Download or read book Teaching Jean Toomer s 1923 Cane written by Chezia Thompson-Cager and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2006 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cane one of the major works of the Harlem Renaissance and Jean Toomer's imagist masterpiece, is now a part of the canon in Afro-American literature. Teaching Jean Toomer's 1923 Cane is a unique literary tool that explores the brilliance and far-sighted vision of Toomer, allowing Cane to be taught holistically as a discovery process, using the blues motif and the poetic essay. This book's text and figures ground a discussion of Cane's enigmatic and figurative language, connecting the Harlem Renaissance to the Negritude Movement and to later Afro-centric literary movements. This book also reviews P.B.S. Pinchback's legacy as a non-Negro, able to pass easily in white society, the influence of Ouspensky, H. L Mencken's critical work, The Paris Brotherhood, and «Saccaharum officinarum-G.» Like the lunar arcs dividing Cane, the book works as an instructional map. The pictures from the first complete production also tell a remarkable story.
Download or read book The Collected Poems of Jean Toomer written by Robert B. Jones and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2014-02-01 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is the only collected edition of poems by Jean Toomer, the enigmatic American writer, Gurdjieffian guru, and Quaker convert who is perhaps best known for his 1923 lyrical narrative Cane. The fifty-five poems here -- most of them previously unpublished -- chart a fascinating evolution of artistic consciousness. The book is divided into sections reflecting four distinct periods of creativity in Toomer's career. The Aesthetic period includes Imagist, Symbolist, and other experimental pieces, such as "Five Vignettes," while "Georgia Dusk" and the newly discovered poem "Tell Me" come from Toomer' s Ancestral Consciousness period in the early 1920s. "The Blue Meridian" and other Objective Consciousness poems reveal the influence of idealist philosopher Georges Gurdjieff. Among the works of this period the editor presents a group of local color poems picturing the landscape of the American Southwest, including "Imprint for Rio Grande." "It Is Everywhere," another newly discovered poem, celebrates America and democratic idealism. The Quaker religious philosophy of Toomer's final years is demonstrated in such Christian Existential works as "They Are Not Missed" and "To Gurdjieff Dying." Robert Jones's clear and comprehensive introduction examines the major poems in this volume and serves as a guide through the stages of Toomer's evolution as an artist and thinker. The Collected Poems of Jean Toomer will prove essential to Toomer's admirers as well as to scholars and students of modern poetry, Afro-American literature, and American studies.
Download or read book As Lie Is to Grin written by Simeon Marsalis and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2017-10-10 with total page 104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shortlisted for the 2017 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize “Simeon Marsalis’s As Lie Is to Grin is not a satire meant to teach us lessons, nor a statement of hope or despair, but something more visionary—a portrait of a young man’s unraveling, a depiction of how race shapes and deforms us, a coming–of–age story that is also a confrontation with American history and amnesia. The book achieves more in its brief span than most books do at three times the length.” —Zachary Lazar, author of I Pity the Poor Immigrant David, the narrator of Simeon Marsalis’s singular first novel, is a freshman at the University of Vermont who is struggling to define himself against the white backdrop of his school. He is also mourning the loss of his New York girlfriend, whose grandfather’s alma mater he has chosen to attend. When David met Melody, he lied to her about who he was and where he lived, creating a more intriguing story than his own. This lie haunts and almost unhinges him as he attempts to find his true voice and identity. On campus in Vermont, David imagines encounters with a student from the past who might represent either Melody’s grandfather or Jean Toomer, the author of the acclaimed Harlem Renaissance novel Cane (1923). He becomes obsessed with the varieties of American architecture “upon land that was stolen,” and with the university’s past and attitudes as recorded in its newspaper, The Cynic. And he is frustrated with the way the Internet and libraries are curated, making it difficult to find the information he needs to make connections between the university’s history, African American history, and his own life. In New York, the previous year, Melody confides a shocking secret about her grandfather’s student days at the University of Vermont. When she and her father collude with the intent to meet David’s mother in Harlem—craving what they consider an authentic experience of the black world—their plan ends explosively. The title of this impressive and emotionally powerful novel is inspired by Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem “We Wear the Mask” (1896): “We wear the mask that grins and lies . . .”
