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Indecent Exposure (novel) Indecent Exposure is a satirical novel by British writer Tom Sharpe, originally published in 1973. The sequel to "Riotous Assembly", the author’s debut novel, this story also successfully lampoons the South African police under apartheid. Plot summary. Set in the fictional South African town of Piemburg, where local police, headed by Kommandant van Heerden, Luitenant Verkramp and Konstabel Els, are determined to maintain the government policy of apartheid. While the Kommandant is absent at the country home of a snobbish upper class English couple, Luitenant Verkramp enlists the help of a female psychiatrist to provide the police garrison with aversion therapy, with the aim of stopping them from fraternising with black girls. However, this goes horribly awry and turns the town’s entire police force into homosexuals. Called back from his holiday, Kommandant van Heerden attempts to restore some order.

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A Sport of Nature A Sport of Nature is a 1987 novel by the South African writer Nadine Gordimer. Plot. While still a secondary school student, Kim Capran decides to rename herself "Hillela". Hillela joins the ANC, she marries a black man from the congress and has a child with him. She travels to Dar es Salaam, Nairobi before returning to South Africa as one of the wives of a fictitious first President of South Africa. Reception. In Gordimer's Nobel Prize citation, "A Sport of Nature" was described as "[her] most hazardous undertaking."

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Vortex (Bond and Larkin novel) Vortex is a 1991 war novel by Larry Bond and Patrick Larkin. Set during the final years of "apartheid" in South Africa, "Vortex" follows the assassination of a reformist National Party president and his cabinet by the African National Congress, as well as a subsequent seizure of power by far-right Afrikaners. The plot unfolds through a series of intertwining accounts narrated through several characters. It was a commercial success, receiving generally positive reviews. A "Vortex" audiobook, presented by David Purdham, was released via Simon Schuster Audio in August 1991. Setting. "Vortex" is initially set during bilateral negotiations to end apartheid in South Africa during the early 1990s. Despite conservative opposition, the ruling National Party and newly elected State President Frederick Haymans secretly discuss options for reform with the African National Congress (ANC). However, beneath the surface tensions remain high, with both parties facing immense pressure from their radical wings and internal resistance to apartheid escalating. The National Party is unwilling to consider a universal franchise, which forms the crux of the ANC's demands, while for its part the ANC refuses to cease planning guerrilla operations. Plot. Despite strict instructions to avoid provoking unnecessary confrontations with the ANC's armed wing, the Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), Karl Vorster, the South African Minister of Law and Order, authorises a raid by the 44 Parachute Brigade on suspected MK bases in Zimbabwe. Vorster—a hardline conservative and secret Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging sympathiser—is roundly criticised by President Haymans and his reformist Cabinet for his actions. However, the paratroopers succeed in recovering valuable intelligence on "Broken Covenant", a proposed MK operation to assassinate Haymans as he travels to Pretoria from Cape Town aboard the Blue Train for the parliament's summer recess. This incident comes at a time when negotiations between Haymans and the ANC are approaching a major breakthrough, so MK decides to abort the attack. Sensing an opportunity to seize power himself with the current leadership eliminated, Vorster excuses himself from the Blue Train and eliminates the ANC courier assigned to transmit the abort signal to MK forces. The oblivious guerrillas carry out the attack as planned, killing Haymans and his entire Cabinet. A triumphant Vorster then assumes the presidency and declares a state of emergency, giving the South African Police free rein to crack down on anti-apartheid movements. Diplomatic relations with the rest of the world quickly sour, and thousands of those suspected of being affiliated with the ANC are executed or moved to remote internment facilities. Vorster also orders the South African Defence Force (SADF) to invade newly independent Namibia under the pretext of targeting MK training camps. At the behest of the Namibian government, thousands of Cuban troops redeploy from their bases in Angola to halt the SADF's offensive south of Windhoek. This leads to a prolonged war of attrition, with neither side being able to gain the upper hand. Meanwhile, conditions in South Africa begin to worsen due to Vorster's heavy-handed attempts at silencing domestic opposition. His use of lethal force against white dissenters and other Afrikaners in particular leads to militant secessionist movements in the Transvaal and Orange Free State. The fledgling regime also alienates the Inkatha Freedom Party and nominally independent KwaZulu, which results in a violent insurgency waged by Zulu radicals across Natal and an urban insurrection in Durban. SADF units in Cape Town also mutiny and intervene to protect civilians after several mass killings. Taking note of these internal crises, General Antonio Vega, commander of the Cuban military mission in Namibia, proposes an invasion of South Africa itself. Bolstered by new shipments of Soviet arms, and troops from several other socialist African nations, Vega duly sends three tactical battle groups into the Transvaal. Having concentrated on the potential of a future Cuban attack on the Namibian front, South African intelligence agencies are taken by surprise. The SADF is also slow to mount an effective resistance due to its preoccupation with various revolts and the fact that a disproportionate amount of manpower and supplies are already committed to a major operation in Namibia. As General Vega's forces advance eastwards towards Johannesburg, Vorster orders the deployment of South Africa's nuclear arsenal to save the city. A South African Mirage F1CZ drops a nuclear weapon on Vega's third tactical group, killing about three thousand Cuban and Libyan soldiers. The invasion force retaliates by bombarding SADF defenders with sarin gas at Potgietersrus; appalled by the carnage affecting innocent civilians, the ANC—which had previously embraced the Cubans as liberators—breaks off its alliance with Vega. Havana then authorises the use of human shields to discourage further South African nuclear strikes. The war in South Africa triggers a global market crisis as the prices of precious metals spiral upward. Remaining Western support for Vorster's government evaporates shortly after a U.S. journalist, Ian Sherfield, leaks the truth about Broken Covenant to the international press. The United States and United Kingdom subsequently undertake direct military intervention in South Africa to depose Vorster and prevent Cuba or the Soviet Union from gaining control over the country's valuable mineral resources. U.S. Army Rangers launch an airborne assault on the Pelindaba with the intention of capturing all remaining South African nuclear weapons, while other allied forces make amphibious landings in Cape Town and Durban. When Vorster threatens to irradiate the mines on the Witwatersrand with nuclear waste material, American, British, and mutinous South African forces attack the Union Buildings and arrest him before the order can be given. The remaining Cuban tactical groups are halted by U.S. air strikes just short of Pretoria; conceding defeat, Vega begins withdrawing his troops from the country. During the retreat, he and most of his general staff are killed by a disgruntled MK cadre. Because Vega sold them on an ultimate communist victory in South Africa, a humiliated Soviet leadership vows never to be involved in the continent again. Apartheid is formally abolished in the months after the fall of Vorster's government and a conglomerate of various political parties are brought to the table for establishing a multiracial federal republic with Johannesburg as its new capital. Vorster himself is later meted life imprisonment for his crimes. Reception. The novel earned positive reviews. "Kirkus Reviews" stated that the book will satisfy readers disappointed by the quick resolution of the Persian Gulf War's Operation Desert Storm. It noted that the political scenes were "broad-brushed" compared to the battle scenes. "Publishers Weekly" said the novel is an "extrapolation" of South Africa's political climate at the time it was published. The U.S. deployment into South Africa was highlighted as a potential example of future operations in locations it is not familiar with.

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When Smuts Goes When Smuts Goes is a dystopian novel by Dr. Arthur Keppel-Jones. The novel is set during a future history of South Africa, following the ascension of Afrikaner nationalists and their increasingly destructive quest for total "apartheid". It foreshadowed the fall of Jan Christiaan Smuts and his United Party administration, a rupture in ties with the British Commonwealth, and the declaration of a Second South African Republic. Presiding over the regime which follows is Obadja Bult, a dominion theologian influenced by the ideals of the former "Ossewabrandwag". His blunt authoritarian streak gives spark to racial conflict—culminating in foreign intervention and troubled majority rule. Background. As World War II draws to a close, white politics in the Union of South Africa are glaringly polarised - reflecting the struggle between Daniel Malan's Reunited National Party, whose followers demand a republic, and the United Party of Jan Smuts, who wish to retain their British monarch. Smuts' outstanding electoral victory in 1943 is fast becoming a distant memory; the Nationalists have consolidated by 1948 and go on to win Calvinia, Potchefstroom, Springs, and Caledon. United Prime Minister Oudstryder dissolves parliament in 1952, the tercentenary of Jan van Riebeeck's landing at the Cape of Good Hope. His Nationalist rivals take advantage of the occasion, organising a massive pageant in Cape Town. Speeches, processions, and gatherings mushroom at famous battlefields. British imperialism is decried as the national enemy. A wave of Afrikaner patriotism rocks South Africa as the polls are opened: Oudstryder and his pro-English colleagues are doomed. The triumphant Nationalists return 83 seats against the United Party's 56, securing a majority in every province but Natal. Accuracy of predictions. The book correctly predicted the end of the long tenure in power of the United Party of Jan Smuts and the rise to power of the National Party, followed by a rupture with the British Commonwealth and the proclamation of a second "South African Republic". In Keppel-Jones' prediction, however, the National Party institutes a totalitarian fascist-style dictatorship and completely suppresses all dissent—to a far greater degree than the actual apartheid government was to implement even in its most repressive phases. Keppel-Jones further predicts a mass exodus of South Africa's British diaspora; an uprising led by the Zulus, which is suppressed with much bloodshed; a constant state of overt and guerrilla warfare; a totally intransigent attitude by the Afrikaner leadership leading to increasing tensions with the rest of the world, culminating with an international military intervention—which leads to the toppling of the regime, followed by the killing or expulsion of the remaining white population, much of it migrating to Argentina; and an economic collapse and social degeneration, with the inexperienced and incompetent new government proving unable to maintain the political and economic structures which were handed over to them by the international community. Researcher Gary Baines compared the book's deeply pessimistic message and its looking forwards to a disastrous future to the tone of J.M. Coetzee's "Waiting for the Barbarians" several decades later in 1982.

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The Lying Days The Lying Days is the debut novel of Nobel winning South African novelist, Nadine Gordimer. It was published in 1953 in London by Victor Gollancz and New York by Simon & Schuster. It is Gordimer's third published book, following two collections of short stories, "Face to Face" (1949), and "The Soft Voice of the Serpent" (1952). The novel is semi-autobiographical, with the main character coming from a small mining town in Africa similar to Gordimer's own childhood. The novel is also a bildungsroman "about waking up from the naivete of a small colonial town." Reception. Reviews of "The Lying Days" in 1953 were generally positive. "New York Times" critic James Stern compared the novel favourably to the works of Alan Paton, especially "Cry, the Beloved Country", describing "The Lying Days" as the better of the two novels. Stern described the novel as less "novel" and more "biography", following the style and form of biographical writing. In a review in the "Fitchburg Sentinel", W. G. Rogers wrote that in "The Lying Days" Gordimer shows that South Africa "is a land not of a single problem, race, but of many problems which that one central issue seems to magnify and intensify." Rogers complimented Gordimer on the way she "brings her characters so surely to life", and on how she "writes so moving of love". Writing in the "El Paso Herald-Post", F. A. Ehmann called "The Lying Days" "not a bad novel", adding that once it got going, Gordimer's characters become "interesting", the plot "satisfactory", and her prose "good [and] honest". But Ehmann was critical of her "experimental prose" at the beginning, saying that "this maladroit display of implied symbolism, disjointed reverie and rhetorical questions is both unnecessary and badly disjointed." In a review in the "Petersburg Progress Index", Joan Pollack described "The Lying Days" as "alive, bright and inquiring" and complimented it on its "handling ... the problems of youth [while] still maintaining the beauty and adventure of life." Pollack said Gordimer "is an expert craftsman and her sensitive ability to portray the most delicate emotions should place her among the most promising newcomers today".

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The Sellout (novel) The Sellout is a 2015 novel by Paul Beatty published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and in the UK by Oneworld Publications in 2016. The novel takes place in and around Los Angeles, California, and muses about the state of racial relations in the U.S. today. In October 2016, it won the Man Booker Prize, making Beatty the first US writer to win that award. Background. Published in 2015, "The Sellout" was the latest in Paul Beatty’s body of work that explores racial identity in America and the pervasive historical effects of racism. Beatty’s other notable works include "The White Boy Shuffle", "Tuff", and "Slumberland". Beatty has stated his motivation for writing the novel was that "[he] was broke". Although "The Sellout" was not written in response to any specific event, the novel was released during a time of racial reckoning surrounding multiple instances of police brutality and the Ferguson, Missouri protests. Plot Summary. The story begins with the narrator (referred to as either “me” or “Bonbon”) standing trial before the Supreme Court for crimes related to his attempt to restore slavery and segregation in his hometown of Dickens, an “agrarian ghetto” on the outskirts of Los Angeles, California. Sitting before the court, Bonbon starts to reflect on what led up to this moment and recounts his upbringing. Bonbon had a tenuous relationship with his father, an unorthodox sociologist who performed numerous traumatizing social experiments on him as a child and held lofty expectations for Bonbon to become a  respected community leader in Dickens. A few years before the Supreme Court case, Bonbon’s father is murdered by the police, and an ambivalent Bonbon struggles to find his purpose in life. At first, Bonbon is content to withdraw from the community and continue his agricultural endeavors of growing artisanal watermelons and marijuana without his father’s judgement. One day, however, the town of Dickens spontaneously disappears from the map and becomes unincorporated, a change that Bonbon attributes to Dickens’ undesirable socioeconomic and racial demographics. Bonbon sets out to restore Dickens’ existence through any means possible. Bonbon enlists the help of Hominy Jenkins, an old man and former child actor, to paint provocative road signs and boundary lines that draw attention to Dickens’ existence. After those attempts are fruitless, Bonbon continues a step further and attempts to reinstitute both slavery and segregation in Dickens and bring back what he believes to be a unifying power structure in the town. He first attempts to re-segregate a public bus driven by his ex-girlfriend by posting “white-only signs” in the front of the bus. He later tries to open an all-white school next to the local high school. Meanwhile, Hominy offers to become Bonbon’s slave, to which a reluctant Bonbon eventually agrees. As the absurdity of Bonbon’s actions are noticed on a wider scale, Hominy causes a large accident that ultimately leads to the supreme court case. Genre. "The Sellout" is a fictitious, satirical novel about racial relations in the U.S. Beatty utilizes stereotypes and parody throughout the story to inject social commentary. Beatty’s other works are mostly humorous as well, but Beatty has claimed that he does not view himself as a satirical author. Analysis. "The Sellout" has been seen by many as a critique of the idea that American society is post-racial. According to literary scholar Henry Ivry, the satirical devices used throughout the book bring attention to the current issues of systemic racism and mock the conventional approaches that American society has taken to remedy these issues. Similarly, University of Albany professor Steven Delmagori notes that the pointed comedy in the novel establishes white privilege as a central issue facing American society, but Beatty simultaneously pokes fun at the overly individualistic view that has dominated the discourse around white privilege. Another scholar, Judit Friedrich, stipulates that Beatty’s writing may seem taboo at first, but his flippant treatment of serious racial issues -- from segregation to economic inequality -- call out society’s unwillingness to discuss and substantively address these issues. Reception. The novel was well received by critics, who praised its humor, ostensibly satirical content, and rich social commentary. In "The Guardian", Elisabeth Donnelly described it as "a masterful work that establishes Beatty as the funniest writer in America", while reviewer Reni Eddo-Lodge called it a "whirlwind of a satire", going on to say: "Everything about "The Sellout"s plot is contradictory. The devices are real enough to be believable, yet surreal enough to raise your eyebrows." The "HuffPost" concluded: ""The Sellout" is a hilarious, pop-culture-packed satire about race in America. Beatty writes energetically, providing insight as often as he elicits laughs." Historian Amanda Foreman, chair of the judges of the Man Booker prize, said: ""The Sellout" is one of those very rare books that is able to take satire, which is in itself a very difficult subject and not always done well, and it plunges into the heart of contemporary American society and, with absolutely savage wit, of the kind I haven't seen since Swift or Twain, both manages to eviscerate every social taboo and politically correct, nuanced, every sacred cow, and while both making us laugh, making us wince. It is both funny and painful at the same time and it is really a novel of our times." Beatty has indicated surprise that critics refer to the novel as a comic one, indicating his belief that discussing the comic aspects of the novel prevents critics from having to discuss its more serious themes. Awards and honors. "The Sellout" was the first American book to win the prestigious Man Booker prize, an award traditionally reserved for English-language literature not from the U.S. The contest began considering American literature in 2002. Publication. "The Sellout" was published in 2015 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux and UK publishing house Oneworld Publications.

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Operation Burning Candle Operation Burning Candle is a novel by Blyden Jackson published in 1973. It was his debut novel. It describes a political conspiracy led by a group called the Black Warriors, whose leader is Vietnam War veteran and Harlem native Captain Aaron Rogers. The conspiracy does not appear clear until more than halfway through the novel and refers to a traumatic event to galvanize the black community in the US to take control of their own destiny. The novel culminates with a series of killings at a political convention held at Madison Square Garden in New York City. Title. The title of the book refers to the three part plan initiated by the Black Warriors. No matter where they go, they will be welcomed in to the homes of members of the black community who burn candles in their home as a sign of solidarity and refuge. Plot summary. The novel begins with the death of Harlem native and Vietnam War veteran Captain Aaron Rogers. He has supposedly been killed in Vietnam and his body has been flown back to the US for burial. Suspicion is created when Rogers' sister Sissy (Janice) claims to have seen Aaron in a car in lower Manhattan. She and her brother Tommy go to the funeral parlor where the body of Aaron is in a coffin. They discover that the body is not of their brother at all, but someone else entirely. While Sissy and Tommy are discovering the truth about their brother, Police detective Dan Roberts, former Korean War veteran and current law school student as well as member of the NYPD's Special Operations Unit is investigating a series of seemingly unrelated yet unusual crimes, including a number of bank robberies and a subway malfunction and shutdown. Meanwhile, firebrand governor of Mississippi Josiah Brace is getting ready for the Democratic National Convention scheduled to occur in just a few days in Madison Square Garden. Brace is a divisive figure who is opposed to the Civil Rights reforms of the 1960s as well as school busing. He is ambitious and hopes to be nominated as his party's presidential candidate at the convention. At this point, there are flashbacks to the Vietnam War from Aaron Rogers' point of view. We see the racism prevalent during the war from white officers against black regulars. It was not uncommon for black soldiers to engage in "fracking" against their white superiors. There are additional flashbacks to Rogers' time as a student in graduate school where he studied psychology at New York University. He is the only black student in his class and he feels isolated and ostracized by the rest of the class. He is intrigued by Carl Jung's theory of the collective unconsciousness which he hopes to apply to his study of the black community. He comes to the realization that the only thing that can transform the black community's standing in the United States is a monumental traumatic event that will alter the predominant white community's power dynamic. Ultimately, using well trained black Vietnam War soldiers, Aaron Rogers formulates a plan that will culminate in a monumental event of political violence that will transform American society. Main themes. The novel which was written during the late 1960s and early 1970s reflects many of the themes prevalent in US society during the time period. Written in the aftermath of the civil rights movement, urban riots, the Vietnam War, the political assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, it reflects the political paranoia of the period. At the same time the novel is a call to black unity and cooperation in order to transform the political power structure. Many of the novel's themes were addressed in films of the period including Uptight and The Spook Who Sat By the Door. Its treatment of the black soldier's experience during the Vietnam War is reflected in Spike Lee's Da 5 Bloods.

