SONG OF THE SHANK is the powerful novel from the prodigiously talented author of RAILS UNDER MY BACK (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000). It recounts the obscure history of Thomas Greene Wiggins, a remarkable nineteenth-century African American musical prodigy and “idiot savant” who performed under the stage name Blind Tom. Born a slave in Georgia in 1849, Wiggins was one of the first African American classical musicians, a contemporary of virtuosos such as Liszt and Rubinstein.
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This dazzling novel, which has been hailed nationwide as a rare achievement on the level of fiction by Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and Richard Wright, is the communal expression of a century of African-American life in America, with its imagery of exodus and exile, departure and destiny. Wielding extraordinary literary, religious, and historical power, it is the triumphant debut of a most powerful and utterly original voice.
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Encompassing ten short stories, Jeffery Renard Allen's forthcoming collection FAT TIME (Graywolf Press, 2020) is loosely linked around African notions of time and place, along with African views of space, cosmology, and metaphysics. Taken together, these ten stories represent a contemporary master at the top of his craft.
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Anthrax. Smallpox. Incurable and horrifying Ebola-related fevers. For two decades, while a fearful world prepared for nuclear winter, an elite team of Russian bioweaponeers began to till a new killing field: a bleak tract sown with powerful seeds of mass destruction—by doctors who had committed themselves to creating a biological Armageddon. BIOHAZARD (Delta, 2000) is the never-before-told story of Russia’s darkest, deadliest, and most closely guarded Cold War secret.
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In this remarkable history, critically acclaimed and award-winning author Jane Brox examines the institution of silence from monastic communion with God to the punitive isolation of inmates. With precision and grace, SILENCE explores the use of silence as both a threat and a tool over time, and our often-fraught relationship with communication and solitude as it has evolved in our digital lives.
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The world of Jeffery Renard Allen’s stunning short story collection, HOLDING PATTERN, is a recognizable city (Chicago), but one in which a young man, jailed for jumping a subway turnstile, might sprout wings, or copper pennies might rain from the skies. Yet these are no fairy tales – Allen’s sensitivity to the realities of African American life is assuredly contemporary. Dazzlingly written, astonishingly inventive and unfailingly entertaining, HOLDING PATTERN (Graywolf, 2008) is a break-out collection.
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When they arrived in New York in 1964, Christo was already becoming well known in avant-garde circles for his wrappings of everyday objects; Jeanne-Claude acted as manager, dealer, and accountant. Over time, as Chernow reveals, the fusion of their prodigious gifts-his drawings and her ability to draw things together-produced the works for which today they are known the world over. CHRISTO AND JEANNE-CLAUDE is an indelible portrait of the artists and their work, and a moving account of an extraordinary couple.
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A novel that has drawn comparisons with the work of J. D. Salinger, Truman Capote, and Flannery O’Connor, EDISTO centers on one Simons Everson Manigault, a twelve-year-old possessed of a vocabulary and sophistication way beyond his years and a preadolescent bewilderment with the behavior of adults.
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