Download or read book The Letters of Mina Harker written by Dodie Bellamy and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2021-10-19 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bellamy's debut novel revives the central female character from Bram Stoker's Dracula and imagines her as an independent woman living in San Francisco during the 1980s. Hypocrisy's not the problem, I think, it's allegory the breeding ground of paranoia. The act of reading into--how does one know when to stop? KK says that Dodie has the advantage because she's physical and I'm "only psychic." ... The truth is: everyone is adopted. My true mother wore a turtleneck and a long braid down her back, drove a Karmann Ghia, drank Chianti in dark corners, fucked Gregroy Corso ... --Dodie Bellamy, The Letters of Mina Harker First published in 1998, Dodie Bellamy's debut novel The Letters of Mina Harker sought to resuscitate the central female character from Bram Stoker's Dracula and reimagine her as an independent woman living in San Francisco during the 1980s--a woman not unlike Dodie Bellamy. Harker confesses the most intimate details of her relationships with four different men in a series of letters. Vampirizing Mina Harker, Bellamy turns the novel into a laboratory: a series of attempted transmutations between the two women in which the real story occurs in the gaps and the slippages. Lampooning the intellectual theory-speak of that era, Bellamy's narrator fights to inhabit her own sexuality despite feelings of vulnerability and destruction. Stylish but ruthlessly unpretentious, The Letters of Mina Harker was Bellamy's first major claim to the literary space she would come to inhabit.
Download or read book A Country of Ghosts written by Margaret Killjoy and published by AK Press. This book was released on 2021-11-23 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dimos Horacki is a Borolian journalist and a cynical patriot, his muckraking days behind him. But when his newspaper ships him to the front, he’s embedded in the Imperial Army and the reality of colonial expansion is laid bare before him. His adventures take him from villages and homesteads to the great refugee city of Hronople, built of glass, steel, and stone, all while a war rages around him. The empire fights for coal and iron, but the anarchists of Hron fight for their way of life. A Country of Ghosts is a novel of utopia besieged and a tale that challenges every premise of contemporary society.
Download or read book Still William written by Richmal Crompton and published by Good Press. This book was released on 2022-08-21 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Still—William" by Richmal Crompton. Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.
Download or read book Perfect Black written by Crystal Wilkinson and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2021-08-03 with total page 105 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2022 NAACP Image Award Winner Crystal Wilkinson combines a deep love for her rural roots with a passion for language and storytelling in this compelling collection of poetry and prose about girlhood, racism, and political awakening, imbued with vivid imagery of growing up in Southern Appalachia. In Perfect Black, the acclaimed writer muses on such topics as motherhood, the politics of her Black body, lost fathers, mental illness, sexual abuse, and religion. It is a captivating conversation about life, love, loss, and pain, interwoven with striking illustrations by her long-time partner, Ronald W. Davis.
Download or read book We Are Bridges written by Cassandra Lane and published by Feminist Press at CUNY. This book was released on 2021-04-20 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In this evocative memoir, Cassandra Lane deftly uses the act of imagination to reclaim her ancestors’ story as a backdrop for telling her own. The tradition of Black women’s storytelling leaps forward within these pages—into fresh, daring, and excitingly new territory." —Bridgett M. Davis, author of The World According to Fannie Davis When Cassandra Lane finds herself pregnant at thirty-five, the knowledge sends her on a poignant exploration of memory to prepare for her entry into motherhood. She moves between the twentieth-century rural South and present-day Los Angeles, reimagining the intimate life of her great-grandparents Mary Magdelene Magee and Burt Bridges, and Burt's lynching at the hands of vengeful white men in his southern town. We Are Bridges turns to creative nonfiction to reclaim a family history from violent erasure so that a mother can gift her child with an ancestral blueprint for their future. Haunting and poetic, this debut traces the strange fruit borne from the roots of personal loss in one Black family—and considers how to take back one’s American story.