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Nervous Conditions Nervous Conditions is a novel by Zimbabwean author Tsitsi Dangarembga, first published in the United Kingdom in 1988. It was the first book published by a black woman from Zimbabwe in English. "Nervous Conditions" won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize in 1989, and in 2018 was listed as one of the BBC's top 100 books that changed the world. The semi-autobiographical novel focuses on the story of a Shona family in post-colonial Rhodesia during the 1960s. "Nervous Conditions" is the first book of a trilogy, with "The Book of Not" (2006) as the second novel in the series, and "This Mournable Body" (2020) as the third. "Nervous Conditions" illustrates the dynamic themes of race, colonialism, and gender during the post-colonial conditions of present-day Zimbabwe. The title is taken from the introduction by Jean-Paul Sartre to Frantz Fanon's "The Wretched of the Earth" (1961). Plot summary. Tambu is the main character of the novel. The novel opens up with the news that Tambu’s older brother, Nhamo, had just died. Tambu is not upset about this because Nhamo studied at a missionary school away from home with his uncle Babamukuru and his family. The only thing Tambu desires is to attend school, but her family is very poor and do not have enough money to pay her school fees. Tambu’s uncle, Babamukuru, and his family came to visit the homestead. Because of Babamakuru’s success, he is worshiped whenever he comes to visit. During the visit, Babamukuru suggests that Tambu should take Nhamo's place and attend the missionary school by his house. Upon arriving, she soon becomes close to her cousin Nyasha and completely focuses on her studies. During term break, everyone returns to visit the family back in the homestead. Tambu does not want to go back as she is much more comfortable living with Babamukuru. Towards the end of the term, there is an exam administered at Tambu’s school. This exam is to test the students and offer them an opportunity to study at a well known missionary school. Tambu excels on the exam and is offered a scholarship to attend this well known school. In the new school Tambu is introduced to many cultural changes; however, she remains resistant to the changes. As always she is fully focused on her studies. Consequently, she remains cautious of her daily situations and nervous of the conditions that surround her. Major themes. Gender Gender is one major theme expressed in the novel. The Rhodesian female characters are oppressed on the basis of gender, and this is a driving force behind many of the story arcs in the novel. Colonialism Colonialism is another major theme in the novel - it is another driving force behind many of the plot points, including the fixation on (Western) education and Nyasha's internal struggles with race and colonialism. Additionally, Tambu's trajectory starting with her early education and ending with her acceptance at the nun's school reveals the colonial nature of that scholarship, since the African students were not treated the same as the white Western students. Reception. "Nervous Conditions" has mostly received positive reviews, making it a prominent African and Zimbabwean literary work. The Africa Book Club recommends "Nervous Conditions", claiming Dangarembga’s work to be, "a thought-provoking novel that packs a huge number of complicated ideas into a simple and engaging story." "Nervous Conditions" was awarded the Commonwealth Writers' Prize in 1989, and has since been translated into a number of languages. It has been praised both within and outside of Africa as a prominent contribution and advocate of African feminism and post-colonialism. The novel has been described as an "absorbing page-turner" by "The Bloomsbury Review", "another example of a bold new national literature" by the "African Times" and "a unique and valuable book" by "Booklist". Finally, Pauline Uwakweh describes how "Nervous Conditions" emphasizes that "[Racial and colonial problems are explored] as parallel themes to patriarchal dominance because both are doubtless interrelated forms of dominance over a subordinate social group. Dangarembga has, indeed, demonstrated a keen knowledge of the problems of her Rhodesian society in particular, and Africa in general. Her vision as a writer stresses that awareness and courage are the blueprint to exploding its contradictions." Overall, "Nervous Conditions" is recognized as a major literary contribution to African feminism and postcolonial literature. In May 2018, the BBC named "Nervous Conditions" as one of the top 100 books that have shaped the world. The novel was the 66th book on the list.

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Sapphira and the Slave Girl Sapphira and the Slave Girl is Willa Cather's last novel, published in 1940. It is the story of Sapphira Dodderidge Colbert, a bitter white woman, who becomes irrationally jealous of Nancy, a beautiful young slave. The book balances an atmospheric portrait of antebellum Virginia against an unblinking view of the lives of Sapphira's slaves. Plot summary. Except for the epilogue, the book takes place entirely in 1856. Sapphira Colbert is an unhappy middle-aged woman, crippled by dropsy, who came to marriage late and married beneath her station. Her husband, Henry, a miller, lives an entirely separate life, residing at his mill and visiting the estate house only for occasional meals. Sapphira is comfortable with slavery; Henry is not. Having overheard a conversation between two of her slaves, Sapphira develops a paranoid fear that Henry is having an affair with an attractive young mulatto girl named Nancy. Sapphira responds by mistreating Nancy. Eventually Sapphira invites a dissolute nephew to the estate, who threatens to rape Nancy on several occasions. With the help of the Colberts' daughter, Rachel Colbert Blake, and two abolitionist neighbors, Nancy is helped to make connections with the Underground Railroad and taken to Canada. The epilogue takes place 25 years later. Nancy, now in her 40s, returns to Virginia to visit her mother, and Mrs. Blake. The narrator (Cather) is revealed to be a child who has heard stories of Nancy's escape all of her life. Criticism. The novel is discussed in Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark--an adaptation of three lectures given by Morrison in 1990. Sapphira and the Slave Girl is discussed as an example of a white writer's imagining of black characters and the "powerful impact race has on narrative" (page 24). Allusions to other works. The Baptist church scene in Book II contains a long reference to William Billings' hymn, "There is a Land of Pure Delight".

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Copper Sun Copper Sun is a 2006 young adult novel by Coretta Scott King Award-winning author Sharon Draper. It was a National Book Award winner. Background. When Draper traveled to Ghana, West Africa, she visited the Point of No Return and the castles had thousands of slaves that were kept before getting on the ship which made her inspired to write this novel. "Copper Sun" addresses the Transatlantic Slave Trade, slavery in America, and freedom. Plot. Amari, a 15-year old girl, is with Kwasi, her 8-year old brother, in her village of Ziavi, Africa. Kwasi is in a coconut tree when Amari tells him to get down and bring some fruits to their mother. Kwasi teases Amari by saying he saw her promised, Besa, a drummer from their village. Amari then starts describing her village. She meets up with Besa, who is going to the elders of the village, claiming to have seen strangers who have "skin the colour of goat’s milk.” She goes back to her family's home, uneasy. After talking with her mother about these people, they conclude that they must welcome these people, and start making preparations for their guests. The men arrive later, along with warriors from the Ashanti, a nearby tribe. After exchanging gifts, the village storyteller, Komla, who is Amari's own father, starts telling tales about the past. Then ceremonial dancing begins, to the beat of ceremonial drums. Suddenly, one of the white men shoots the village chief with his gun. Fighting follows, with various villagers trying to escape, only to be killed by the white men. The Ashanti warriors that accompanied the men join them in capturing the villagers. Both of Amari's parents are killed, and later when she tries to escape with her brother, he is killed as well before she is shackled and brought back to the village. At daybreak, she discovers that only 24 villagers are alive, and all of them are like her, young and fairly healthy. Amari and the other villagers are then shackled in the neck to each other and are commanded by the white men to start walking. Several of the villagers die, some from wounds, others from simply losing the will to live. Amari, along with the surviving villagers and a few other groups of captives then arrive at Cape Coast, in what is nowadays Southern Ghana. There, she is thrown into a prison with other women, having lost their families in the mass genocide, who were now hostile, where she befriends a lady called Afi. Afi, with no family of her own, treats Amari like her own daughter. Afi starts telling Amari of all the horrible things that await her. After a few days, all of the women are brought out of their mass cells and inspected by a thin, white man. Amari initially resists, but after being slapped in the face by the white man and hearing advice from Afi, she suffers while he probes her. Then, the women are bought by the thin white man and sent through a long, narrow tunnel in the side of the wall. Amari goes through and is then pulled up at the end of the tunnel. She then looks out onto the sea for the first time, admiring how beautiful the sand is, and how vast the ocean is. She then sees the large freighter that the white men came in, and she likens it to a place of death. She is then brought to a fire, where she is branded and then thrown into another cell, with other people that have also been branded. She watches as several of the Ashanti, who had helped the white men in capturing Amari's village, among other villages, are also branded and then thrown into the cell. Besa was the last one to be thrown into the cell, and Amari briefly looks at him. They are given no water during the day, but at night, they are fed well, mainly to strengthen them for the journey, Afi tells Amari. Afi then tell Amari that they will never see Africa again. Amari then manages to sleep. At daybreak, the prisoners are fed more food, and medicine is applied to the spot where they were branded. Amari watches sadly as Besa, along with the men, are taken out of the cell. Afi advises Amari to forget about him, and when she asks why didn't Afi just leave her to die, she responds that she must survive to tell future generation their story. The women were then led out by their captors, and Amari watches as the men are loaded into a small boat, and taken to the larger freighter. Amari, along with the other women are loaded into another waiting boat and then rowed across to the freighter. Amari watches as two women try to escape and jump off the boat, only to be consumed by two sharks. The women are then led aboard the freighter. They are pushed into the cargo hold aboard the freighter, which smells terrible due to the men urinating and defecating wherever they can. Once they are in the women's area of the hold, Afi starts humming an old funeral song in which eventually all of the women join in. After several hours, the women are led out of the cargo hold, fed, and thrown saltwater on to roughly clean them. A white man then starts drumming on a barrel and tells them to "dance", jumping up and down. Amari notices one white man with orange-coloured hair looking her directly at her face, not at her body, as the other white men are doing with the other women. The women are then chained to the deck, and Afi tells Amari that that night, they will be forced to have sex with the men. Then, the men are brought on deck, and go through the same procedure that the women go through. When the men finish, they are brought back down to the hold. At nightfall, the white men start choosing women to have sex with. The orange-haired man, whose name is Bill, comes to Amari and takes her to his room. He then tells her to scream, and after she does, he allowed her to sit and gives her water, then starts teaching her English. after a couple of hours, he leads her back outside, gives her more water, and ties her gently to a mast, after which he leaves. Amari tells Afi that she was not raped, and Afi tells her that she was lucky this night, but that the next night, or the night after that, she will be taken. Afi then consoles Amari and hugs her. The next few nights, Amari is raped, and thrown back onto the deck. Bill occasionally rescues Amari from the other men and teaches her English. When they are close to arriving to their destination, the slaves are fed better and the doctor of the ship tends to them. When they arrive at Sullivan's Island, South Carolina, they are inspected and then brought to a prison, where they are told that they will stay there for 10 days to make sure they do not have any diseases, such as smallpox. Amari has a short reunion with Besa, before he is taken to another part of the prison. Reception. Most critics saw "Copper Sun" as “unflinching and unforgettable.” Another critic thought of the novel as “character driven, with a fast moving plot, and unforgettable characters.” Agreeing, another critic noted that the novel was "horrific" "multi-faceted" and that "[they were] afraid to turn the page." Beverly Almond noted that the novel expresses “unimaginable hardship” and “starvation and disease.” Another critic claimed that the book showed themes of "pain, hope, and determination" and "human exploitation and suffering." Kirkus Reviews added that the novel showed "cynicism and realistic outlook." Awards and nominations. Sharon Draper's "Copper Sun" won the Coretta Scott King award in 2007.

