Understanding Randall Kenan

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A Visitation of Spirits

Author : Randall Kenan
Publisher : Grove Press
ISBN 13 : 080215932X
Total Pages : 259 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (21 download)

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Book Synopsis A Visitation of Spirits by : Randall Kenan

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.

Understanding Randall Kenan

Author : James A. Crank
Publisher : Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN 13 : 1611179599
Total Pages : 157 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (111 download)

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Book Synopsis Understanding Randall Kenan by : James A. Crank

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.

Let the Dead Bury Their Dead and Other Stories

Author : Randall Kenan
Publisher : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN 13 : 9780156505154
Total Pages : 364 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (51 download)

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Book Synopsis Let the Dead Bury Their Dead and Other Stories by : Randall Kenan

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.

If I Had Two Wings: Stories

Author : Randall Kenan
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 1324005475
Total Pages : 145 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (24 download)

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Book Synopsis If I Had Two Wings: Stories by : Randall Kenan

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.

Walking on Water

Author : Randall Kenan
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 067973788X
Total Pages : 689 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (797 download)

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Book Synopsis Walking on Water by : Randall Kenan

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.

The Fire This Time

Author : Randall Kenan
Publisher : Melville House
ISBN 13 : 1685890024
Total Pages : 161 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (858 download)

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Book Synopsis The Fire This Time by : Randall Kenan

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.

The Cross of Redemption

Author : James Baldwin
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0307275965
Total Pages : 401 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (72 download)

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Book Synopsis The Cross of Redemption by : James Baldwin

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.”

Understanding Sam Shepard

Author : James A. Crank
Publisher : Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN 13 : 1611171873
Total Pages : 152 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (111 download)

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Book Synopsis Understanding Sam Shepard by : James A. Crank

Download or read book Understanding Sam Shepard written by James A. Crank and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2012-10-31 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Understanding Sam Shepard investigates the notoriously complex and confusing dramatic world of Sam Shepard, one of America’s most prolific, thoughtful, and challenging contemporary playwrights. During his nearly fifty-year career as a writer, actor, director, and producer, Shepard has consistently focused his work on the ever-changing American cultural landscape. James A. Crank’s comprehensive study of Shepard offers scholars and students of the dramatist a means of understanding Shephard’s frequent experimentation with language, setting, characters, and theme. Beginning with a brief biography of Shepard, Crank shows how experiences in Shepard’s life eventually resonate in his work by exploring the major themes, unique style, and history of Shepard’s productions. Focusing first on Shepard’s early plays, which showcase highly experimental, frenetic explorations of fractured worlds, Crank discusses how the techniques from these works evolve and translate into the major works in his “family trilogy”: Curse of the Starving Class, the Pulitzer Prize–winning Buried Child, and True West. Shepard often uses elements from his past—his relationship with his father, his struggle for control within the family, and the breakdown of the suburban American dream—as major starting points in his plays. Shepard is a recipient of a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, eleven Obie Awards, and a Chicago Tribune Literary Prize for Lifetime Achievement. Augmented with an extensive bibliography, Understanding Sam Shepard is an ideal point of entrance into complex and compelling dramas of this acclaimed playwright.

Black Folk Could Fly: Selected Writings by Randall Kenan

Author : Randall Kenan
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 0393882179
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (938 download)

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Book Synopsis Black Folk Could Fly: Selected Writings by Randall Kenan by : Randall Kenan

Download or read book Black Folk Could Fly: Selected Writings by Randall Kenan written by Randall Kenan and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2022-08-09 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A personal, social, and intellectual self-portrait of the beloved and enormously influential late Randall Kenan, a master of both fiction and nonfiction. Virtuosic in his use of literary forms, nurtured and unbounded by his identities as a Black man, a gay man, an intellectual, and a Southerner, Randall Kenan was known for his groundbreaking fiction. Less visible were his extraordinary nonfiction essays, published as introductions to anthologies and in small journals, revealing countless facets of Kenan’s life and work. Flying under the radar, these writings were his most personal and autobiographical: memories of the three women who raised him—a grandmother, a schoolteacher great-aunt, and the great-aunt’s best friend; recollections of his boyhood fear of snakes and his rapturous discoveries in books; sensual evocations of the land, seasons, and crops—the labor of tobacco picking and hog killing—of the eastern North Carolina lowlands where he grew up; and the food (oh the deliriously delectable Southern foods!) that sustained him. Here too is his intellectual coming of age; his passionate appreciations of kindred spirits as far-flung as Eartha Kitt, Gordon Parks, Ingmar Bergman, and James Baldwin. This powerful collection is a testament to a great mind, a great soul, and a great writer from whom readers will always wish to have more to read.