Download or read book Heaven My Home written by Attica Locke and published by Mulholland Books. This book was released on 2019-09-17 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this "captivating" crime novel (People), Texas Ranger Darren Mathews is on the hunt for a missing child -- but it's the boy's family of white supremacists who are his real target. 9-year-old Levi King knew he should have left for home sooner; now he's alone in the darkness of vast Caddo Lake, in a boat whose motor just died. A sudden noise distracts him - and all goes dark. Darren Mathews is trying to emerge from another kind of darkness; after the events of his previous investigation, his marriage is in a precarious state of re-building, and his career and reputation lie in the hands of his mother, who's never exactly had his best interests at heart. Now she holds the key to his freedom, and she's not above a little maternal blackmail to press her advantage. An unlikely possibility of rescue arrives in the form of a case down Highway 59, in a small lakeside town where the local economy thrives on nostalgia for ante-bellum Texas - and some of the era's racial attitudes still thrive as well. Levi's disappearance has links to Darren's last case, and to a wealthy businesswoman, the boy's grandmother, who seems more concerned about the fate of her business than that of her grandson. Darren has to battle centuries-old suspicions and prejudices, as well as threats that have been reignited in the current political climate, as he races to find the boy, and to save himself. A Best Book of the Year New York TimesHouston ChronicleNPRWall Street JournalMilwaukee Journal-SentinelBook PageFinancial TimesKirkusSheReadsSunday TimesLitHubGuardianBook RiotSouth Florida Sun SentinelLonglisted for the Orwell Political Fiction Book Prize
Download or read book Masculinist Impulses written by Nathan Grant and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Masculinist Impulses, Nathan Grant begins his analysis of African American texts by focusing on the fragmentation of values of black masculinity-free labor, self-reliance, and responsibility to family and community-as a result of slavery, postbellum disfranchisement, and the ensuing necessity to migrate from the agrarian South to the industrialized North. Through examinations of novels that deal with black male selfhood, Grant demonstrates the ways in which efforts to alleviate the most destructive aspects of racism ultimately reproduced them in the context of the industrialized city. Grant,s book provides close readings of Jean Toomer (Cane and Natalie Mann) and Zora Neale Hurston (Moses, Man of the Mountain, Seraph of the Suwanee, and Their Eyes Were Watching God), for whom the American South was a crucial locus of the African American experience. Toomer and Hurston were virtually alone among the Harlem Renaissance writers of prose who returned to the South for their literary materials. That return, however, allowed their rediscovery of key black masculine values and charted the northern route of those values in the twentieth century to their compromise and destruction. Grant then moves on to three more recent writers-John Edgar Wideman, Gloria Naylor, and Toni Morrison-who expanded upon and transformed the themes of Toomer and Hurston. Like Toomer and Hurston, these later authors recognized the need for the political union of black men and women in the effort to realize the goals of equity and justice. Masculinist Impulses discusses nineteenth- and twentieth-century black masculinity as both a feature and a casualty of modernism. Scholars and students of African American literature will find Grant,s nuanced and creative readings of these key literary texts invaluable.
Download or read book A Dog s Ransom written by Patricia Highsmith and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2002-08-17 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Long out of print, this Highsmith classic resurfaces with a vengeance. The great revival of interest in Patricia Highsmith continues with the publication of this novel that will give dog owners nightmares for years to come. With an eerie simplicity of style, Highsmith turns our next-door neighbors into sadistic psychopaths, lying in wait among white picket fences and manicured lawns. In A Dog's Ransom, Highsmith blends a savage humor with brilliant social satire in this dark tale of a highminded criminal who hits a wealthy Manhattan couple where it hurts the most when he kidnaps their beloved poodle. This work attesets to Highsmith's reputation as "the poet of apprehension" (Graham Greene).
Download or read book The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White written by George Hutchinson and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 566 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By restoring interracial dimensions left out of accounts of the Harlem Renaissance--or blamed for corrupting it--George Hutchinson transforms our understanding of black (and white) literary modernism, interracial literary relations, and twentieth-century cultural nationalism in the United States.