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Beloved (novel) Beloved is a 1987 novel by the American writer Toni Morrison. Set after the American Civil War, it tells the story of a family of former slaves whose Cincinnati home is haunted by a malevolent spirit. "Beloved" is inspired by a true-life incident involving Margaret Garner, an escaped slave from Kentucky who fled to the free state of Ohio in 1856, but was captured in accordance with the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. When U.S. marshals burst into the cabin where Garner and her husband had barricaded themselves, they found that she had killed her two-year-old daughter and was attempting to kill her other children to spare them from being returned to slavery. Morrison had come across an account of Garner titled "A Visit to the Slave Mother who Killed Her Child" in an 1856 newspaper article published in the "American Baptist", and reproduced in "The Black Book", a miscellaneous compilation of black history and culture that Morrison edited in 1974. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988 and was a finalist for the 1987 National Book Award. It was adapted as a 1998 movie of the same name, starring Oprah Winfrey. A survey of writers and literary critics compiled by "The New York Times" ranked it as the best work of American fiction from 1981 to 2006. Background. The book's dedication reads "Sixty Million and more", referring to the Africans and their descendants who died as a result of the Atlantic slave trade. The book's epigraph is Romans 9:25. Plot summary. "Beloved" begins in 1873 in Cincinnati, Ohio, with Sethe, a formerly enslaved woman, and her 18-year-old daughter Denver, who live at 124 Bluestone Road. The site has been haunted for years by what they believe is the ghost of Sethe's eldest daughter. Denver is shy, friendless, and housebound. Sethe's sons, Howard and Buglar, ran away from home by the age of 13, which she believes was due to the ghost. Baby Suggs, the mother of Sethe's husband Halle, died soon after the boys fled, eight years before the start of the novel. One day, Paul D, one of the enslaved men from Sweet Home, the plantation where Sethe, Halle, Baby Suggs, and several others were once enslaved, arrives at Sethe's home. He forces out the spirit, receiving Denver’s contempt for driving away her only companion, but persuades them to leave the house together for the first time in years for a carnival. Upon returning home, they find a young woman sitting in front of the house who calls herself Beloved. Paul D is suspicious and warns Sethe, but she is charmed by the young woman and ignores him. Denver is eager to care for the sickly Beloved, whom she begins to believe is her older sister come back. Paul D begins to feel increasingly uncomfortable in the house and that he is being driven out. One night, Paul D is cornered by Beloved, who demands sex. While they have sex, his mind is filled with horrific memories from his past. Paul D tries to tell Sethe about it, but cannot. Instead, he says that he wants her pregnant. Sethe is afraid to have to live for a baby. When Paul D tells friends at work about his plans to start a new family, they react fearfully. One, Stamp Paid, reveals the reason for the community's rejection of Sethe. Paul D confronts Sethe, who tells him that after escaping from Sweet Home and joining her children at 124, four horsemen came to return her children and her to a life of slavery at Sweet Home. Sethe ran to the woodshed with her children and tried to kill them all, but only had time to kill her eldest daughter. Sethe says that she was "trying to put [her] babies where they would be safe." Paul D leaves, telling her her love is "too thick"; she retorts that "thin love is no love", adamant that she did the right thing. Sethe comes to believe that Beloved is the daughter she had killed, as "BELOVED" was all she could afford to have engraved on her tombstone. She is overjoyed, holding onto a hope that Halle and her sons will come back and they will all be a family together. Out of guilt, she begins to spend all of her time and money on Beloved to please her and try to explain her actions, losing her job. Beloved becomes angry and demanding, throwing tantrums when she does not get her way. Beloved's presence consumes Sethe's life. She hardly eats, while Beloved grows bigger and bigger, eventually taking the form of a pregnant woman. Denver reveals her fear of Sethe, having known that she killed Beloved, but not having understood why, and that her brothers shared this fear and ran away due to it. Sethe and Beloved's voices merge together until indistinguishable, and Denver observes that Sethe becomes more like a child, while Beloved seems more like the mother. Denver reaches out to the Black community for help, from whom they had been isolated because of envy of Baby Suggs' privilege and horror at Sethe killing Beloved. Local women come to the house to exorcise Beloved. At the same time, a White man, Mr. Bodwin (their landlord, who had offered work to Baby Suggs and Sethe) arrives at the house on a horse for Denver, who asked him for a job. Not knowing this, Sethe attacks him with an ice pick, thinking he was Schoolteacher coming back for her daughter. The village women and Denver hold her back and Beloved disappears. Denver becomes a working member of the community, and Paul D returns to a bed-ridden Sethe, who, devastated at Beloved's disappearance, remorsefully tells him that Beloved was her "best thing". He replies that Sethe is her own "best thing", leaving her questioning, "Me? Me?" As time goes on, those who knew Beloved gradually forget her until all traces of her are gone. Major themes. Mother-daughter relationships. The maternal bonds between Sethe and her children inhibit her own individuation and prevent the development of her self. Sethe develops a dangerous maternal passion that results in killing one daughter, her own "best self". Her surviving daughter becomes estranged from the Black community. Both outcomes result from Sethe trying to salvage her "fantasy of the future", her children, from a life in slavery. In Ohio, Sethe fails to recognize her daughter Denver's need for interaction with the Black community to enter into womanhood. At the end of the novel, Denver succeeds in establishing her own self and embarking on her individuation with the help of Beloved. Sethe only becomes individuated after Beloved's exorcism. Then, she is free to fully accept the first relationship that is completely "for her", her relationship with Paul D. This relationship relieves her from the self-destruction she was causing based on her maternal bonds with her children. Beloved and Sethe are both emotionally impaired, which come from Sethe having been enslaved. Under slavery, mothers lost their children, with devastating consequences for both. Baby Suggs dealt with this by refusing to become close with her children and remembering what she could of them, but Sethe tried to hold onto them and fight for them, to the point of killing them so they could be free. Sethe was traumatized by having had her milk stolen, unable to form the symbolic bond between herself and her daughter of feeding her. Psychological effects of slavery. Because of the suffering under slavery, most people who had been enslaved tried to repress these memories in an attempt to forget the past. This repression and dissociation from the past causes a fragmentation of the self and a loss of true identity. Sethe, Paul D., and Denver all suffered a loss of self, which could only be remedied when they were able to reconcile their pasts and memories of earlier identities. Beloved serves to remind these characters of their repressed memories, eventually leading to the reintegration of their selves. Slavery splits a person into a fragmented figure. The identity, consisting of painful memories and unspeakable past, denied and kept at bay, becomes a "self that is no self". To heal and humanize, one must constitute it in a language, reorganize the painful events, and retell the painful memories. As a result of suffering, the "self" becomes subject to a violent practice of making and unmaking, once acknowledged by an audience becomes real. Sethe, Paul D, and Baby Suggs, who all fall short of such realization, are unable to remake themselves by trying to keep their pasts at bay. The "self" is located in a word, defined by others. The power lies in the audience, or more precisely, in the word—once the word changes, so does the identity. All of the characters in "Beloved" face the challenge of an unmade self, composed of their "rememories" and defined by perceptions and language. The barrier that keeps them from remaking of the self is the desire for an "uncomplicated past" and the fear that remembering will lead them to "a place they couldn't get back from". Definition of manhood. The discussion of manhood and masculinity is foreshadowed by the dominant meaning of Sethe's story. "Beloved" depicts slavery in two main emotions: Love and Self-Preservation; however, Morrison does more than depict emotions. The author accurately depicts the horrors of enslavement and its effects to communicate the morals of manhood. It also distorts a man from himself. Morrison revealed different pathways to the meaning of manhood by her stylistic devices. She established new information for understanding the legacy of slavery best depicted through stylistic devices. To understand Paul D's perception of manhood, Morrison deliberately inserts his half-formed words and thoughts, to provide the audience a "taste" of what is going on inside his mind. Yet, throughout the novel, Paul D's depiction of manhood was being constantly challenged by the norms and values of White culture. The author demonstrates the distinctions between Western and African values, and how the dialogue between the two values is heard through juxtaposition and allusions. She maneuvered her "message" though the social atmosphere of her words, which was further highlighted by the character's motives and actions. Paul D is a victim of racism in that his dreams and goals are so high that he will never be able to achieve them because of racism. He thought he earned his right to reach each of his goals because of his sacrifices and what he has been through, that society would pay him back and allow him to do what his heart desired. During the Reconstruction era, Jim Crow laws were put in place to limit the movement and involvement of African Americans in the White-dominant society. Black men during this time had to establish their own identity, which may seem impossible due to all the limitations put upon them. Many Black men, like Paul D, struggled to find their meaning in their society and achieving their goals because of the "disabilities" that constrained them to a certain part of the social hierarchy. In "Beloved," Stamp Paid observes Paul D sitting on the base of the church steps "… liquor bottle in hand, stripped of the very maleness that enables him to caress and love the wounded Sethe…" (132). Throughout the novel, Paul D is sitting on a base of some sort or a foundation like a tree stub or the steps, for instance. This exemplifies his place in society. Black men are the foundation of society because without their hard labor, the white men would not profit. They were coerced into the society where they were deemed "lower-status" because of the color of their skin. Family relationships. Family relationships are an instrumental element of "Beloved," which help visualize the stress and the dismantlement of African-American families in this era. The slavery system did not allow African Americans to have rights to themselves, their family, their belongings, or their children. So, Sethe killing Beloved was deemed a peaceful act because Sethe believed that killing her daughter was saving her. By doing this, their family is divided and fragmented, much like the time in which they were living. After the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, formerly enslaved families were broken and bruised because of the hardships they faced while they were enslaved. Since enslaved people could not participate in societal events, they put their faith and trust in the supernatural. They performed rituals and prayed to their god or multiple gods. In the novel, Beloved, who was murdered at the hands of her mother Sethe, haunts Sethe. For example, Sethe, Denver, and Paul D go to the neighborhood carnival, which happens to be Sethe's first social outing since killing her daughter. When they return home, Beloved appears at the house. Throughout the novel, Sethe believes that the person claiming to be Beloved is her daughter that she killed 18 years prior - a scenario that shows how [fractured] family relationships are used to display the mental strife the protagonist faces. Pain. The pain throughout this novel is universal because everyone involved in slavery was heavily scarred, whether that be physically, mentally, sociologically, or psychologically. Some of the characters tend to "romanticize" their pain, in a way that each experience is a turning point in one's life. This concept is played throughout history in early Christian contemplative tradition and African-American blues tradition. "Beloved" is a book of the systematic torture that people who had been enslaved had to deal with after the Emancipation Proclamation. Therefore, in this novel, the narrative is like a complex labyrinth because all the characters have been "stripped away" from their voices, their narratives, their language in a way that their sense of self is diminished. Also, all the characters have had different experiences with slavery, which is why their stories and their narratives are distinct from each other. In addition to the pain, many major characters try to beautify pain in a way that diminishes what was done. For example, Sethe keeps repeating what a White girl said about her scars on her back, calling them "a Choke-cherry tree. Trunk, branches, and even leaves". She repeats this to everyone, suggesting she is trying to find the beauty in her scar, even when they caused her extreme pain. Paul D and Baby Suggs both look away in disgust and deny this description of Sethe's scars. Sethe does the same with Beloved. The memory of her ghost-like daughter plays a role of memory, grief, and spite that separates Sethe and her late daughter. For instance, Beloved stays in the house with Paul D and Sethe. A home is a place of vulnerability, where the heart lies. Paul D and Baby Suggs both suggest that Beloved is not invited into the home, but Sethe says otherwise because she sees Beloved, all grown and alive, instead of the pain of when Sethe murdered her. At the end of the book, Beloved is gone and Paul D encourages Sethe to love herself instead. Major characters. Sethe. Sethe is the protagonist of the novel. She escaped slavery from a plantation called Sweet Home. She lives in the house named 124 (a house on 124 Bluestone Rd., but referred to only as "124") which is believed to be haunted because she killed her infant child there. Her two sons have fled because of the haunting, and she resides in the house with her daughter Denver. She is motherly and will do anything to protect her children from suffering the same abuses she experienced when she was enslaved. Sethe is greatly influenced by her repression of the trauma she endured, she lives with "a tree on her back", scars from being whipped. Her character is resilient, yet defined by her traumatic past. She was 19 years old when Denver was born, making her birth year to be 1836. Beloved. The opaque understanding of Beloved is central to the novel. She is a young woman who mysteriously appears from a body of water near Sethe's house, and is discovered soaking wet on the doorstep by Sethe, Paul D, and Denver, on their return from visiting the fair; they take her in. She is widely believed to be the murdered baby who haunted 124, as the haunting ends when she arrives, and in many ways she behaves like a child. As also mentioned, a young woman enslaved by a White man nearby had escaped, and Beloved recounts stories of past slaves, including Sethe's mother. Morrison stated that the character Beloved is the daughter Sethe killed. The murdered baby was unnamed, her name is derived from the engraving on Sethe's murdered baby's tombstone, which simply read "Beloved" because Sethe could not afford to engrave the word "Dearly" or anything else. Beloved becomes a catalyst to bring repressed trauma of the family to the surface, but also creates madness in the house and slowly depletes Sethe. Paul D. Paul D retains his slave name; most of the enslaved men at Sweet Home were named Paul. He also retains many painful memories from enslavement and being forced to live in a chain gang; he had been moving around continuously before arriving at 124. He has a "tobacco tin" for a heart, in which he contains his painful memories, until Beloved opens it. Years after their time together at Sweet Home, Paul D and Sethe reunite and begin a romantic relationship. He acts fatherly towards Denver and is the first to be suspicious of Beloved. Despite their long past, he fails to understand Sethe fully because of her motherhood and because of the many years that had passed since. Denver. Denver is Sethe's only child who remains at House 124. Isolated from her community after Beloved's killing, Denver forms a close bond with her mother. Upon Beloved's arrival, Denver watches as her sister's ghost begins to exhibit demonic activity. Although introduced as a childish character, Denver develops into a protective woman throughout the novel. In the final chapters, Denver fights not only for her personal independence, but also for her mother's wellbeing, breaking the cycle of isolation at House 124. She is 18 years old at the beginning of the novel. Baby Suggs. Baby Suggs is Sethe's mother-in-law. Her son Halle worked to buy her freedom, after which she travels to Cincinnati and establishes herself as a respected leader in the community, preaching for the Black people to love themselves because other people will not. This respect turns sour after she turns some food into a feast, earning their envy, as well as Sethe's act of infanticide. Baby Suggs retires to her bed, where she thinks about pretty colors for the rest of her life. She dies at 70 in the beginning of the book, 8 years before the main events. Halle. Halle is the son of Baby Suggs, the husband of Sethe and father of her children. Sethe and he were married in Sweet Home, yet they got separated during her escape. He is only mentioned in flashbacks. Paul D was the last to see Halle, churning butter at Sweet Home. He is presumed to have gone mad after seeing residents of Sweet Home violating Sethe. He is hardworking and good, qualities that Paul D sees in Denver at the end of the book, but ones that Baby Suggs fears make him a target. Schoolteacher. Schoolteacher is the primary discipliner, violent, abusive, and cruel to the people he enslaved at Sweet Home, whom he views as animals. He comes for Sethe following her escape, but she kills her daughter and is arrested, instead. Amy Denver. Amy Denver is a young White girl who finds Sethe desperately trying to make her way to safety after her escape from Sweet Home, trying to get to Boston herself. Sethe is extremely pregnant at the time, and her feet are bleeding badly from the travel. Amy helps nurture her and deliver Sethe's daughter on a small boat, and Sethe names the child Denver after her. Adaptations. In 1998, the novel was made into a film directed by Jonathan Demme, and produced by and starring Oprah Winfrey. In January 2016, "Beloved" was broadcast in 10 episodes by BBC Radio 4 as part of its "15 Minute Drama" programme. The radio series was adapted by Patricia Cumper. Legacy. "Beloved" received the Frederic G. Melcher Book Award, which is named for an editor of "Publishers Weekly". In accepting the award on October 12, 1988, Morrison said that "[t]here is no suitable memorial or plaque or wreath or wall or park or skyscraper lobby" honoring the memory of the human beings forced into slavery and brought to the United States. "There's no small bench by the road," she continued. "And because such a place doesn't exist (that I know of), the book had to." Inspired by her remarks, the Toni Morrison Society began to install benches at significant sites in the history of slavery in America. "The New York Times" reported that the first 'bench by the road' was dedicated on July 26, 2008, on Sullivan's Island, South Carolina, the place of entry for some 40% of the enslaved Africans brought to the United States. Morrison said she was extremely moved by the memorial. In 2017, the 21st bench was placed at the Library of Congress. It is dedicated to Daniel Alexander Payne Murray (1852–1925), the first African-American assistant librarian of Congress. The novel received the seventh annual Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights Book Award in 1988, given to a novelist who "most faithfully and forcefully reflects Robert Kennedy's purposes—his concern for the poor and the powerless, his struggle for honest and even-handed justice, his conviction that a decent society must assure all young people a fair chance, and his faith that a free democracy can act to remedy disparities of power and opportunity." Critical reception. The publication of "Beloved" in 1987 resulted in the greatest acclaim yet for Morrison. Although nominated for the National Book Award, it did not win, and 48 African-American writers and critics—including Maya Angelou, Amiri Baraka, Jayne Cortez, Angela Davis, Ernest J. Gaines, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Rosa Guy, June Jordan, Paule Marshall, Louise Meriwether, Eugene Redmond, Sonia Sanchez, Quincy Troupe, John Edgar Wideman, and John A. Williams—signed a letter of protest that was published in "The New York Times Book Review" on January 24, 1988. Yet later in 1988 "Beloved" did receive the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, as well as the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Book Award, the Melcher Book Award, the Lyndhurst Foundation Award, and the Elmer Holmes Bobst Award. Despite its popularity and status as one of Morrison's most accomplished novels, "Beloved" has never been universally hailed as a success. Some reviewers have excoriated the novel for what they consider its excessive sentimentality and sensationalistic depiction of the horrors of slavery, including its characterization of the slave trade as a Holocaust-like genocide. Others, while concurring that "Beloved" is at times overwritten, have lauded the novel as a profound and extraordinary act of imagination. Noting the work's mythic dimensions and political focus, these commentators have treated the novel as an exploration of family, trauma, and the repression of memory as well as an attempt to restore the historical record and give voice to the collective memory of African Americans. Indeed, critics and Morrison herself have indicated that the controversial epigraph to "Beloved", "60 million and more", is drawn from a number of studies on the African slave trade, which estimate that approximately half of each ship's "cargo" perished in transit to America. Scholars have additionally debated the nature of the character Beloved, arguing whether she is actually a ghost or a real person. Numerous reviews, assuming Beloved to be a supernatural incarnation of Sethe's daughter, have subsequently faulted "Beloved" as an unconvincing and confusing ghost story. Elizabeth B. House, however, has argued that Beloved is not a ghost, and the novel is actually a story of two probable instances of mistaken identity. Beloved is haunted by the loss of her African parents and thus comes to believe that Sethe is her mother. Sethe longs for her dead daughter and is rather easily convinced that Beloved is the child she has lost. Such an interpretation, House contends, clears up many puzzling aspects of the novel and emphasizes Morrison's concern with familial ties. Since the late 1970s, the focus on Morrison's representation of African-American experience and history has been strong. The idea that writing acts as a means of healing or recovery is a strain in many of these studies. Timothy Powell, for instance, argues that Morrison's recovery of a Black logos rewrites blackness as "affirmation, presence, and good", while Theodore O. Mason, Jr., suggests that Morrison's stories unite communities. Many critics explore memory, or what "Beloved"’s Sethe calls "rememory", in this light. Susan Bowers places Morrison in a "long tradition of African American apocalyptic writing" that looks back in time, "unveiling" the horrors of the past in order to "transform" them. Several critics have interpreted Morrison's representations of trauma and memory through a psychoanalytic framework. Ashraf H. A. Rushdy explores how "primal scenes" in Morrison's novels are "an opportunity and affective agency for self-discovery through memory" and "rememory". As Jill Matus argues, however, Morrison's representations of trauma are "never simply curative": in raising the ghosts of the past to banish or memorialize them, the texts potentially "provoke readers to the vicarious experience of trauma and act as a means of transmission". Ann Snitow's reaction to "Beloved" neatly illustrates how Morrison criticism began to evolve and move toward new modes of interpretation. In her 1987 review of "Beloved", Snitow argues that Beloved, the ghost at the center of the narrative, is "too light" and "hollow", rendering the entire novel "airless". Snitow changed her position after reading criticism that interpreted "Beloved" in a different way, seeing something more complicated and burdened than a literal ghost, something requiring different forms of creative expression and critical interpretation. The conflicts at work here are ideological, as well as critical; they concern the definition and evaluation of American and African-American literature, the relationship between art and politics, and the tension between recognition and appropriation. In defining Morrison's texts as African-American literature, critics have become more attentive to historical and social context and to the way Morrison's fiction engages with specific places and moments in time. As Jennings observes, many of Morrison's novels are set in isolated Black communities where African practices and belief systems are not marginalized by a dominant White culture, but rather remain active, if perhaps subconscious, forces shaping the community. Matus comments that Morrison's later novels "have been even more thoroughly focused on specific historical moments"; "through their engagement with the history of slavery and early twentieth-century Harlem, [they] have imagined and memorialized aspects of black history that have been forgotten or inadequately remembered". On November 5, 2019, the "BBC News" listed "Beloved" on its list of the 100 most influential novels. Banning and controversy. "Beloved" has been banned from five U.S. schools since 2007. Common reasons for censorship include bestiality, infanticide, sex, and violence. Twenty years after its publication, in 1987, the novel was first banned from AP English classes at Eastern High School in Louisville, Kentucky, because of the book's mention of bestiality, racism, and sex. The book was banned because two parents complained that the book discussed inappropriate parts about the "antebellum"' slavery. In 2017, "Beloved" was considered for removal from the Fairfax County (VA) senior English reading list due to a parent's complaint that "the book includes scenes of violent sex, including a gang rape, and was too graphic and extreme for teenagers". Parental concern about "Beloved"s content inspired the "Beloved Bill", legislation that, if passed, would require Virginia public schools to notify parents of any "sexually explicit content" and provide an alternative assignment if requested.

