book-length study of the life and writings of the critically acclaimed Southern writer Randall Kenan is an American author best known for his novel A Visitation of Spirits and his collection of stories Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, was a nominee for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction, and named a New York Times Notable Book. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as the Whiting Writers Award, Sherwood Anderson Award, John Dos Passos Award, Rome Prize, and North Carolina Award for Literature. Understanding Randall Kenan is the first book-length critical study of Kenan, offering a brief biography and an exploration of his considerable oeuvre—memoir, short stories, novels, journalism, folklore, and essays. Kenan's writing can be complex and sometimes highly stylized while covering a broad range of topics, though he often explores African Americans' complicated relationships, specifically as they struggle to make connections along other axes of class, gender, and sexual identity. Crank explores these themes and how they influence Kenan's work through a personal interview with the author.
Download or read book The Spirits of America written by Eric Burns and published by Temple University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The spirits of America, Burns relates that drinking was "the first national pastime," and shows how it shaped American politics and culture from the earliest colonial days. He details the transformation of alcohol from virtue to vice and back again and how it was thought of as both scourge and medicine. He tells us how "the great American thirst" developed over the centuries, and how reform movements and laws sprang up to combat it. Burns brings back to life such vivid characters as Carrie Nation and other crusaders against drink. He informs us that, in the final analysis, Prohibition, the culmination of the reformers' quest, had as much to do with politics and economics and geography as it did with spirituous beverage.
Download or read book Toni Morrison s Spiritual Vision written by Nadra Nittle and published by Augsburg Fortress Publishers. This book was released on 2021-10-05 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Toni Morrison's Spiritual Vision unpacks an oft-ignored but essential element of her work--her religion--and in so doing gives readers a deeper, richer understanding of her life and her writing. Nadra Nittle's wide-ranging, deep exploration of Morrison's oeuvre reveals the role of religion and spirituality in her life and literature.
Download or read book Woodcuts of Women written by Dagoberto Gilb and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These ten stories of “intensity and bravado” by the acclaimed Chicano author explore love, lust, and longing among people struggling to find their way (Jean Thompson, The New York Times Book Review). Featuring characters of Mexican American heritage, each of these haunting stories is crafted with Gilb’s quintessentially spare yet evocative language and explores the lives of men and women at odds with each other. Steeped in an ethos of regimented gender roles, the men in these stories see the women in their lives as little more than woodcuts—crude variations of their actual complexity; symbols of seduction, mystery, and power that will ultimately bring about their undoing. At turns powerful and resonant, hopeful and humorous, Woodcuts of Women is a tour de force by one of America’s foremost Latino writers. “Lonely, tough stories—stories that force us to confront what’s difficult in us, and in the people we love.” —Esquire “The gritty passions of men for women—the grand delusions and tender mercies—are the jukebox songs playing through the 10 stories of Gilb’s ‘Woodcuts of Women.’” —San Francisco Chronicle
Download or read book Messages written by Bonnie McEneaney and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2011-08-23 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An inspiring and groundbreaking work that brilliantly illuminates the eternal power of love and the unbreakable bond it creates. As a mother and former business executive, Bonnie McEneaney was always skeptical of the spiritual world and all that it represents. When her husband, Eamon, died in the attacks on the World Trade Center, she thought she had lost him forever. Then Bonnie began to have experiences that convinced her that her husband, in spirit, was sending her signs—indeed messages—that he was still present and watching over his family. After talking to other families and friends of loved ones lost on 9/11, she realized she was not alone. In Messages, Bonnie shares the miraculous spiritual stories of numerous others connected to the tragedy while weaving in her heartfelt personal message of comfort and hope. For all who are searching for their own deeper connections, this extraordinary book is indispensable proof that love and relationships can continue . . . even after death.
Download or read book Discerning of Spirits written by Demontae A. Edmonds and published by . This book was released on 2018-09-22 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the gift of discerning of spirits? Why is this gift often misunderstood? Does this gift allow one to see more than demons? These questions and many others will be answered in "Discerning of Spirits: 7 Dimensions of Revelation." In this book you will discover the purpose, nature, and power of this divine gift that the Holy Spirit at times causes to work in the lives of believers. Misconceptions will be cleared up and divine insights will be provided. Also, you will hear what Jesus in a visitation shared directly within the Demontae A. Edmonds about this powerful spiritual gift. "Discerning of Spirits: 7 Dimensions of Revelation" is a heavenly inspired literary work that presents in-depth insights into the gift of discerning of spirits. Anecdotes, personal testimonies, and scripture are combined together to give the reader a powerful understanding of this often misunderstood gift. Those engaged in prophetic ministry, intercession, deliverance, and spiritual warfare will be especially benefit from this revelatory read.