Download or read book A History of the Harlem Renaissance written by Rachel Farebrother and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-04 with total page 453 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Harlem Renaissance was the most influential single movement in African American literary history. The movement laid the groundwork for subsequent African American literature, and had an enormous impact on later black literature world-wide. In its attention to a wide range of genres and forms – from the roman à clef and the bildungsroman, to dance and book illustrations – this book seeks to encapsulate and analyze the eclecticism of Harlem Renaissance cultural expression. It aims to re-frame conventional ideas of the New Negro movement by presenting new readings of well-studied authors, such as Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, alongside analysis of topics, authors, and artists that deserve fuller treatment. An authoritative collection on the major writers and issues of the period, A History of the Harlem Renaissance takes stock of nearly a hundred years of scholarship and considers what the future augurs for the study of 'the New Negro'.
Download or read book Black Fiction written by Roger Rosenblatt and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1974 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this illuminating book Roger Rosenblatt offers both sensitive analyses of individual works and a provocative and compelling thesis. He argues that black fiction has a unity deriving not from any chronological sequence, or simply from its black authorship, but from a particular cyclical conception of history on which practically every significant black American novel and short story is based. Marked for oppression by an external physical characteristic, black characters struggle constantly against and within a hostile world. Rosenblatt's analysis of the way black protagonists try to break historical patterns provides an integrated and sustained interpretation of motives and methods in black fiction. The black hero, after starting on a circular track, may try to change direction by means of his youth, love, education, or humor; or he may try to escape into his own elusive and vague history. But, as Rosenblatt demonstrates, these attempts all fail. And the black hero discovers in the failure of his attempts that the society which caused all this failure is not only unattainable but undesirable. Neither a sociological study nor a routine survey, this is distinctly a work of literary criticism which concentrates on black fiction as literature.
Download or read book A Drama of the Southwest written by Jean Toomer and published by University of New Mexico Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, a critical edition of a previously unpublished 1935 manuscript, makes A Drama of the Southwest available to readers for the first time.
Download or read book Cane written by Jean Toomer and published by Dover Publications. This book was released on 2019-01-16 with total page 147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "[Cane] has been reverberating in me to an astonishing degree. I love it passionately; could not possibly exit without it." — Alice Walker "A breakthrough in prose and poetical writing …. This book should be on all readers' and writers' desks and in their minds." — Maya Angelou Hailed by critics for its literary experimentation and vivid portrayal of African-American characters and culture, Cane represents one of the earliest expressions of the Harlem Renaissance. Combining poetry, drama, and storytelling, it contrasts life in an African-American community in the rural South with that of the urban North. Author Jean Toomer (1894–1967) drew upon his experiences as a teacher in rural Georgia to create a variety of Southern psychological realism that ranks alongside the best works of William Faulkner. The book's three-part structure, ranging from South to North and back again, is united by its focus on the lives of African-American men and women in a world of bigotry, violence, passion, and tenderness.
Download or read book Folklore in New World Black Fiction written by Chiji Akoma and published by . This book was released on 2021-01-29 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For a while, tracing African roots in the artistic creations of blacks in the New World tended to generate much attention as if to suggest that the New World does not have profound impact on their creative spirit. In addition, few studies have tried to construct an interpretive model through which an array of works by New World writers could be meaningfully explored on the basis of their African Diasporic identity. In Folklore in New World Black Fiction, Chiji Akọma offers an interpretive model for the reading of the African New World novel focusing on folklore, not as an ingredient, but as the basis for the narratives. The works examined do not contain folklore materials; they are folklore, constituted by the intersections of African oral narrative aesthetics, New World sensibility, and the written tradition. Specifically Akọma looks at four African Caribbean and African American novelists, Roy A.K. Heath, Wilson Harris, Toni Morrison, and Jean Toomer. The book seeks to expand the understanding of the forms of folklore as it pertains to black texts. For one, it broadens the dimensions of folklore by looking beyond the oral world of the "simple folk" to the kinds of narrative sophistication associated with writing; it also asserts the importance of performance art in folklore analysis. The study demonstrates the durability of the black aesthetic over artistic forms.