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Amos Fortune, Free Man Amos Fortune, Free Man is a biographical novel by Elizabeth Yates that won the Newbery Medal for excellence in American children's literature in 1951. It is about a young African prince who is captured and taken to America as a slave. He masters a trade, purchases his freedom and dies free in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, in 1801. Amos Fortune, a young African prince of a tribe called the At-mun-shi, was born free in Africa in 1710. He lives a peaceful life until a raid on their village by slavers kills his father, the chief. At-mun is kidnapped, transported to America via the "White Falcon" (a slave ship), and sold in New England. Now called 'Amos', he is sold to a man named Caleb Copeland, and though the Copeland family do not treat him badly he rejects his slave status and determines to earn his freedom. He comes to an arrangement with Copeland, but when Caleb dies in debt the arrangement is disregarded, and so Amos Fortune is sold again to a man named Ichabod Richardson. Richardson teaches Amos about tanning, and he becomes a skilled worker. He is now about thirty. Amos works for Richardson for four years, then buys his freedom. He marries a woman named Lily, whose freedom he also buys; but she dies a year later. Amos is sad that she died, yet happy she died a free woman. Later he marries another African woman named Lydia, and it takes three more years to save up her freedom price. Lydia dies a year later. Again, Amos is sad she died but happy that she died free. He marries a younger woman named Violet, and he buys freedom for her daughter too. Amos moves to Jaffrey, New Hampshire to start his own tanning business there, and does so despite opposition. Eventually Amos saves up enough money that he buys his own land and he builds a house and a barn. At one point Amos becomes very angry with his wife, who has taken money from him. He climbs Mt. Monadnock and does not leave until he gets an answer from God. Eventually he receives his answer and climbs back down, then forgives his wife as she is sorry for stealing his money. She had done it to keep him from helping a woman named Lois who needed help to keep her children from being taken away. She was lazy and would not support her children, but Amos had pity on her. He decides against helping her and keeps the money. Amos goes to buy the land that he has always wanted. They buy the land and they build a house before winter. They also build a place where Amos can work as a tanner. At this point in his life, he is 80 years old. The real Amos Fortune. Amos Fortune (circa 1710–1801) was born in Africa, sold into slavery and eventually freed at the age of 60. Fortune worked hard to develop his tannery in the town of Jaffrey, New Hampshire, and became a valued member of the community there. Peter Lambert's booklet "Amos Fortune: The Man and His Legacy" distinguishes the known historical facts from the dramatic events of the novel.

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Kindred (novel) Kindred is a novel by American writer Octavia E. Butler that incorporates time travel and is modeled on slave narratives. First published in 1979, it is still widely popular. It has been frequently chosen as a text for community-wide reading programs and book organizations, as well as being a common choice for high school and college courses. The book is the first-person account of a young African-American woman writer, Dana, who finds herself being shunted in time between her Los Angeles, California home in 1976 and a pre-Civil War Maryland plantation. There she meets her ancestors: a proud black freewoman and a white planter who has forced her into slavery and concubinage. As Dana's stays in the past become longer, the young woman becomes intimately entangled with the plantation community. She makes hard choices to survive slavery and to ensure her return to her own time. "Kindred " explores the dynamics and dilemmas of antebellum slavery from the sensibility of a late 20th-century black woman, who is aware of its legacy in contemporary American society. Through the two interracial couples who form the emotional core of the story, the novel also explores the intersection of power, gender, and race issues, and speculates on the prospects of future egalitarianism. While most of Butler's work is classified as science fiction, "Kindred" is considered to cross genre boundaries. It has been classified also as literature or African-American literature. Butler has categorized the work as "a kind of grim fantasy." Plot. "Kindred" scholars have noted that the novel's chapter headings suggest something "elemental, apocalyptic, archetypal about the events in the narrative," thus giving the impression that the main characters are participating in matters greater than their personal experiences. Prologue Dana wakes up in the hospital with her arm amputated. Police deputies question her about the circumstances surrounding the loss of her arm and ask her whether her husband Kevin, a white man, beats her. Dana tells them that it was an accident and that Kevin is not to blame. When Kevin visits her, they are both afraid of telling the truth because they know nobody would believe them. The River Their predicament began on June 9, 1976, the day of her twenty-sixth birthday. The day before, she and Kevin had moved into a house a few miles away from their old apartment in Los Angeles. While unpacking, Dana suddenly becomes dizzy, and her surroundings begin to fade away. When she comes to her senses, she finds herself at the edge of a wood, near a river where a small, red-haired boy is drowning. Dana wades in after him, drags him to the shore, and tries to resuscitate him. The boy's mother, who had been unable to save him, begins screaming and hitting Dana, accusing her of killing her son, whom she identifies as Rufus. A man arrives and points a gun at Dana, terrifying her. She becomes dizzy again and arrives back at her new house with Kevin beside her. Kevin, shocked at her disappearance and reappearance, tries to understand if the whole episode was real or a hallucination. The Fire Dana managed to wash off the filth from the river before the dizziness sets in once again. This time, she is whisked back to a bedroom where a red-haired boy has set his bedroom drapes aflame. The boy turns out to be Rufus, now a few years older. Dana quickly puts out the fire and speaks to Rufus, who, unafraid, confesses he set fire to the drapes to get back at his father for beating him after he stole a dollar. During their ensuing conversation, Rufus's casual use of the word "nigger" to refer to Dana, who is black, initially upsets Dana, but then leads her to figure out that she has been transported back in time as well as space, specifically to Maryland, circa 1815. Following Rufus's advice, Dana seeks refuge at the home of Alice Greenwood and her mother, free blacks who live on the edge of the plantation. Dana realizes that both Rufus and Alice are her ancestors, and will one day have children. At the Greenwoods', she witnesses a group of young white men smash down the door, drag out Alice's father, who is a slave, and whip him brutally for being there without papers. One of the men punches Alice's mother when she refuses his advances. The men leave, Dana comes out of hiding, and helps Alice's mother, only to be confronted by one of the white men, who hits her and attempts to rape her. Fearing for her life, Dana becomes dizzy and returns to 1976. Though hours have passed for her, Kevin assures her that she has been gone only for a few minutes. The next day, Kevin and Dana prepare for the possibility that she may travel back in time again by packing a survival bag for her and by doing some research on black history from the books in their home library. The Fall In a flashback, Dana recounts how she met Kevin while doing minimum-wage temporary jobs at an auto-parts warehouse. Kevin becomes interested in Dana when he learns she is a writer like him, and she befriends him even though he is white and their coworkers judge their relationship. They find they have much in common; both are orphans, both love to write, and both their families disapproved of their aspiration to become writers. They become lovers. As Kevin is leaving for the library to find out how to forge "free papers" for Dana, she feels the dizziness coming back. This time, Kevin holds on to her and also travels to the past. They find Rufus writhing in pain from a broken leg. Next to him is a black boy named Nigel, whom they send to the main house for help. Rufus reacts with violent disbelief when he finds out that Kevin and Dana are married: whites and blacks are not allowed to marry in his time. Dana and Kevin explain to Rufus that they are from the future and prove it by showing the dates stamped on the coins Kevin carries in his pockets. Rufus promises to keep their identities a secret, and Dana tells Kevin to pretend that he is her owner. When Tom Weylin arrives with his slave Luke to retrieve Rufus, Kevin introduces himself. Weylin grudgingly invites him to dinner. Once back in the Weylin plantation, Margaret, Rufus's mother, fusses about her son's well-being and, jealous of the attention Rufus shows Dana, sends Dana to the cookhouse. There, Dana meets two house slaves: Sarah, the cook; and Carrie, her mute daughter. Unsure as to what their next act should be, Kevin accepts Weylin's offer to become Rufus's tutor. Kevin and Dana stay on the plantation for several weeks. They observe the relentless cruelty and torture that Weylin, Margaret, and the spoiled Rufus use against the slaves. While none is actually sadistic or evil, they feel entitled to treat the slaves as property. Weylin catches Dana reading and whips her mercilessly. The dizziness overcomes her before Kevin can reach her and she travels back to 1976 alone. The Fight In a flashback, Dana remembers how she and Kevin were married. Both of their families opposed the marriage due to ethnic bias. While Kevin's reactionary sister is prejudiced against African Americans, Dana's uncle abhors the idea of a white man eventually inheriting his property. Only Dana's aunt favors the union, as it would mean that her niece's children would have lighter skin. Kevin and Dana marry without any family present. After eight days of being home recuperating without Kevin, Dana time travels to find Rufus getting beaten up by Alice Greenwood's husband, the slave Isaac Jackson. Dana learns that Rufus had attempted to rape Alice, once his childhood friend. Dana convinces Isaac not to kill Rufus, and Alice and Isaac run away while Dana gets Rufus home. She learns that it has been five years since her last visit and that Kevin has left Maryland. Dana nurses Rufus back to health in return for his help delivering letters to Kevin. Five days later, Alice and Isaac are caught. Isaac is mutilated and sold to traders heading to Mississippi. Alice is beaten, savaged by dogs, and enslaved as punishment for helping Isaac escape. Rufus, who claims to love Alice, buys her, and orders Dana to nurse her back to health. Dana does so with much care. When Alice finally recovers, she curses Dana for not letting her die, and is wracked with grief for her lost husband. Rufus orders Dana to convince Alice to sleep with him now that she has recovered. Dana speaks with Alice, outlining her three choices: she can refuse and be whipped and raped; she can acquiesce and be raped without being beaten; or she can try again to run away. Injured and terrified from her previous punishment, Alice gives in to Rufus's desire and becomes his concubine. While in his bedroom, Alice finds out that Rufus did not send Dana's letters to Kevin, and tells Dana. Furious that Rufus lied to her, Dana runs away to find Kevin, but is betrayed by a jealous slave, Liza. Rufus and Weylin capture her and Weylin whips her brutally. When Weylin learns that Rufus failed to keep his promise to Dana to send her letters, he writes to Kevin and tells him that Dana is on the plantation. Kevin comes to retrieve Dana, but Rufus stops them on the road and threatens to shoot them. He tells Dana that she can't leave him again. The dizziness overcomes Dana and she travels back to 1976, this time with Kevin. The Storm Dana's and Kevin's happy reunion is short-lived, as Kevin has a hard time adjusting to the present after living in the past for five years. He shares a few details of his life in the past with Dana: he witnessed terrible atrocities against slaves, traveled farther up north, worked as a teacher, helped slaves escape, and grew a beard to disguise himself from a lynch mob. Disconcerted about his trouble in re-entering his former world, he grows angry and cold. Deciding to let him work his feelings out for himself, Dana packs a bag in case she time travels again. Soon enough she finds herself outside the Weylin plantation house in a rainstorm, with a very drunk Rufus lying face down in a puddle. She tries to drag him back to the house, then gets Nigel to help her carry him. Back at the house, an aged Weylin appoints Dana to nurse Rufus back to health under threat of her life. Suspecting Rufus has malaria and knowing she cannot help much, Dana feeds Rufus the aspirin she has packed to lower his fever. Rufus survives, but remains weak for weeks. Dana learns that Rufus and Alice have had three mixed-race children of the plantation and that only one, a boy named Joe, has survived. Alice is pregnant again. Rufus had forced Alice to let the doctor bleed the other two when they had fallen ill, a customary treatment of the time, but it killed them. Weylin has a heart attack and, when Dana is unable to save his life, Rufus sends her to work in the corn fields as punishment. By the time he repents his decision, she has collapsed from exhaustion and is being whipped by the overseer. Rufus appoints Dana as the caretaker of his ailing mother, Margaret. Now the master of the plantation, Rufus sells off some slaves, including Tess, Weylin's former concubine. Dana expresses her anger about that sale, and Rufus explains that his father left debts he must pay. He convinces Dana to use her writing talent to stave off his other creditors. Dana abhors secretarial work, and had argued with Kevin about his asking her to type his manuscripts. Time passes and Alice gives birth to a girl, Hagar, a direct ancestor of Dana. Alice confides that she plans to run away with her children as soon as possible, as she fears that she is forgetting to hate Rufus. Dana convinces Rufus to let her teach his son Joe and some of the slave children how to read. However, when a slave named Sam asks Dana if his younger siblings can join in on the lessons, Rufus sells him away as punishment for flirting with her. When Dana tries to interfere, Rufus hits her. Faced with her own powerlessness over Rufus, she retrieves the knife she has brought from home and slits her wrists in an effort to time travel. The Rope Dana awakens back at home with her wrists bandaged and Kevin by her side. She tells him of her eight months in the plantation, of Hagar's birth, and of the need to keep Rufus alive, as the slaves would be separated and sold if he died. When Kevin asks if Rufus has raped Dana, she responds that he has not, that a rape attempt would be the act that would cause her to kill him, despite the possible consequences. Fifteen days later, on the 4th of July, Dana returns to the plantation where she finds that Alice has hanged herself. Alice attempted to run away after Dana disappeared, and as punishment Rufus whipped her and told her that he had sold her children. In reality, he had sent to them to stay with his aunt in Baltimore. Racked with guilt about Alice's death, Rufus nearly commits suicide. After Alice's funeral, Dana uses that guilt to convince Rufus to free his children by Alice. From that moment on, Rufus keeps Dana at his side almost constantly, having her share meals and teach his children. One day, he finally admits that he wants Dana to replace Alice in his life. He says that unlike Alice, who, despite growing used to Rufus, never stopped plotting to escape him, Dana will see that he is a fair master and eventually stop hating him. Dana, horrified at the thought of forgiving Rufus in this way, flees to the attic to find her knife. Rufus follows her there, and when he attempts to rape her, Dana stabs him twice with her knife. Nigel arrives to see Rufus's death throes, at which point Dana becomes terribly sick and time travels home for the last time, only to find herself in excruciating pain, as her arm has been joined to a wall in the spot where Rufus was holding it. Epilogue Dana and Kevin travel to Baltimore to investigate the fate of the Weylin plantation after the death of Rufus, but they find very little; a newspaper notice reporting Rufus's death as a result of his house catching fire, and a Slave Sale announcement listing all the Weylin slaves except Nigel, Carrie, Joe, and Hagar. Dana speculates that Nigel covered up the murder by starting the fire, and feels responsible for the sale of the slaves. To that, Kevin responds that she cannot do anything about the past, and now that Rufus is finally dead, they can return to their peaceful life together. Main themes. Realistic depiction of slavery and slave communities. "Kindred "was written to explore how a modern black woman would experience the time of a slavery society, where most black people were considered as property; a world where "all of society was arrayed against you." During an interview, Butler admitted that while reading slave narratives for background, she realized that if she wanted people to read her book, she would have to present a less violent version of slavery. Still, scholars of "Kindred" consider the novel an accurate, fictional account of slave experiences. Concluding that "there probably is no more vivid depiction of life on an Eastern Shore plantation than that found in "Kindred"," Sandra Y. Govan traces how Butler's book follows the classic patterns of the slave narrative genre: loss of innocence, harsh punishment, strategies of resistance, life in the slave quarters, struggle for education, experience of sexual abuse, realization of white religious hypocrisy, and attempts to escape, with ultimate success. Robert Crossley notes how Butler's intense first-person narration deliberately echoes the ex-slave memoirs, thereby giving the story "a degree of authenticity and seriousness." Lisa Yaszek sees Dana's visceral first-hand account as a deliberate criticism of earlier commercialized depictions of slavery, such as the book and film "Gone with the Wind", produced largely by whites, and even the television miniseries "Roots", based on a book by African-American writer Alex Haley. In "Kindred", Butler portrays individual slaves as distinctive people, giving each his or her own story. Robert Crossley argues that Butler treats the blackness of her characters as "a matter of course", to resist the tendency of white writers to incorporate African Americans into their narratives just to illustrate a problem or to divorce themselves from charges of racism. Thus, in "Kindred "the slave community is depicted as a "rich human society": the proud yet victimized freewoman-turned-slave Alice; Sam the field slave, who hopes Dana will teach his brother; the traitorous sewing woman Liza, who frustrates Dana's escape; the bright and resourceful Nigel, Rufus's childhood friend who learns to read from a stolen primer; most importantly, Sarah the cook, who Butler transforms from an image of the submissive, happy "mammie" of white fiction to a deeply angry yet caring woman subdued only by the threat of losing her last child, the mute Carrie. Master-slave power dynamics. Scholars have argued that "Kindred" complicates the usual representations of chattel slavery as an oppressive system where the master regards the slave as a mere tool/economic resource to be bred or sold. Pamela Bedore notes that while Rufus seems to hold all the power in his relationship with Alice, she never wholly surrenders to him. Alice's suicide can be read as her way of ending her struggle with Rufus with a "final upsetting of their power balance", an escape through death. By placing "Kindred" in comparison to other Butler novels such as "Dawn", Bedore explores the bond between Dana and Rufus as re-envisioning slavery as a "symbiotic" interaction between slave and master: since neither character can exist without the other's help and guidance, they are continually forced to collaborate in order to survive. The master does not simply control the slave but depends on her. From the side of the slave, Lisa Yaszek notices conflicting emotions: in addition to fear and contempt, there is affection from familiarity and the occasional kindnesses of the master. A slave who collaborates with the master to survive is not reduced to a "traitor to her race" or to a "victim of fate." "Kindred" portrays the exploitation of black female sexuality as a main site of the historic struggle between master and slave. Diana Paulin describes Rufus's attempts to control Alice's sexuality as a means to recapture power he lost when she chose Isaac as her sexual partner. Compelled to submit her body to Rufus, Alice divorces her desire from her sexuality to preserve a sense of self. Similarly, Dana's time traveling reconstructs her sexuality to fit the times. While in the present, Dana chooses her husband and enjoys sex with him; in the past, her status as a black female forced her to subordinate her body to the desires of the master for pleasure, breeding, and as sexual property. Thus, as Rufus grows into adulthood, he attempts to control Dana's sexuality, ending with his attempt at rape to turn her into a replacement of Alice. Since Dana sees sexual domination as the ultimate form of subordination, her killing of Rufus is the way she rejects the role of female slave, distinguishing herself from those who did not have the power to say "no." Critique of American history. Scholarship on "Kindred" often touches on its critique of the official history of the formation of the United States as an erasure of the raw facts of slavery. Lisa Yaszek places "Kindred" as emanating from two decades of heated discussion over what constituted American history, with a series of scholars pursuing the study of African-American historical sources to create "more inclusive models of memory." Missy Dehn Kubitschek argues that Butler set the story during the bicentennial of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence of the United States to suggest that the nation should review its history in order to resolve its current racial strife. Robert Crossley believes that Butler dates Dana's final trip to her Los Angeles home on the Bicentennial to connect the personal with the social and the political. The power of this national holiday to erase the grim reality of slavery is negated by Dana's living understanding of American history, which makes all her previous knowledge of slavery through mass media and books inadequate. Yaszek further notes that Dana throws away all her history books about African-American history on one of the trips back to her California home, as she finds them to be inaccurate in portraying slavery. Instead, Dana reads books about the Holocaust and finds these books to be closer to her experiences as a slave. In several interviews, Butler has mentioned that she wrote "Kindred" to counteract stereotypical conceptions of the submissiveness of slaves. While studying at Pasadena City College, Butler heard a young man from the Black Power Movement express his contempt for older generations of African-Americans for what he considered their shameful submission to white power. Butler realized the young man did not have enough context to understand the necessity to accept abuse just to keep oneself and one's family alive and well. Thus, Butler resolved to create a modern African-American character, who would go back in time to see how well he (Butler's protagonist was originally male) could withstand the abuses his ancestors had suffered. Therefore, Dana's memories of her enslavement, as Ashraf A. Rushdy explains, become a record of the "unwritten history" of African-Americans, a "recovery of a coherent story explaining Dana's various losses." By living these memories, Dana is enabled to make the connections between slavery and current social situations, including the exploitation of blue-collar workers, police violence, rape, domestic abuse, and segregation. Trauma and its connection to historical memory (or historical amnesia). "Kindred "reveals the repressed trauma slavery caused in America's collective memory of history. In an interview on 1985, Butler suggested that this trauma partly comes from attempts to forget America's dark past: "I think most people don’t know or don’t realize that at least 10 million blacks were killed just on the way to this country, just during the middle passage...They don’t really want to hear it partly because it makes whites feel guilty." In a later interview with Randall Kenan, Butler explained how debilitating this trauma has been for Americans, especially for African Americans, as symbolized by the loss of her protagonist's left arm: "I couldn’t really let [Dana] come all the way back. I couldn’t let her return to what she was, I couldn’t let her come back whole and [losing her arm], I think, really symbolizes her not coming back whole. Antebellum slavery didn’t leave people quite whole." Many academics have extended Dana's loss as a metaphor for the "lasting damage of slavery on the African American psyche" to include other meanings: Pamela Bedore, for example, reads it as the loss of Dana's naïvete regarding the supposed progress of racial relations in the present. For Ashraf Rushdy, Dana's missing arm is the price she must pay for her attempt to change history. Robert Crossley quotes Ruth Salvaggio as inferring that the amputation of Dana's left arm is a distinct "birthmark" that represents a part of a "disfigured heritage." Scholars have also noted the importance of Kevin's forehead scar, with Diana R. Paulin arguing that it symbolizes Kevin's changing understanding of racial realities, which constitute "a painful and intellectual experience." Race as social construct. The construction of the concept of "race" and its connections to slavery are central themes in Butler's novel. Mark Bould and Sherryl Vint place "Kindred" as a key science fiction literary text of the 1960s and 1970s black consciousness period, noting that Butler uses the time travel trope to underscore the perpetuation of past racial discrimination into the present and, perhaps, the future of America. The lesson of Dana's trips to the past, then, is that "we cannot escape or repress our racist history but instead must confront it and thereby reduce its power to pull us back, unthinkingly, to earlier modes of consciousness and interaction." The novel's focus on how the system of slavery shapes its central characters dramatizes society's power to construct raced identities. The reader witnesses the development of Rufus from a relatively decent boy allied to Dana to a "complete racist" who attempts to rape her as an adult. Similarly, Dana and Kevin's prolonged stay in the past reframes their modern attitudes. Butler's depiction of her principal character as an independent, self-possessed, educated African-American woman defies slavery's racist and sexist objectification of black people and women. "Kindred" also challenges the fixity of "race" through the interracial relationships that form its emotional core. Dana's kinship to Rufus disproves America's erroneous concepts of racial purity. It also represents the "inseparability" of whites and blacks in America. The negative reactions of characters in the past and the present to Dana and Kevin's integrated relationship highlight the continuing hostility of both white and black communities to interracial mixing. At the same time, the relationship of Dana and Kevin extends to concept of "community" from people related by ethnicity to people related by shared experience. In these new communities whites and black people may acknowledge their common racist past and learn to live together. The depiction of Dana's white husband, Kevin, also serves to examine the concept of racial and gender privilege. In the present, Kevin seems unconscious of the benefits he derives from his skin pigmentation as well as of the way his actions serve to disenfranchise Dana. Once he goes to the past, however, he must not just resist accepting slavery as the normal state of affairs, but dissociate himself from the unrestricted power white males enjoy as their privilege. His prolonged stay in the past transforms him from a naive white man oblivious about racial issues into an anti-slave activist fighting racial oppression. Strong female protagonist. In her article "Feminisms," Jane Donawerth describes "Kindred" as a product of more than two decades of recovery of women's history and literature that began in the 1970s. The republication of a significant number of slave narratives, as well as the work of Angela Davis, which highlighted the heroic resistance of the black female slave, introduced science fiction writers such as Octavia Butler and Suzy McKee Charnas to a literary form that redefined the heroism of the protagonist as endurance, survival, and escape. As Lisa Yaszek points further, many of these African-American woman's neo-slave narratives, including "Kindred", discard the lone male hero in favor of a female hero immersed in family and community. Robert Crossley sees Butler's novel as an extension of the slave woman's memoir's exemplified by texts such as Harriet Ann Jacobs' "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl", especially in its portrayal of the compromises the heroine must make, the endurance she must have, and her ultimate resistance to victimization. Originally, Butler intended for the protagonist of "Kindred "to be a man, but as she explained in her interview, she could not do so because a man would immediately be "perceived as dangerous": "[s]o many things that he did would have been likely to get him killed. He wouldn't even have time to learn the rules...of submission." She then realized that sexism could work in favor of a female protagonist, "who might be equally dangerous" but "would not be perceived so." Most scholars see Dana as an example of a strong female protagonist. Angelyn Mitchell describes Dana as a black woman "strengthened by her racial pride, her personal responsibility, her free will, and her self-determination." Identifying Dana as one of many Butler's strong female black heroes, Grace McEntee explains how Dana attempts to transform Rufus into a caring individual despite her struggles with a white patriarchy. These struggles, Missy Dehn Kubitschek explains, are clearly represented by Dana's resistance to white male control of a crucial aspect of her identity—her writing—both in the past and in the present. Sherryl Vint argues that, by refusing Dana to be reduced to a raped body, Butler would seem to be aligning her protagonist with "the sentimental heroines who would rather die than submit to rape" and thus "allows Dana to avoid a crucial aspect of the reality of female enslavement." However, by risking death by killing Rufus, Dana becomes a permanent surviving record of the mutilation of her black ancestors, both through her armless body and by becoming "the body who writes "Kindred"." In contrast to these views, Beverly Friend believes Dana represents the helplessness of modern woman and that "Kindred" demonstrates that women have been and continue to be victims in a world run by men. Female quest for emancipation. Some scholars consider "Kindred" as part of Butler's larger project to empower black women. Robert Crossley sees Butler' science fictional narratives as generating a "black feminist aesthetic" that speaks not only to the sociopolitical "truths" of the African-American experience, but specifically to the female experience, as Butler focuses on "women who lack power and suffer abuse but are committed to claiming power over their own lives and to exercising that power harshly when necessary." Given that Butler makes Dana go from liberty to bondage and back to liberty beginning on the day of her birthday, Angelyn Mitchell further views "Kindred" as a revision of the "female emancipatory narrative" exemplified by Harriet A. Jacobs's "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl", with Butler's story engaging in themes such as female sexuality, individualism, community, motherhood, and, most importantly, freedom in order to illustrate the types of female agency that are capable of resisting enslavement. Similarly, Missy Dehn Kubistchek reads Butler's novel as "African-American woman’s quest for understanding history and self" which ends with Dana extending the concept of "kindred" to include both her black and white her heritage as well as her white husband while "insisting on her right to self definition." The meaning of the novel's title. "Kindred"’s title has several meanings: at its most literal, it refers to the genealogical link between its modern-day protagonist, the slave-holding Weylins, and both the free and bonded Greenwoods; at its most universal, it points to the kinship of all Americans regardless of ethnic background. Since Butler’s novel challenges readers to come to terms with slavery and its legacy, one significant meaning of the term "kindred" is the United States’ history of miscegenation and its denial by official discourses. This kinship of black people and whites must be acknowledged if America is to move into a better future. On the other hand, as Ashraf H. A. Rushdy contends, Dana's journey to the past serves to redefine her concept of kinship from blood ties to that of "spiritual kinship" with those she chooses as her family: the Weylin slaves and her white husband, Kevin. This sense of the term "kindred" as a community of choice is clear from Butler's first use of the word to indicate Dana and Kevin's similar interests and shared beliefs. Dana and Kevin's relationship, in particular, signals the way for black and white America to reconcile: they must face the country's racist past together so they can learn to co-exist as kindred. Genre. Publishers and academics have had a hard time categorizing "Kindred". In an interview with Randall Kenan, Butler stated that she considered "Kindred" "literally" as "fantasy." According to Pamela Bedore, Butler's novel is difficult to classify because it includes both elements of the slave narrative and science fiction. Frances Smith Foster insists "Kindred" does not have one genre and is in fact a blend of "realistic science fiction, grim fantasy, neo-slave narrative, and initiation novel." Sherryl Vint describes the narrative as a fusion of the fantastical and the real, resulting in a book that is "partly historical novel, partly slave narrative, and partly the story of how a twentieth century black woman comes to terms with slavery as her own and her nation's past." Critics who emphasize "Kindred"’s exploration of the grim realities of antebellum slavery tend to classify it mainly as a neo-slave narrative. Jane Donawerth traces Butler's novel to the recovery of slave narratives during the 1960s, a form then adapted by female science fiction writers to their own fantastical worlds. Robert Crossley identifies "Kindred" as "a distinctive contribution to the genre of neo-slave narrative" and places it along Margaret Walker’s "Jubilee", David Bradley’s "The Chaneysville Incident", Sherley Anne Williams’s "Dessa Rose", Toni Morrison’s "Beloved", and Charles R. Johnson’s "Middle Passage". Sandra Y. Govan calls the novel "a significant departure" from the science fiction narrative not only because it is connected to "anthropology and history via the historical novel," but also because it links "directly to the black American slave experiences via the neo-slave narrative." Noting that Dana begins the story as a free black woman who becomes enslaved, Marc Steinberg labels "Kindred " an "inverse slave narrative." Still, other scholars insist that Butler's background in science fiction is key to our understanding of what type of narrative "Kindred" is. Dana's time traveling, in particular, has caused critics to place "Kindred" along science fiction narratives that question "the nature of historical reality," such as Kurt Vonnegut's "time-slip" novel "Slaughterhouse Five" and Philip K. Dick’s "The Man in the High Castle", or that warn against "negotiat[ing] the past through a single frame of reference," as in William Gibson's "The Gernsback Continuum." In her article "A Grim Fantasy," Lisa Yaszek argues that Butler adapts two tropes of science fiction—time-travel and the encounter with the alien Other—to "re-present African-American women’s histories." Raffaella Baccolini further identifies Dana's time traveling as a modification of the "grandfather paradox" and notices Butler's use of another typical science fiction element: the narrative's lack of correlation between time passing in the past and time passing in the present. Style. "Kindred" ‘s plot is non linear; rather, it begins in the middle of its end and contains several flashbacks that connect events in the present and past. In an interview, Butler acknowledged that she split the ending into a "Prologue" and an "Epilogue" so as to "involve the reader and make him or her ask a lot of questions" that could not be answered until the end of the story. Missy Dehn Kubitschek sees this framing of Dana's adventures as Butler's way to highlight the significance of slavery to what Americans consider their contemporary identity. Because "Prologue" occurs before Dana travels in time and "Epilogue" concludes with a message on the necessity to confront the past, we experience the story as Dana's understanding of what we have yet to understand ourselves, while the "Epilogue" speaks about the importance of this understanding. Roslyn Nicole Smith proposes that Butler's framing of the story places Dana literally and figuratively "in media res" so as to take her out of that "in media res"; that is, to indicate Dana's movement from "a historically fragmented Black woman, who defines herself solely on her contemporary experiences" to "a historically integrated identity" who has knowledge of and a connection to her history. "Kindred" ’s story is further fragmented by Dana’s report of her time traveling, which uses flashbacks to connect the present to the past. Robert Crossley sees this "foreshortening" of the past and present as a "lesson in historical realities." Because the story is told from the first-person point of view of Dana, readers feel they are witnessing firsthand the cruelty and hardships that many slaves faced every day in the South and so identify with Dana's gut-wrenching reactions to the past. This autobiographical voice, along with Dana's harrowing recollection of the brutality of slavery and her narrow escape from it, is one of the key elements that have made critics classify "Kindred" as a neo-slave narrative. Another strategy Butler uses to add dramatic interest to "Kindred"’s story is the deliberate delay of the description of Dana and Kevin’s ethnicities. Butler has stated in an interview she did not want to give their "race" away yet since it would have less of an impact and the reader would not react the way that she wanted them to. Dana's ethnicity becomes revealed in chapter two, "The Fire," while Kevin's ethnicity becomes clear to the reader in chapter three, "The Fall," which also includes the history of Dana's and Kevin's interracial relationship. Butler also uses Alice as Dana's doppelgänger to compare how their decisions are a reflection of their environment. According to Missy Dehn Kubitschek, each woman seems to see a reflection of herself in the other; each is the vision of what could be (could have been) the possible fate of the other given different circumstances. According to Bedore, Butler's use of repetition blurs the lines between the past and present relationships. As time goes on, Alice and Rufus’ relationship begins to seem more like a miserable married couple while Dana and Kevin become somewhat distant. Background. Butler wrote "Kindred" specifically to respond to a young man involved in black consciousness raising. He felt ashamed of what he considered the subservience of older generations of African Americans, saying they were traitors and he wanted to kill them. Butler disagreed with this view. She believed that a historical context had to be given so that the lives of the older generations of African Americans could be understood as the silent, courageous resistance that it was, a means of survival. She decided to create a contemporary character and send her (originally it was a him) back to slavery, to explore how difficult a modern person would find it to survive in such harsh conditions. As Butler said in a 2004 interview with Allison Keyes, she "set out to make people feel history." Butler's field research in Maryland also influenced her writing of "Kindred". She traveled to the Eastern Shore to Talbot County where she wandered a bit. She also conducted research at the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore and the Maryland Historical Society. She toured Mount Vernon, the plantation home of America's first president, George Washington. At the time, guides referred to the slaves as "servants" and avoided referring to the estate as a former slave plantation. Butler also spent time reading slave narratives, including the autobiography of Fredrick Douglass, who escaped and became an abolitionist leader. She read many grim accounts, but decided she needed to moderate events in her book in order to attract enough readers. Reception. "Kindred "is Butler's bestseller, with Beacon Press advertising it as "the classic novel that has sold more than 450,000 copies." Among Butler's peers, the novel has been well received. Speculative writer Harlan Ellison has praised "Kindred "as "that rare magical artifact… the novel one returns it to again and again", while writer Walter Mosley described the novel as "everything the literature of science fiction can be." Book reviewers were enthusiastic. "Los Angeles Herald-Examiner" writer Sam Frank described the novel as "[a] shattering work of art with much to say about love, hate, slavery, and racial dilemmas, then and now." Reviewer Sherley Anne Williams from "Ms". defined the novel as "a startling and engrossing commentary on the complex actuality and continuing heritage of American slavery. "Seattle Post-Intelligencer" writer John Marshall said that "Kindred" is "the perfect introduction to Butler’s work and perspectives for those not usually enamored of science fiction." "The Austin Chronicle" writer Barbara Strickland declared "Kindred" to be "a novel of psychological horror as it is a novel of science fiction." High school and college courses have frequently chosen "Kindred" as a text to be read. Linell Smith of "The Baltimore Sun" describes it as "a celebrated mainstay of college courses in women's studies and black literature and culture." Speaking at the occasion of Beacon Press' reissue of "Kindred" for its 25th Anniversary, African-American literature professor Roland L. Williams said that the novel has remained popular over the years because of its crossover appeal, which "continues to find a variety of audiences--fantasy, literary and historical" and because "it is an exceedingly well-written and compelling story… that asks you to look back in time and at the present simultaneously." Communities and organizations also choose this novel for common reading events. In 2003, Rochester, New York selected "Kindred" as the novel to be read during the third annual "If All of Rochester Read the Same Book." Approximately 40,000 to 50,000 people participated by reading "Kindred" and joining panel discussions, lectures, film viewings, visual arts exhibitions, poetry readings, and other events from February 2003 until March 2003. The town discussed the book in local groups, and from March 4–7 met Octavia Butler during her appearances at colleges, community centers, libraries, and bookstores. In the spring of 2012, "Kindred" was chosen as one of thirty books to be given away as part of World Book Night, a worldwide event conducted to encourage love for books and reading by giving away hundreds of thousand of free paperbacks in one night.