Download or read book Raising the Dead written by Sharon Patricia Holland and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2000-03-29 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Raising the Dead is a groundbreaking, interdisciplinary exploration of death’s relation to subjectivity in twentieth-century American literature and culture. Sharon Patricia Holland contends that black subjectivity in particular is connected intimately to death. For Holland, travelling through “the space of death” gives us, as cultural readers, a nuanced and appropriate metaphor for understanding what is at stake when bodies, discourses, and communities collide. Holland argues that the presence of blacks, Native Americans, women, queers, and other “minorities” in society is, like death, “almost unspeakable.” She gives voice to—or raises—the dead through her examination of works such as the movie Menace II Society, Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead, Randall Kenan’s A Visitation of Spirits, and the work of the all-white, male, feminist hip-hop band Consolidated. In challenging established methods of literary investigation by putting often-disparate voices in dialogue with each other, Holland forges connections among African-American literature and culture, queer and feminist theory. Raising the Dead will be of interest to students and scholars of American culture, African-American literature, literary theory, gender studies, queer theory, and cultural studies.
Download or read book Long Division written by Kiese Laymon and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-06-01 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the NAACP Image Award for Fiction From Kiese Laymon, author of the critically acclaimed memoir Heavy, comes a “funny, astute, searching” (The Wall Street Journal) debut novel about Black teenagers that is a satirical exploration of celebrity, authorship, violence, religion, and coming of age in post-Katrina Mississippi. Written in a voice that’s alternately humorous, lacerating, and wise, Long Division features two interwoven stories. In the first, it’s 2013: after an on-stage meltdown during a nationally televised quiz contest, fourteen-year-old Citoyen “City” Coldson becomes an overnight YouTube celebrity. The next day, he’s sent to stay with his grandmother in the small coastal community of Melahatchie, where a young girl named Baize Shephard has recently disappeared. Before leaving, City is given a strange book without an author called Long Division. He learns that one of the book’s main characters is also named City Coldson—but Long Division is set in 1985. This 1985-version of City, along with his friend and love interest, Shalaya Crump, discovers a way to travel into the future, and steals a laptop and cellphone from an orphaned teenage rapper called...Baize Shephard. They ultimately take these items with them all the way back to 1964, to help another time-traveler they meet to protect his family from the Ku Klux Klan. City’s two stories ultimately converge in the work shed behind his grandmother’s house, where he discovers the key to Baize’s disappearance. Brilliantly “skewering the disingenuous masquerade of institutional racism” (Publishers Weekly), this dreamlike “smart, funny, and sharp” (Jesmyn Ward), novel shows the work that young Black Americans must do, while living under the shadow of a history “that they only gropingly understand and must try to fill in for themselves” (The Wall Street Journal).
Download or read book The Ghost Bride written by Yangsze Choo and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2013-08-06 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now a Netflix Mandarin original drama! From the New York Times bestselling author of The Night Tiger, a Reese’s Book Club pick Yangsze Choo’s stunning debut, The Ghost Bride, is a startlingly original novel infused with Chinese folklore, romantic intrigue, and unexpected supernatural twists. Li Lan, the daughter of a respectable Chinese family in colonial Malaysia, hopes for a favorable marriage, but her father has lost his fortune, and she has few suitors. Instead, the wealthy Lim family urges her to become a “ghost bride” for their son, who has recently died under mysterious circumstances. Rarely practiced, a traditional ghost marriage is used to placate a restless spirit. Such a union would guarantee Li Lan a home for the rest of her days, but at what price? Night after night, Li Lan is drawn into the shadowy parallel world of the Chinese afterlife, where she must uncover the Lim family’s darkest secrets—and the truth about her own family. Reminiscent of Lisa See’s Peony in Love and Amy Tan’s The Bonesetter’s Daughter, The Ghost Bride is a wondrous coming-of-age story and from a remarkable new voice in fiction.