The Carolina Table

Author : Randall Kenan
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780997314403
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (144 download)

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Book Synopsis The Carolina Table by : Randall Kenan

Download or read book The Carolina Table written by Randall Kenan and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A buffet of North Carolina food stories. Tar Heel writers share culinary traditions, adventures and flavors that linger long after the last bite"--Page 4 of cover.

The Fire This Time

Author : Randall Kenan
Publisher : Melville House
ISBN 13 : 1685890024
Total Pages : 161 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (858 download)

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Book Synopsis The Fire This Time by : Randall Kenan

James Baldwin

Author : Randall Kenan
Publisher : Facts On File
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 152 pages
Book Rating : 4.F/5 ( download)

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Book Synopsis James Baldwin by : Randall Kenan

Download or read book James Baldwin written by Randall Kenan and published by Facts On File. This book was released on 1994 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Describes the life of the writer James Baldwin, focusing on his experiences as an African-American civil rights worker and as a gay man.

Understanding Margaret Atwood

Author : Donna M. Bickford
Publisher : Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN 13 : 1643364502
Total Pages : 136 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (433 download)

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Book Synopsis Understanding Margaret Atwood by : Donna M. Bickford

Download or read book Understanding Margaret Atwood written by Donna M. Bickford and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2023-08-31 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A timely, accessible introduction to Margaret Atwood's most recent novels and enduring themes In 2017, the Hulu adaptation of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale introduced the acclaimed and bestselling Canadian author to a new generation and reminded Atwood's long-established readers of her uncanny prescience. Understanding Margaret Atwood provides an overview of the author's life, descriptions and analyses of the key themes present in her most recent novels, signposts to the connections and intertextual references between them, and attention to their critical reception. Following a biographical overview, author Donna M. Bickford studies The Handmaid's Tale (1985) and its sequel The Testaments (2019), retellings of The Odyssey in The Penelopiad (2005) and The Tempest in Hag Seed (2016), the MaddAddam trilogy (2003, 2009, 2013), and The Heart Goes Last (2015). Written in clear language and a style appropriate both for scholars and for new students of Atwood, Bickford locates Atwood's recent works in the literary, political, and social context. Atwood is the author of more than fifty books of fiction, essays, and poetry, which have collectively sold more than eight million copies worldwide; has received numerous awards and accolades, including multiple Booker Prizes and a PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Award; and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

Understanding John Rechy

Author : María DeGuzmán
Publisher : Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN 13 : 1643360078
Total Pages : 193 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (433 download)

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Book Synopsis Understanding John Rechy by : María DeGuzmán

Download or read book Understanding John Rechy written by María DeGuzmán and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2019-09-19 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this first book-length monograph on the Mexican American novelist, essayist, and playwright John Rechy, best known for his debut novel City of Night, María DeGuzmán offers a conceptually clear yet aesthetically, philosophically, and socio-politically fine-grained analysis of the spectrum of his writing. Recipient of PEN Center USA's Lifetime Achievement Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, ONE Magazine's National Gay and Lesbian Cultural Hero Award, the William Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement, the Luis Leal Award for Excellence in Chicano/Latino Literature, and the Robert Kirsch Award for Lifetime Achievement, Rechy is the author of fifteen novels, at least three plays, and several volumes of nonfiction. He has written for the Nation, the New York Review of Books, the Los Angeles Times, the Village Voice, the New York Times, and Saturday Review. In Understanding John Rechy, María DeGuzmán offers a brief biographical overview and then traces the development of Rechy's craft through his major works by calling attention to central issues, recurring situations and characters, styles, and special techniques. She examines the complexities of his representation of identity, the subjectivity in his male homosexual odyssey and identity quest novels, and his experimentation with genre. She offers a concise yet intricate analysis of the major organizing paradigms and themes, genres, modes, styles, and handling of the gay Chicano's oeuvre. The book's guiding analysis pays particular attention to the ways in which Rechy's works function as cultural critique challenging mainstream values in a deep-structure manner.