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The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman is a 1971 novel by Ernest J. Gaines. The story depicts the struggles of African Americans as seen through the eyes of the narrator, a woman named Jane Pittman. She tells of the major events of her life from the time she was a young slave girl in the American South at the end of the Civil War. The novel was dramatized in a TV movie in 1974, starring Cicely Tyson. Realistic fiction novel. The novel, and its main character, are particularly notable for the breadth of time, history and stories they recall. In addition to the plethora of fictional characters who populate Jane's narrative, Jane and others make many references to historical events and figures over the close-to-a hundred years Miss Jane can recall. In addition to its obvious opening in the American Civil War, Jane alludes to the Spanish–American War and her narrative spans across both World Wars and the beginning of the Vietnam War. Jane and other characters also mention Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Jackie Robinson, Fred Shuttlesworth, Rosa Parks, and others. Corporal Brown's voice give these historical meditations a kind of "setting the record straight" mood to the storytelling presented in this novel. For instance, an entire section is dedicated to Huey P. Long in which Miss Jane explains "Oh, they got all kinds of stories about her now ... When I hear them talk like that I think, 'Ha. You ought to been here twenty-five, thirty years ago. You ought to been here when poor people had nothing.'" Because of the historical content, some readers thought the book was non-fiction. Gaines commented: Some people have asked me whether or not "The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman" is fiction or nonfiction. It is fiction. When Dial Press first sent it out, they did not put "a novel" on the galleys or on the dustjacket, so a lot of people had the feeling that it could have been real. ... I did a lot of research in books to give some facts to what Miss Jane could talk about, but these are my creations. I read quite a few interviews performed with former slaves by the WPA during the thirties and I got their rhythm and how they said certain things. But I never interviewed anybody. Motifs. Slavery again. The novel, which begins with a protagonist in slavery being freed and leaving the plantation only to return to another plantation as a sharecropper, stresses the similarities between the conditions of African Americans in slavery and African Americans in the sharecropping plantation. The novel shows how formerly enslaved people lived after freedom. It shows how the patrollers and other vigilante groups through violence and terror curtailed the physical and educational mobility of African Americans in the south. Access to schools and political participation was shut down by plantation owners. Between physical limitations, not having money, and having to deal with ambivalent and hostile figures, Jane and Ned's travels don't take them very far physically (they do not leave Louisiana) nor in lifestyle. At the end of the chapter "A Flicker of Light; And Again Darkness", Miss Jane remarks of Colonel Dye's plantation, "It was slavery again, all right". In the depiction of Miss Jane's telling of the story, Jim, the child of sharecroppers parallels if not resoundingly echoes the earlier story of Ned, the child born on a slave plantation. Through these stories the novel further highlights the conditions of Louisiana sharecropping in relationship to the conditions of slavery. Film adaptation. The book was made into an award-winning television movie, "The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman", broadcast on CBS in 1974. The film holds importance as one of the first made-for-TV movies to deal with African-American characters with depth and sympathy. It preceded the ground-breaking television miniseries "Roots" by three years. The film culminates with Miss Pittman joining the civil rights movement in 1962 at age 110. Critics have noted the language to be difficult to understand by viewers not familiar with the dialect and accent of the characters. The movie was directed by John Korty; the screenplay was written by Tracy Keenan Wynn and executive produced by Roger Gimbel. It starred Cicely Tyson in the lead role, as well as Michael Murphy, Richard Dysart, Katherine Helmond and Odetta. The film was shot in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and was notable for its use of very realistic special effects makeup by Stan Winston and Rick Baker for the lead character, who is shown from ages 23 to 110. The television movie is currently distributed through Classic Media. The film won nine Emmy Awards in 1974 including Best Actress of the Year, Best Lead Actress in a Drama, Best Directing in a Drama, and Best Writing in Drama. Differences between the novel and film. Preceding Alex Haley's miniseries "Roots", the film was one of the first films to take seriously depictions of African Americans in the plantation south. The film, like the book, also suggests a comparison between the contemporary moment of the Civil Rights Movement and the plight of African Americans at various points in history. The film, however, has some noticeable divergences from the novel. In the film the person who interviews Miss Jane is European American (played by Michael Murphy). There is no indication of the interviewer's race in the novel. In fact after the first couple of pages the interviewer completely falls out of the frame of the story though he continues to appear between flashbacks in the film. The film also opens with the book's final story about Jimmy coming to an almost 110-years-old Miss Jane to ask for her participation in a Civil Rights demonstration. The film appears to be a series of flashbacks that happen during this time of Jimmy's Civil Rights organizing. In the novel, Corporal Brown gives Jane her name. Originally she had been called Ticey. The Corporal exclaims that "Ticey" is a slave name but then declares "I'll call you Jane" after his own girl back in Ohio. In the film however, Corporal Brown only suggests the name "Jane" as one option in a list of potential names, so that it is Jane who says "I like 'Jane'". The movie never shows Tee Bob killing himself.

