One of our most provocative African American novelists affirms the literary power of the African diaspora with an eloquent appreciation of three writers from very different places and times
One of our most provocative African American novelists affirms the literary power of the African diaspora with an eloquent appreciation of three write...
No one sat me down and told me I was a Negro. That was something I figured out on the sly...
So begins acclaimed critic and novelist Darryl Pinckney's debut novel, High Cotton, an elegant and insightful look into the world of upper-middle-class black elite, or, in a term popularized by W. E. B. Du Bois, "the talented tenth." The story follows an unnamed narrator as he moves from his safe childhood in conservative Indianapolis to a brief tenure as minister of information for a local radical organization, to eventually settling into the life as an expatriate in...
No one sat me down and told me I was a Negro. That was something I figured out on the sly...
Jed--young, gay, black, out of rehab and out of prospects in his hometown of Chicago--flees to the city of his fantasies, a museum of modernism and decadence: Berlin. The paradise that tyranny created, the subsidized city isolated behind the Berlin Wall, is where he's chosen to become the figure that he so admires, the black American expatriate. Newly sober and nostalgic for the Weimar days of Isherwood and Auden, Jed arrives to chase boys and to escape from what it means to be a black male in America.
But history, both personal and political, can't be avoided with time or distance....
Jed--young, gay, black, out of rehab and out of prospects in his hometown of Chicago--flees to the city of his fantasies, a museum of modernism and...