Understanding Alice Walker

Author : Thadious M. Davis
Publisher : Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN 13 : 1643362399
Total Pages : 180 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (433 download)

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Book Synopsis Understanding Alice Walker by : Thadious M. Davis

Download or read book Understanding Alice Walker written by Thadious M. Davis and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2021-08-20 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Understanding Alice Walker serves both as an introduction to the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner's large body of work and as a critical analysis of her multifaceted canon. Thadious M. Davis begins with Walker's biography and her formative experiences in the South and then presents ways of accessing and reading Walker's complex, interconnected, and sociopolitically invested career in writing fiction, poetry, critical essays, and meditations. Although best known for her novel The Color Purple and her landmark essays In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose, Walker began her career with Once: Poems, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, and In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women. She has remained committed not merely to writing in multiple genres but also to conveying narratives of the hope and transformation possible within the human condition and as visualized through the lens of race and gender. Davis traces Walker's literary voice as it emerges from the civil rights and feminist movements to encourage an individual and collective search for justice and joy and then evolves into forceful advocacy for world peace, spiritual liberation, and environmental conservancy. Her writing, a rich amalgamation of the cutting-edge and popular, the new-age and difficult, continues to be paradigm shifting and among the most important produced in the last half of the twentieth century and among the most consistently prophetic in the first part of the twenty-first century.

Understanding Colson Whitehead

Author : Derek C. Maus
Publisher : Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN 13 : 1643361759
Total Pages : 176 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (433 download)

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Book Synopsis Understanding Colson Whitehead by : Derek C. Maus

Download or read book Understanding Colson Whitehead written by Derek C. Maus and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2021-04-07 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An inviting point of entrance into the truth seeking, genre defying novels of the award-winning author In 2020 Colson Whitehead became the youngest recipient of the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. Although Whitehead's widely divergent books complicate overarching categorization, Derek C. Maus argues that they are linked by their skepticism toward the ostensible wisdom inherited from past generations and the various forms of "stories" that transmit it. Whitehead, best known for his Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Underground Railroad, bids readers to accompany him on challenging, often open-ended literary excursions designed to reexamine—and frequently defy—accepted notions of truth. Understanding Colson Whitehead unravels the parallel structures found within Whitehead's books from his 1999 debut The Intuitionist through 2019's The Nickel Boys, for which he won his second Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. By first imitating and then violating their conventions, Whitehead attempts to transcend the limits of the formulas of the genres in which he seems to write. Whitehead similarly tests subject matter, again imitating and then satirizing various forms of conventional wisdom as a means of calling out unexamined, ignored, or malevolent aspects of American culture. Although it is only one of many subjects that Whitehead addresses, race is often central to his work. It serves as a prime example of Whitehead's attempt to prompt his readers into revisiting their assumptions about meanings and values. By upending the literary formulas of the detective novel, the heroic folktale, the coming-of-age story, the zombie apocalypse, the slave narrative, and historical fiction, Whitehead reveals the flaws and shortcomings by which Americans have defined themselves. In addition to evoking such explicitly literary storytelling traditions, Whitehead also directs attention toward other interrelated historical and cultural processes that influence how race, class, gender, education, social status, and other categories of identity determine what an individual supposedly can and cannot do.

Understanding Jennifer Egan

Author : Alexander Moran
Publisher : Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN 13 : 1643362267
Total Pages : 156 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (433 download)

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Book Synopsis Understanding Jennifer Egan by : Alexander Moran

Download or read book Understanding Jennifer Egan written by Alexander Moran and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2021-09-03 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Understanding Jennifer Egan is the first book-length study of the novelist, short-story writer, and journalist best known for the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad. Alexander Moran examines each of Egan's varied published works, analyzes how her journalism informs her fiction, excavates her literary and intellectual influences, and considers her place in contemporary fiction. Moran argues that because Egan's fiction is not easily categorized many of her novels have been underappreciated. He proposes a framework for understanding her writing centered on what it means to have, and to write, an "authentic" experience. In Emerald City, Egan explores the authenticity of touristic experience; in The Invisible Circus, her focus shifts to the authenticity of historical memory; in Look at Me, The Keep, and A Visit from the Goon Squad, she explores the effects of digital technology on how we understand authentic experience. In the concluding chapter, Moran discusses Egan's 2017 novel Manhattan Beach as a text that explores the authenticity of history and genre while resonating with the instability of the present.