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Underground Airlines Underground Airlines is a 2016 novel by Ben Winters which is set in a contemporary alternate-history United States where the American Civil War never occurred because Abraham Lincoln was assassinated prior to his 1861 inauguration and a version of the Crittenden Compromise was adopted instead. As a result, slavery has remained legal in the "Hard Four" (a group of southern states which have kept slavery): Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and a unified Carolina. Its name evokes the Underground Railroad in relations to its setting. The novel attracted praise for exploring racism through the alternate-history mechanism. Plot. The novel is narrated by Victor, a former Person Bound to Labor ('peeb') who, after escaping the Hard Four, has been forced to work as an undercover agent for U.S. Marshal Bridge, infiltrating and gathering evidence to prosecute fellow escapees and the people and organisations helping peebs escape slavery. If Victor refuses to help, the agent has threatened to return him to the plantation from which he escaped; and he can be tracked by a device implanted in his spine if he tries to run. As the novel opens, Victor is tracking down the peeb escapee Jackdaw, whose last known whereabouts have led Victor to Indianapolis. His trail ends at Saint Anselm's Catholic Promise, a seemingly derelict community center run by Father Barton. Victor poses as Jim Dirkson, a consultant for Indonesian cell carrier Sulawesi Digital, looking to expand into the United States, seeking to get his wife Gentle out of the Carolina plantation she is enslaved in and into Little America, a suburb of Montreal mainly populated by African-Americans in exile. Victor befriends Martha, a white woman with a mixed-race child, after they are ejected from a hotel for stealing from the breakfast buffet. Eventually, Victor locates Jackdaw, who is revealed to be a freeborn African-American college student named Kevin. He was sent by Barton to infiltrate Garments of the Greater South, Inc., purportedly to expose how they have been illegally selling slave-made goods to the rest of the United States (where such goods are unlawful) through shell companies located in Malaysia. Barton contends that this explosive revelation could bring down slavery, or at least assassinate the credibility of its proponents. Kevin, however, refuses to give up the location of the 'evidence' unless they also extract a slave girl he'd fallen for during his year behind the Fence. In a commotion, he is shot dead by an Indianapolis police officer who is working with Father Barton after he became enraged at the news that the girl was probably dead. Victor is then coerced by Father Barton to go back to GGSI to retrieve the intel. Victor deduces something larger is at play and gets Martha to play his 'Missus' through the slavery-embracing Hard Four states so they can investigate GGSI. Martha, for her part, is seeking access to Torchlight; a centralized registry of every Person Bound to Labor in the United States - specifically, she wants to find out what happened to Samson, her son's father. Victor decides to double-cross Father Barton, and makes another deal with Bridge. He does not believe the intelligence being retrieved would make any difference, and decides to use the U.S. Marshal Service to secure his own freedom. Bridge is compelled to play along after Victor bluffs about the damaging nature of the evidence to the Service. At the Fence, Victor disguises himself as Martha's slave, endures a dehumanizing inspection by Internal Border and Regulation agents, and the two make their way to Green Hollow, Alabama. In Green Hollow, Victor sends Martha back north and meets up with former peebs who hide out at a sympathetic old white lawyer's mansion; he is accommodated there as he prepares to insert himself into GGSI. Martha unexpectedly returns to Victor's side, and they succeed in infiltrating GGSI's HQ, obtaining the intel as well as information on Samson. He and Martha are unexpectedly abducted by IMPD Officer Cook, one of Father Barton's colleagues from Indianapolis. It turns out that Cook, like Victor, is also an undercover agent for the Marshal Service; he betrays both Father Barton and Victor to secure his own freedom. In the ensuing struggle, Cook is shot dead. When confronted by Victor, Father Barton reveals that the evidence is much more horrifying: GGSI has been experimenting with the eggs of female slaves to genetically produce a new line of slaves who can be legally classified as non-humans. Victor pretends to co-operate with Barton. Telling Bridge he has the intel, they rendezvous in a makeshift operating tent off of a highway, so his tracking implant can be removed and Bridge can give him a new identity. During the exchange, however, Barton and his comrades ambush Bridge, killing the medical technician he'd brought along, and is about to kill Bridge, when Victor says to spare him instead. In gratitude, Bridge removes the implant himself, and Victor passes out, waking up to an empty tent. The novel ends with the undercover Victor and Martha in Chicago, checking into the HQ of the elevator company that contracts with GGSI - plotting sabotage. Development history. Winters cites Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man" as a strong influence on the finished novel. Recognition. The novel was a finalist for the 2017 Chautauqua Prize, the 2017 Southern Book Prize, the 2017 International Thriller Award, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel of the Year. The book won the 2016 Sidewise Award for Alternate History. Cover art. The United States hardback edition cover was designed by Oliver Munday. An alternative cover for the UK edition featured a background with the stars and bars from the Confederate Battle Flag. Reception. In an early review, Kirkus Reviews called the novel's premise "worthy of Philip K. Dick ... smart and well-paced." The book debuted on the New York Times hardcover best-seller list at #20, and was ranked #11 on the Indie Bestsellers list. Charles Finch wrote, in a review for "USA Today", the novel had a "rather prosaic plotline" and "many of [the novel's] big turns are anticlimactic" but overall, it was "a swift, smart, angry new novel [that] illuminates all the ways that slavery has endured into the present day — by depicting an alternate world in which it has endured" and called it an astonishing feat of world-building. In a review for "The Washington Post", Jon Michaud found the "alternate history that does not feel fully realised [in] its rendering of popular culture" was "slightly distracting" but overall, the novel was a success "because its fiction is disturbingly close to our present reality." Many reviewers probed the novel's premise and found it reasonable. Maureen Corrigan, writing for National Public Radio, called the novel "one suspenseful tale filled with double crosses and dangerous expeditions" set in "a disturbing but plausible alternate reality for the United States." Kathryn Schulz, reviewing the novel for "The New Yorker", said "Winters gets the balance right. He is careful to set up a plausible case for how history shifted off-kilter ... and he paints a convincing picture of what fugitive life would look like in our own era. Racial controversy. A profile in "The New York Times" called the novel "creatively and professionally risky" for Winters, as fellow author Lev Grossman was quoted describing Winters as "fearless" for being "a white writer going after questions of what it's like to be black in America." Corrigan wrote that a white author imagining the thoughts and experiences of a black character was potentially controversial. Other critics of the "Times" profile felt that Winters was being unfairly lionised, especially since the themes of science fiction, racism and slavery had in fact been explored before, most notably by African-American author Octavia Butler in her 1979 novel "Kindred". Winters had already acknowledged Butler's influence in a blog post published three weeks before the profile in the "Times". Adaptation. Winters has written the pilot script for a television adaptation.

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The Heroic Slave The Heroic Slave, a Heartwarming Narrative of the Adventures of Madison Washington, in Pursuit of Liberty is a short piece of fiction, or novella, written by abolitionist Frederick Douglass, at the time a fugitive slave based in Boston. When the Rochester Ladies' Anti Slavery Society asked Douglass for a short story to go in their collection, "Autographs for Freedom", Douglass responded with "The Heroic Slave". The novella, published in 1852 by John P. Jewett and Company, was Douglass' first and only published work of fiction (though he did publish several autobiographical narratives). "The Heroic Slave" is a fictional work inspired by the Creole case, in which Madison Washington, an enslaved cook on the brig "Creole" led a ship-board rebellion by 19 slaves in November 1841. They succeeded in taking control of the ship en route from Virginia to New Orleans (known as the coastwise slave trade), and ordered it sailed to Nassau, Bahamas, a British port. A total of 135 slaves gained freedom there, as Britain had abolished slavery in 1839. It was the largest and most successful slave rebellion in United States history. Plot. Part I opens as Madison Washington carries a heavy load through the woods, lamenting his condition under slavery. Mr. Listwell, a free white man, secretly watches him in silence. In Part II, the story moves ahead five years. Mr. Listwell is sitting at the table with his wife when they hear a knock at the door. Madison Washington is running from slavery, and Mr. Listwell is more than willing to help him escape. As they talk, Mr. Listwell tells Madison he remembers him from so many years before, and asks him where he has been all of this time. Madison reveals that on the day Mr. Listwell saw him, he left his wife and children to escape and seek freedom. Unable to find his way to the North, a week later he returned to his plantation. He met with his wife who regularly gave him food and provision, and for five years hid in the woods. However, a great fire caused Madison to lose his hiding place, which is why he ran to see Mr. Listwell. Mr. Listwell gives Madison a new coat and provisions and helps him escape to Canada. In Part III, Mr. Listwell is in a tavern and reveals that he has traveled that day. As he drinks, he sees a slave-gang on their way to market, and is surprised to see Madison Washington among the slaves. Madison reveals that he reached Canada, but he missed his wife so much that he returned to the United States to help her escape. He reached her bedroom window, but he scared her so much that she woke up her master. The couple were chased by the master and his dogs. His wife was shot down and killed and he had been sold to traders who would take him to the Deep South. Mr. Listwell realizes there's nothing he can do for Madison in these conditions, but implores the man to put his trust in God. As he is leaving, Mr. Listwell buys 3 files; he gives them and $10 secretly to Madison. Part III ends with Madison taken aboard a ship, put in chains together with other slaves, and sailing to the South for re-sale. In Part IV, white men speak about "unfortunate" events that occurred aboard the ship "Creole". Madison Washington gained the trust of all of the overseers on board and, using the files Mr. Listwell had given him, cuts through his fetters and leads the slaves in rebellion. Nineteen slaves survived the battle. Madison took over as captain of the ship, ordering it sailed to Nassau, in the British colony of the Bahamas. Britain had abolished slavery there in 1834. In Nassau, a group of black soldiers declared that they only protected property, and people were not property, so the nineteen slaves were freed.

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The Sport of Kings (novel) The Sport of Kings is a 2016 novel by C. E. Morgan. It is a family saga about horse racing set in Kentucky and Ohio. It won the 2016 Kirkus Prize for Fiction and was a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Reception. In its starred review, "Kirkus Reviews" called the novel "vaultingly ambitious, thrillingly well-written, charged with moral fervor and rueful compassion." "Publishers Weekly" praised the novel's "authentically pungent shed-row atmosphere" but criticized its "series of melodramatic incidents that undermines the care with which Morgan has created these larger-than-life characters."

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The Partisan Leader The Partisan Leader; A Tale of The Future is a political novel by the antebellum Virginia author and jurist Nathaniel Beverley Tucker. A two-volume work published in 1836 in New York City and in 1837 in Washington, D.C. under the pen-name "Edward William Sydney," the novel is set thirteen years into the future, in 1849, and imagines a world where the American states south of Virginia (South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Florida) have seceded from the Union. The story traces the formation of a band of Virginia insurgents who seek to free their state from federal control and adjoin it to the independent Southern Confederacy. Ever since the Southern states actually withdrew from the Union in 1861, the work has been viewed as a window into the development of secessionist thought, and, in some ways, a preview of the American Civil War. In 1861, it was reprinted in New York City with the title "A Key to the Disunion Conspiracy". A Confederate edition was published in Richmond in 1862.

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Gone with the Wind (novel) Gone with the Wind is a novel by American writer Margaret Mitchell, first published in 1936. The story is set in Clayton County and Atlanta, both in Georgia, during the American Civil War and Reconstruction Era. It depicts the struggles of young Scarlett O'Hara, the spoiled daughter of a well-to-do plantation owner, who must use every means at her disposal to claw her way out of poverty following Sherman's destructive "March to the Sea". This historical novel features a coming-of-age story, with the title taken from the poem “Non Sum Qualis eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae”, written by Ernest Dowson. "Gone with the Wind" was popular with American readers from the outset and was the top American fiction bestseller in 1936 and 1937. As of 2014, a Harris poll found it to be the second favorite book of American readers, just behind the Bible. More than 30 million copies have been printed worldwide. "Gone with the Wind" is a controversial reference point for subsequent writers of the South, both black and white. Scholars at American universities refer to, interpret, and study it in their writings. The novel has been absorbed into American popular culture. Mitchell received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for the book in 1937. It was adapted into the 1939 film of the same name, which has been considered to be one of the greatest movies ever made and also received the Academy Award for Best Picture during the 12th annual Academy Awards ceremony. "Gone with the Wind" is the only novel by Mitchell published during her lifetime. Plot. Part I. "Gone with the Wind" takes place in the state of Georgia during the American Civil War (1861–1865) and the Reconstruction Era (1865–1877). The novel opens on the eve of a rebellion in which seven southern states – including Georgia – declared their secession from the United States (the "Union") over a desire to continue the institution of slavery, which was the economic engine of the South. The story begins on April 15, 1861, on a plantation owned by the family of wealthy Irish immigrant Gerald O'Hara. The oldest of the three O'Hara daughters, 16-year-old Scarlett is willful, witty, and intelligent though uninterested in schooling. She is described in the book's opening sentence as "not beautiful" but in possession of a powerful ability to charm and attract men. Scarlett is dismayed to learn that the man for whom she harbors a secret love, her county neighbor Ashley Wilkes, is set to announce his engagement to his cousin Melanie Hamilton. The next day, the Wilkeses throw an all-day party at their estate ("Twelve Oaks") where Scarlett spies a dark stranger leering at her. She learns that this man is Rhett Butler and that he has a reputation for seducing young women. Throughout the day, Scarlett attempts to turn Ashley's head by flirting shamelessly with every man present, including Melanie's brother Charles. In the afternoon Scarlett finally gets Ashley alone and confesses her love for him, convinced he will return it, but he says only that he cares for her as a friend and intends to marry Melanie. Stung, Scarlett reacts badly, pelting Ashley with insults about himself and Melanie and accusing him of being too cowardly to submit to his real feelings for her. As Ashley departs, Rhett Butler reveals himself from his hiding place in the library - he has overheard their whole exchange. A humiliated Scarlett claims that he is "not a gentleman", to which he admiringly replies "And you are not a lady". After rejoining the other party guests, Scarlett learns that war has been declared and the men are going to enlist. Feeling petty and vengeful, Scarlett accepts a marriage proposal from Melanie's brother, Charles Hamilton. They marry two weeks later, Charles goes to war, and then he promptly dies of measles only two months later. Scarlett later gives birth to his child, Wade Hampton Hamilton. As a widow, she is bound to dye her dresses black, wear a veil in public, and avoid conversations with young men. Scarlett mourns the loss of her youth, though not the husband she barely knew, and rues her hasty decision to marry Charles. Part II. Melanie is living in Atlanta with her Aunt Sarah Jane, who is largely called by her childhood nickname "Pittypat". Scarlett's mother, mistaking Scarlett's depression at having lost her status as a belle for grief at having lost her husband, suggests that living with Melanie and Pittypat in Atlanta might lift her spirits. After moving to Atlanta, Scarlett's spirit is revived by the energy and excitement of living in a growing city. She busies herself with hospital work and sewing circles for the Confederate Army, although her heart isn't in it - she does these things mostly to avoid being gossiped about by the other women of Atlanta society. Additionally, she believes that her efforts may aid Ashley, with whom she is still deeply in love. Scarlett is mortified when she runs into Rhett Butler, whom she hasn't seen since her humiliation at Twelve Oaks, while manning a sales stall at a public dance benefiting the troops. Rhett believes the war is a lost cause but is becoming rich as a blockade runner for profit. Rhett sees through Scarlett's "lady in mourning" disguise and recognizes her longing to dance with the other young people, so he bids a large amount of gold to win the honor of leading the first dance and chooses Scarlett as his partner. Scarlett scandalizes the city by dancing joyfully while still dressed in widow's mourning. Her reputation is saved by intervention from Melanie, who is now her sister-in-law and highly respected in Atlanta. Melanie argues that Scarlett is supporting the Confederate cause. Scarlett continues to act recklessly, flirting and going on dates while still in widow's clothes, but is continually protected by Melanie's endorsement. She spends much of her time with Rhett Butler. Rhett's sexual attraction to Scarlett is ever-present, and at one point he enrages her with a silky proposition she become his mistress. Still, she appreciates Rhett for his money, his sophistication, and their shared irritation with the hypocrisy of Atlanta society. At Christmas (1863), Ashley is granted a furlough from the army and visits the women in Atlanta. Scarlett struggles to restrain her feelings for him and to remember that he is someone else's husband. She remains convinced that he is secretly in love with her and that he remains married to Melanie out of duty. Scarlett is heartbroken when Melanie becomes pregnant with Ashley's child. Part III. The war is going badly for the Confederacy. By September 1864, Atlanta is besieged from three sides. The city becomes desperate as hundreds of wounded Confederate soldiers pour in. Melanie goes into labor with only the inexperienced Scarlett and a young slave named Prissy to assist, as all the trained doctors are attending to the soldiers. Scarlett - left to fend for herself and forced to serve as Melanie's midwife - cries for the comfort and safety of her mother and of Tara. The tattered Confederate States Army sets flame to Atlanta before they abandon it to the Union Army. Amidst the chaos, Melanie gives birth to a boy, Beau. Scarlett tracks down Rhett and begs him to take her, Wade, Melanie, Beau, and Prissy to Tara. Rhett laughs at this idea, explaining that Tara has likely been burned by the Yankees, but still steals an emaciated horse and a small wagon and begins driving the party out of Atlanta. At the edge of the city, Rhett announces that he has had a change of heart and is abandoning Scarlett to join the army in their final, doomed push. Scarlett drives the wagon to Tara, where she is relieved to see that Tara has avoided being burned like so many of her neighbors' homes. However, the situation is bleak: Scarlett's mother is dead, her father has lost his mind with grief, her sisters are sick with typhoid fever, the field slaves have left, the Yankees have burned all the cotton, and there is no food in the house. The long and tiring struggle for survival begins, with Scarlett working in the fields. There are several hungry people and animals, along with an ever-present threat from Yankees who steal or burn what little they can find. At one point, Scarlett kills a Yankee soldier who attempts to invade her home and buries his body in the garden. A long post-war succession of Confederate soldiers returning home stop at Tara to find food and rest. Eventually, Ashley returns from the war, with his idealistic view of the world shattered. Finding themselves alone one day, he and Scarlett share a passionate kiss in the fields, after which he declares that he can't trust himself with her and that he intends to move his family to New York to get away from her. Part IV. Life at Tara slowly begins to recover, but exorbitant taxes are levied on the plantation. Scarlett knows only one man with enough money to help her - Rhett Butler. She puts on her only pretty dress, looks for him in Atlanta, and finds him in jail. Although she nearly wins him over with a southern belle routine, he declines to help when he realizes her sweetness is an act meant to get at his money. Leaving the jailhouse in a snit, Scarlett meets Frank Kennedy, a middle-aged Atlanta storeowner who is betrothed to Scarlett's sister, Suellen. Realizing that Frank also has money and that Suellen will turn her back on Tara once she is married, Scarlett hatches a plot to marry Frank. She lies to Frank that Suellen has changed her mind about marrying him. Dazed, Frank succumbs to Scarlett's charms and marries her two weeks later, knowing he has done "something romantic and exciting for the first time in his life." Wanting to keep his pretty young wife happy, Frank gives Scarlett the money to pay the taxes. While Frank has a cold and is pampered by Aunt Pittypat, Scarlett goes over the accounts at Frank's store and finds that many owe him money. Terrified of the possibility of more taxes and irritated with Frank's poor business sense, she takes control of the store; her business practices emasculate Frank and leave many Atlantans resentful of her. With a loan from Rhett, she also buys and runs a small sawmill, which is viewed as even more scandalous conduct. To Frank's relief and Scarlett's dismay, Scarlett learns she is pregnant, which curtails her business activities for a while. She convinces Ashley to come to Atlanta and manage her mill, all the while still in love with him. At Melanie's urging and with great trepidation, Ashley accepts. Melanie becomes the center of Atlanta society, and Scarlett gives birth to a girl, Ella Lorena. Georgia is under martial law, and life has taken on a new and more frightening tone. For protection, Scarlett keeps Frank's pistol tucked in the upholstery of his buggy. Her lone trips to and from the mill take her past a shanty town where criminals live. While on her way home one evening, she is accosted by two men who try to rob her, but she escapes with the help of Big Sam, a black former foreman from Tara. Attempting to avenge his wife, Frank and the Ku Klux Klan raid the shanty town, where Frank is shot dead in the fracas. Rhett puts on a charade to keep the raiders from being arrested. He enters the Wilkeses' home with Hugh Elsing and Ashley, singing and pretending to be drunk. Yankee officers outside question Rhett and he says he and the other men had been at Belle Watling's brothel that evening, a story Belle later confirms to the officers. The men are indebted to Rhett, and his reputation among them improves somewhat, but the men's wives - except Melanie - are livid at owing their husbands' lives to the town madame. Later, at Frank's funeral, Rhett asks Scarlett to marry him. When she says she doesn't love him and has no desire to marry again, he gleefully proclaims that he does not love her either, but that he's always wanted her and that the only way he will have her is to marry her. He kisses her passionately, and in the heat of the moment, she accepts. One year later, Scarlett and Rhett announce their engagement, which becomes the talk of the town. Part V. Mr. and Mrs. Butler honeymoon in New Orleans, spending lavishly. Upon returning to Atlanta, the couple build a gaudy new mansion on Peachtree Street. Rhett happily pays for the house to be built to Scarlett's specifications, but describes it as an "architectural horror". Shortly after moving into the house, the sardonic jabs between them turn into quarrels. Scarlett wonders why Rhett married her and then, "with real hate in her eyes", tells Rhett she is going to have a baby, which she does not want. Wade is seven years old in 1869 when his half-sister Eugenie Victoria, is born. She has blue eyes like Gerald O'Hara, and Melanie nicknames her "Bonnie Blue" in reference to the Bonnie Blue Flag of the Confederacy. When Scarlett is feeling well again, she makes a trip to the mill and talks to Ashley, who is alone in the office. In their conversation, she comes away believing Ashley still loves her and is jealous of her intimate relations with Rhett. She returns home and tells Rhett she does not want more children. From then on, they sleep separately, and when Bonnie is two years old, she sleeps in a little bed beside Rhett. Rhett turns his attention completely toward Bonnie, pampering her and working to ensure her a good reputation for when she enters society. Melanie plans a surprise birthday party for Ashley. Scarlett goes to the mill to stall Ashley there until the celebration – a rare opportunity to be alone together. Ashley tells her how pretty she looks, and they reminisce about the old days and how far their lives have departed from what they imagined for themselves. They share an innocent embrace but are spotted in the moment by Ashley's sister, India. Before the party has even begun, a rumor of an affair between Ashley and Scarlett explodes across Atlanta, eventually reaching Rhett and Melanie. Melanie refuses to accept any criticism of Scarlett, and India is expelled from the Wilkes home. Rhett, drunker than Scarlett has ever seen him, returns home from the party long after Scarlett. His eyes are bloodshot, and his mood is dark and violent. He enjoins Scarlett to drink with him, but she declines with deliberate rudeness. However, Rhett pins her to the wall and tells her they could have been happy together. He then takes her in his arms and carries her up the stairs to her bedroom, where he rapes her. The next morning, a chagrined Rhett leaves town with Bonnie and Prissy for three months. Scarlett is uncertain about her feelings surrounding Rhett, for whom she feels a mixture of desire and revulsion, and she learns she is pregnant with her fourth child. When Rhett returns, Scarlett is strangely happy for his return. Rhett comments on her paleness, and Scarlett tells him that she is pregnant. Rhett sarcastically asks if the father is Ashley; Scarlett calls him a cad and says that no woman would want his baby, to which he replies, "Cheer up, maybe you'll have a miscarriage." She lunges at him, but misses and tumbles down the stairs. She is seriously ill for the first time in her life, having lost the baby and broken her ribs. Rhett is wildly remorseful and fears Scarlett will die. Sobbing and drunk, he seeks consolation from Melanie and confesses that he acted horribly out of jealousy about Ashley. Scarlett goes to Tara with Wade and Ella, seeking to regain her strength and vitality from "the green cotton fields of home." When she returns healthy to Atlanta, she sells the mills to Ashley. Bonnie is four years old in 1873. Spirited and willful, she has her father wrapped around her finger, and Atlanta society is charmed by Rhett's transformation from scandalous playboy to doting father. Rhett buys Bonnie a Shetland pony, teaching her to ride sidesaddle and paying a trainer to teach the pony to jump. One day, Bonnie asks her father to raise the bar to one-and-a-half feet. He gives in, warning her not to come crying if she falls. During the jump, Bonnie falls and dies of a broken neck. In the dark days and months following Bonnie's death, Rhett is often drunk and disheveled, while Scarlett, though equally bereaved, is more presentable. It is during this time that Melanie miraculously conceives a second child. She loses the baby and soon dies due to complications. As she comforts the newly widowed Ashley, Scarlett finally realizes that she stopped loving Ashley long ago and that perhaps she never truly loved him. She is thunderstruck to realize that she has always, sincerely, deeply loved Rhett Butler and that he has loved her in return. She returns home, brimming with her new love, and determined to begin anew with Rhett. She discovers him packing his bags. In the wake of Melanie's death, Rhett has decided that he wants to rediscover the calm Southern dignity he once knew in his youth and is leaving Atlanta to find it. Scarlett tries to persuade Rhett to either stay or take her with him, but Rhett explains that while he once loved Scarlett deeply, the years of hurt and neglect have killed that love. He leaves and doesn't look back. In the midst of her maddening grief, Scarlett consoles herself with the knowledge that she still has Tara. She plans to return there with the certainty that she can recover and win Rhett back, because "tomorrow is another day." Biographical background and publication. Born in 1900 in Atlanta, Margaret Mitchell was a Southerner and writer throughout her life. She grew up hearing stories about the American Civil War and the Reconstruction from her Irish-American grandmother, who had endured its suffering. Her forceful and intellectual mother was a suffragist who fought for the rights of women to vote. As a young woman, Mitchell found love with an army lieutenant. He was killed in World War I, and she would carry his memory for the remainder of her life. After studying at Smith College for a year during which time her mother died from the 1918 pandemic flu, Mitchell returned to Atlanta. She married, but her husband was an abusive bootlegger. Mitchell took a job writing feature articles for the "Atlanta Journal" at a time when Atlanta debutantes of her class did not work. After divorcing her first husband, she married again to a man who shared her interest in writing and literature. He had been the best man at her first wedding. Margaret Mitchell began writing "Gone with the Wind" in 1926 to pass the time while recovering from a slow-healing injury from an auto crash. In April 1935, Harold Latham of Macmillan, an editor looking for new fiction, read her manuscript and saw that it could be a best-seller. After Latham agreed to publish the book, Mitchell worked for another six months checking the historical references and rewriting the opening chapter several times. Mitchell and her husband John Marsh, a copy editor by trade, edited the final version of the novel. Mitchell wrote the book's final moments first and then wrote the events that led to them. "Gone with the Wind" was published in June 1936. Title. The author tentatively titled the novel "Tomorrow Is Another Day", from its last line. Other proposed titles included "Bugles Sang True", "Not in Our Stars", and "Tote the Weary Load". The title Mitchell finally chose is from the first line of the third stanza of the poem "Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae sub Regno Cynarae" by Ernest Dowson: Scarlett O'Hara uses the title phrase when she wonders if her home on a plantation called "Tara" is still standing, or if it had "gone with the wind which had swept through Georgia." In a general sense, the title is a metaphor for the demise of a way of life in the South before the Civil War. When taken in the context of Dowson's poem about "Cynara," the phrase "gone with the wind" alludes to erotic loss. The poem expresses the regrets of someone who has lost his feelings for his "old passion," Cynara. Dowson's Cynara, a name that comes from the Greek word for artichoke, represents a lost love. It is also possible that the author was influenced by the connection of the phrase “Gone with the wind” with Tara in a line of James Joyce’s Ulysses in the chapter “Aeolus”. Structure. Coming-of-age story. Margaret Mitchell arranged "Gone with the Wind" chronologically, basing it on the life and experiences of the main character, Scarlett O'Hara, as she grew from adolescence into adulthood. During the time span of the novel, from 1861 to 1873, Scarlett ages from sixteen to twenty-eight years. This is a type of "Bildungsroman", a novel concerned with the moral and psychological growth of the protagonist from youth to adulthood (coming-of-age story). Scarlett's development is affected by the events of her time. Mitchell used a smooth linear narrative structure. The novel is known for its exceptional "readability". The plot is rich with vivid characters. Genre. "Gone with the Wind" is often placed in the literary subgenre of the historical romance novel. Pamela Regis has argued that is more appropriately classified as a historical novel, as it does not contain all of the elements of the romance genre. The novel has been described as an early classic of the erotic historical genre because it is thought to contain some degree of pornography. Plot elements. Slavery. Slavery in the United States in "Gone with the Wind" is a backdrop to a story that is essentially about other things. Southern plantation fiction (also known as Anti-Tom literature, in reference to reactions to Harriet Beecher Stowe's anti-slavery novel, "Uncle Tom's Cabin" of 1852) from the mid-19th century, culminating in "Gone with the Wind", is written from the perspective and values of the slaveholder and tends to present slaves as docile and happy. Caste system. The characters in the novel are organized into two basic groups along class lines: the white planter class, such as Scarlett and Ashley, and the black house servant class. The slaves depicted in "Gone with the Wind" are primarily loyal house servants, such as Mammy, Pork, Prissy, and Uncle Peter. House servants are the highest "caste" of slaves in Mitchell's caste system. They choose to stay with their masters after the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 and subsequent Thirteenth Amendment of 1865 sets them free. Of the servants who stayed at Tara, Scarlett thinks, "There were qualities of loyalty and tirelessness and love in them that no strain could break, no money could buy." The field slaves make up the lower class in Mitchell's caste system. The field slaves from the Tara plantation and the foreman, Big Sam, are taken away by Confederate soldiers to dig ditches and never return to the plantation. Mitchell wrote that other field slaves were "loyal" and "refused to avail themselves of the new freedom", but the novel has no field slaves who stay on the plantation to work after they have been emancipated. American William Wells Brown escaped from slavery and published his memoir, or slave narrative, in 1847. He wrote of the disparity in conditions between the house servant and the field hand: During the time that Mr. Cook was overseer, I was a house servant—a situation preferable to a field hand, as I was better fed, better clothed, and not obliged to rise at the ringing bell, but about a half-hour after. I have often laid and heard the crack of the whip, and the screams of the slave. Faithful and devoted slave. Although the novel is more than 1,000 pages long, the character of Mammy never considers what her life might be like away from Tara. She recognizes her freedom to come and go as she pleases, saying, "Ah is free, Miss Scarlett. You kain sen' me nowhar Ah doan wanter go," but Mammy remains duty-bound to "Miss Ellen's chile." (No other name for Mammy is given in the novel.) Eighteen years before the publication of "Gone with the Wind", an article titled, "The Old Black Mammy," written in the "Confederate Veteran" in 1918, discussed the romanticized view of the mammy character persisting in Southern literature: ... for her faithfulness and devotion, she has been immortalized in the literature of the South; so the memory of her will never pass, but live on in the tales that are told of those "dear dead days beyond recall". Micki McElya, in her book "Clinging to Mammy", suggests the myth of the faithful slave, in the figure of Mammy, lingered because white Americans wished to live in a world in which African Americans were not angry over the injustice of slavery. The best-selling anti-slavery novel, "Uncle Tom's Cabin" by Harriet Beecher Stowe, published in 1852, is mentioned briefly in "Gone with the Wind" as being accepted by the Yankees as "revelation second only to the Bible". The enduring interest of both "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and "Gone with the Wind" has resulted in lingering stereotypes of 19th-century black slaves. "Gone with the Wind" has become a reference point for subsequent writers about the South, both black and white alike. Southern belle. The southern belle is an archetype for a young woman of the antebellum American South upper class. The southern belle was believed to be physically attractive but, more importantly, personally charming with sophisticated social skills. She is subject to the correct code of female behavior. The novel's heroine, Scarlett O'Hara, charming though not beautiful, is a classic southern belle. For young Scarlett, the ideal southern belle is represented by her mother, Ellen O'Hara. In "A Study in Scarlett", published in "The New Yorker", Claudia Roth Pierpont wrote: The Southern belle was bred to conform to a subspecies of the nineteenth-century "lady"... For Scarlett, the ideal is embodied in her adored mother, the saintly Ellen, whose back is never seen to rest against the back of any chair on which she sits, whose broken spirit everywhere is mistaken for righteous calm ... However, Scarlett is not always willing to conform. Kathryn Lee Seidel, in her book, "The Southern Belle in the American Novel", wrote: ... part of her does try to rebel against the restraints of a code of behavior that relentlessly attempts to mold her into a form to which she is not naturally suited. The figure of a pampered southern belle, Scarlett lives through an extreme reversal of fortune and wealth and survives to rebuild Tara and her self-esteem. Her bad belle traits (Scarlett's deceitfulness, shrewdness, manipulation, and superficiality), in contrast to Melanie's good belle traits (trust, self-sacrifice, and loyalty), enable her to survive in the post-war South and pursue her main interest, which is to make enough money to survive and prosper. Although Scarlett was "born" around 1845, she is portrayed to appeal to modern-day readers for her passionate and independent spirit, determination, and obstinate refusal to feel defeated. Historical background. Marriage was supposed to be the goal of all southern belles, as women's status was largely determined by that of their husbands. All social and educational pursuits were directed towards it. Despite the Civil War and the loss of a generation of eligible men, young ladies were still expected to marry. By law and Southern social convention, household heads were adult, white propertied males, and all white women and all African Americans were thought to require protection and guidance because they lacked the capacity for reason and self-control. The Atlanta Historical Society has produced a number of "Gone with the Wind" exhibits, among them a 1994 exhibit titled, "Disputed Territories: "Gone with the Wind" and Southern Myths". The exhibit asked, "Was Scarlett a Lady?", finding that historically most women of the period were not involved in business activities as Scarlett was during Reconstruction when she ran a sawmill. White women performed traditional jobs such as teaching and sewing, and generally disliked work outside the home. During the Civil War, Southern women played a major role as volunteer nurses working in makeshift hospitals. Many were middle- and upper-class women who had never worked for wages or seen the inside of a hospital. One such nurse was Ada W. Bacot, a young widow who had lost two children. Bacot came from a wealthy South Carolina plantation family that owned 87 slaves. In the fall of 1862, Confederate laws were changed to permit women to be employed in hospitals as members of the Confederate Medical Department. Twenty-seven-year-old nurse Kate Cumming from Mobile, Alabama, described the primitive hospital conditions in her journal: They are in the hall, on the gallery, and crowded into very small rooms. The foul air from this mass of human beings at first made me giddy and sick, but I soon got over it. We have to walk, and when we give the men any thing kneel, in blood and water; but we think nothing of it at all. Battles. The Civil War came to an end on April 26, 1865, when Confederate General Johnston surrendered his armies in the Carolinas Campaign to Union General Sherman. Several battles are mentioned or depicted in "Gone with the Wind". Atlanta Campaign. The Atlanta Campaign (May–September 1864) took place in northwest Georgia and the area around Atlanta. Confederate General Johnston fights and retreats from Dalton (May 7–13) to Resaca (May 13–15) to Kennesaw Mountain (June 27). Union General Sherman suffers heavy losses to the entrenched Confederate army. Unable to pass through Kennesaw, Sherman swings his men around to the Chattahoochee River where the Confederate army is waiting on the opposite side of the river. Once again, General Sherman flanks the Confederate army, forcing Johnston to retreat to Peachtree Creek (July 20), five miles northeast of Atlanta. March to the Sea. The Savannah Campaign was conducted in Georgia during November and December 1864. President Lincoln's murder. Although Abraham Lincoln is mentioned in the novel 14 times, no reference is made to his assassination on April 14, 1865. Manhood. Ashley Wilkes is the beau ideal of Southern manhood in Scarlet's eyes. A planter by inheritance, Ashley knew the Confederate cause had died. However Ashley's name signifies paleness. His "pallid skin literalizes the idea of Confederate death." Ashley contemplates leaving Georgia for New York City. Had he gone North, he would have joined numerous other ex-Confederate transplants there. Ashley, embittered by war, tells Scarlett he has been "in a state of suspended animation" since the surrender. He feels he is not "shouldering a man's burden" at Tara and believes he is "much less than a man—much less, indeed, than a woman". A "young girl's dream of the Perfect Knight", Ashley is like a young girl himself. With his "poet's eye", Ashley has a "feminine sensitivity". Scarlett is angered by the "slur of effeminacy flung at Ashley" when her father tells her the Wilkes family was "born queer". (Mitchell's use of the word "queer" is for its sexual connotation because queer, in the 1930s, was associated with homosexuality.) Ashley's effeminacy is associated with his appearance, his lack of forcefulness and sexual impotency. He rides, plays poker, and drinks like "proper men", but his heart is not in it, Gerald claims. The embodiment of castration, Ashley wears the head of Medusa on his cravat pin. Scarlett's love interest, Ashley Wilkes, lacks manliness, and her husbands—the "calf-like" Charles Hamilton, and the "old-maid in britches", Frank Kennedy—are unmanly as well. Mitchell is critiquing masculinity in southern society since Reconstruction. Even Rhett Butler, the well-groomed dandy, is effeminate or "gay-coded." Charles, Frank and Ashley represent the impotence of the post-war white South. Its power and influence have been diminished. Scallawag. The word "scallawag" is defined as a loafer, a vagabond, or a rogue. Scallawag had a special meaning after the Civil War as an epithet for a white Southerner who accepted and supported Republican reforms. Mitchell defines scallawags as "Southerners who had turned Republican very profitably." Rhett Butler is accused of being a "damned Scallawag." In addition to scallawags, Mitchell portrays other types of scoundrels in the novel: Yankees, carpetbaggers, Republicans, prostitutes, and overseers. In the early years of the Civil War, Rhett is called a "scoundrel" for his "selfish gains" profiteering as a blockade-runner. As a scallawag, Rhett is despised. He is the "dark, mysterious, and slightly malevolent hero loose in the world". Literary scholars have identified elements of Mitchell's first husband, Berrien "Red" Upshaw, in the character of Rhett. Another sees the image of Italian actor Rudolph Valentino, whom Margaret Mitchell interviewed as a young reporter for "The Atlanta Journal". Fictional hero Rhett Butler has a "swarthy face, flashing teeth and dark alert eyes". He is a "scamp, blackguard, without scruple or honor." Themes. Survival. If "Gone with the Wind" has a theme it is that of survival. What makes some people come through catastrophes and others, apparently just as able, strong, and brave, go under? It happens in every upheaval. Some people survive; others don't. What qualities are in those who fight their way through triumphantly that are lacking in those that go under? I only know that survivors used to call that quality 'gumption.' So I wrote about people who had gumption and people who didn't. — Margaret Mitchell, 1936 Critical reception. Reviews. The sales of Margaret Mitchell's novel in the summer of 1936, as the nation was recovering from the Great Depression and at the virtually unprecedented high price of three dollars, reached about 1 million by the end of December. The book was a bestseller by the time reviews began to appear in national magazines. Herschel Brickell, a critic for the "New York Evening Post", lauded Mitchell for the way she "tosses out the window all the thousands of technical tricks our novelists have been playing with for the past twenty years." Ralph Thompson, a book reviewer for "The New York Times", was critical of the length of the novel, and wrote in June 1936:I happen to feel that the book would have been infinitely better had it been edited down to say, 500 pages, but there speaks the harassed daily reviewer as well as the would-be judicious critic. Very nearly every reader will agree, no doubt, that a more disciplined and less prodigal piece of work would have more nearly done justice to the subject-matter.Some reviewers compared the book to William Thackeray's "Vanity Fair" and Leo Tolstoy's "War and Peace". Mitchell claimed Charles Dickens as an inspiration and called "Gone with the Wind" a "'Victorian' type novel." Helen Keller, whose father had owned slaves and fought as a Confederate captain and who had later supported the NAACP and the ACLU, read the 12-volume Braille edition. The book brought her fond memories of her southern infancy but she also felt sadness comparing that with what she knew about the South. Scholarship: Racial, ethnicity and social issues. "Gone with the Wind" has been criticized for its stereotypical and derogatory portrayal of African Americans in the 19th century South. Former field hands during the early days of Reconstruction are described behaving "as creatures of small intelligence might naturally be expected to do. Like monkeys or small children turned loose among treasured objects whose value is beyond their comprehension, they ran wild—either from perverse pleasure in destruction or simply because of their ignorance." Commenting on this passage of the novel, Jabari Asim, author of "The N Word: Who Can Say It, Who Shouldn't, and Why", says it is "one of the more charitable passages in "Gone With the Wind", Margaret Mitchell hesitated to blame black 'insolence' during Reconstruction solely on 'mean niggers', of which, she said, there were few even in slavery days." Critics say that Mitchell downplayed the violent role of the Ku Klux Klan and their abuse of freedmen. Author Pat Conroy, in his preface to a later edition of the novel, describes Mitchell's portrayal of the Ku Klux Klan as having "the same romanticized role it had in "The Birth of a Nation" and appears to be a benign combination of the Elks Club and a men's equestrian society". Regarding the historical inaccuracies of the novel, historian Richard N. Current points out: No doubt it is indeed unfortunate that "Gone with the Wind" perpetuates many myths about Reconstruction, particularly with respect to blacks. Margaret Mitchell did not originate them and a young novelist can scarcely be faulted for not knowing what the majority of mature, professional historians did not know until many years later. In "Gone with the Wind", Mitchell explores some complexities in racial issues. Scarlett was asked by a Yankee woman for advice on whom to appoint as a nurse for her children; Scarlett suggested a "darky", much to the disgust of the Yankee woman who was seeking an Irish maid, a "Bridget". African Americans and Irish Americans are treated "in precisely the same way" in "Gone with the Wind", writes David O'Connell in his 1996 book, "The Irish Roots of Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind". Ethnic slurs on the Irish and Irish stereotypes pervade the novel, O'Connell claims, and Scarlett is not an exception to the terminology. Irish scholar Geraldine Higgins notes that Jonas Wilkerson labels Scarlett: "you highflying, bogtrotting Irish". Higgins says that, as the Irish American O'Haras were slaveholders and African Americans were held in bondage, the two ethnic groups are not equivalent in the ethnic hierarchy of the novel. The novel has been criticized for promoting plantation values and romanticizing the white supremacy of the antebellum south. Mitchell biographer Marianne Walker, author of "Margaret Mitchell and John Marsh: The Love Story Behind Gone with the Wind", believes that those who attack the book on these grounds have not read it. She said that the popular 1939 film "promotes a false notion of the Old South". Mitchell was not involved in the screenplay or film production. James Loewen, author of "Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong", says this novel is "profoundly racist and profoundly wrong." In 1984, an alderman in Waukegan, Illinois challenged the book's inclusion on the reading list of the Waukegan School District on the grounds of "racism" and "unacceptable language." He objected to the frequent use of the racial slur "nigger." He also objected to several other books: "The Nigger of the 'Narcissus"', "Uncle Tom's Cabin", and "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" for the same reason. Mitchell's use of color in the novel is symbolic and open to interpretation. Red, green, and a variety of hues of each of these colors, are the predominant palette of colors related to Scarlett. The novel has come under intense criticism for alleged racist and white supremacist themes in 2020 following the murder of George Floyd, and the ensuing protests and focus on systemic racism in the United States. Awards and recognition. In 1937, Margaret Mitchell received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for "Gone with the Wind" and the second annual National Book Award from the American Booksellers Association. It is ranked as the second favorite book by American readers, just behind the Bible, according to a 2008 Harris poll. The poll found the novel has its strongest following among women, those aged 44 or more, both Southerners and Midwesterners, both whites and Hispanics, and those who have not attended college. In a 2014 Harris poll, Mitchell's novel ranked again as second, after the Bible. The novel is on the list of best-selling books. As of 2010, more than 30 million copies have been printed in the United States and abroad. More than 24 editions of "Gone with the Wind" have been issued in China. "Time" magazine critics Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo included the novel on their list of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to the present (2005). In 2003, the book was listed at number 21 on the BBC's The Big Read poll of the UK's "best-loved novel." Adaptations. "Gone with the Wind" has been adapted several times for stage and screen: In popular culture. "Gone with the Wind" has appeared in many places and forms in popular culture: Collectibles. On June 30, 1986, the 50th anniversary of the day "Gone with the Wind" went on sale, the U.S. Post Office issued a 1-cent stamp showing an image of Margaret Mitchell. The stamp was designed by Ronald Adair and was part of the U.S. Postal Service's Great Americans series. On September 10, 1998, the U.S. Post Office issued a 32-cent stamp as part of its Celebrate the Century series recalling various important events in the 20th century. The stamp, designed by Howard Paine, displays the book with its original dust jacket, a white Magnolia blossom, and a hilt placed against a background of green velvet. To commemorate the 75th anniversary (2011) of the publication of "Gone with the Wind" in 1936, Scribner published a paperback edition featuring the book's original jacket art. The Windies. The Windies are ardent "Gone with the Wind" fans who follow all the latest news and events surrounding the book and film. They gather periodically in costumes from the film or dressed as Margaret Mitchell. Atlanta, Georgia is their meeting place. Legacy. One story of the legacy of "Gone with the Wind" is that people worldwide incorrectly think it was the "true story" of the Old South and how it was changed by the American Civil War and Reconstruction. The film adaptation of the novel "amplified this effect." The plantation legend was "burned" into the mind of the public through Mitchell's vivid prose. Moreover, her fictional account of the war and its aftermath has influenced how the world has viewed the city of Atlanta for successive generations. Some readers of the novel have seen the film first and read the novel afterward. One difference between the film and the novel is the staircase scene, in which Rhett carries Scarlett up the stairs. In the film, Scarlett weakly struggles and does not scream as Rhett starts up the stairs. In the novel, "he hurt her and she cried out, muffled, frightened." Earlier in the novel, in an intended rape at Shantytown (Chapter 44), Scarlett is attacked by a black man who rips open her dress while a white man grabs hold of the horse's bridle. She is rescued by another black man, Big Sam. In the film, she is attacked by a white man, while a black man grabs the horse's bridle. The Library of Congress began a multiyear "Celebration of the Book" in July 2012 with an exhibition on "Books That Shaped America", and an initial list of 88 books by American authors that have influenced American lives. "Gone with the Wind" was included in the Library's list. Librarian of Congress, James H. Billington said: This list is a starting point. It is not a register of the 'best' American books – although many of them fit that description. Rather, the list is intended to spark a national conversation on books written by Americans that have influenced our lives, whether they appear on this initial list or not. Among books on the list considered to be the Great American Novel were "Moby-Dick", "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn", "The Great Gatsby", "The Grapes of Wrath", "The Catcher in the Rye", "Invisible Man", and "To Kill a Mockingbird". Throughout the world, the novel appeals due to its universal themes: war, love, death, racial conflict, class, gender and generation, which speak especially to women. In North Korea, readers relate to the novel's theme of survival, finding it to be "the most compelling message of the novel". Margaret Mitchell's personal collection of nearly 70 foreign language translations of her novel was given to the Atlanta Public Library after her death. On August 16, 2012, the Archdiocese of Atlanta announced that it had been bequeathed a 50% stake in the trademarks and literary rights to "Gone With the Wind" from the estate of Margaret Mitchell's deceased nephew, Joseph Mitchell. Margaret Mitchell had separated from the Catholic Church. However, one of Mitchell's biographers, Darden Asbury Pyron, stated that Margaret Mitchell had "an intense relationship" with her mother, who was a Roman Catholic. Publication history. Original manuscript. Although some of Mitchell's papers and documents related to the writing of "Gone with the Wind" were burned after her death, many documents, including assorted draft chapters, were preserved. The last four chapters of the novel are held by the Pequot Library of Southport, Connecticut. Publication and reprintings (1936-USA). The first printing of 10,000 copies contains the original publication date: "Published May, 1936". After the book was chosen as the Book-of-the-Month's selection for July, the publication was delayed until June 30. The second printing of 25,000 copies (and subsequent printings) contains the release date: "Published June, 1936." The third printing of 15,000 copies was made in June 1936. Additionally, 50,000 copies were printed for the Book-of-the-Month Club July selection. "Gone with the Wind" was officially released to the American public on June 30, 1936. Sequels and prequels. Although Mitchell refused to write a sequel to "Gone with the Wind", Mitchell's estate authorized Alexandra Ripley to write a sequel, which was titled "Scarlett". The book was subsequently adapted into a television mini-series in 1994. A second sequel was authorized by Mitchell's estate titled "Rhett Butler's People", by Donald McCaig. The novel parallels "Gone with the Wind" from Rhett Butler's perspective. In 2010, Mitchell's estate authorized McCaig to write a prequel, which follows the life of the house servant Mammy, whom McCaig names "Ruth". The novel, "Ruth's Journey", was released in 2014. The copyright holders of "Gone with the Wind" attempted to suppress publication of "The Wind Done Gone" by Alice Randall, which retold the story from the perspective of the slaves. A federal appeals court denied the plaintiffs an injunction ("Suntrust v. Houghton Mifflin") against publication on the basis that the book was a parody and therefore protected by the First Amendment. The parties subsequently settled out of court and the book went on to become a "New York Times" Best Seller. A book sequel unauthorized by the copyright holders, "The Winds of Tara" by Katherine Pinotti, was blocked from publication in the United States. The novel was republished in Australia, avoiding U.S. copyright restrictions. Away from copyright lawsuits, Internet fan fiction has proved to be a fertile medium for sequels (some of them book-length), parodies, and rewritings of "Gone with the Wind." Numerous unauthorized sequels to "Gone with the Wind" have been published in Russia, mostly under the pseudonym Yuliya Hilpatrik, a cover for a consortium of writers. "The New York Times" states that most of these have a "Slavic" flavor. Several sequels were written in Hungarian under the pseudonym Audrey D. Milland or Audrey Dee Milland, by at least four different authors (who are named in the colophon as translators to make the book seem a translation from the English original, a procedure common in the 1990s but prohibited by law since then). The first one picks up where Ripley's "Scarlett" ended, the next one is about Scarlett's daughter Cat. Other books include a prequel trilogy about Scarlett's grandmother Solange and a three-part miniseries of a supposed illegitimate daughter of Carreen. Copyright status. "Gone with the Wind" has been in the public domain in Australia since 1999 (50 years after Margaret Mitchell's death). On 1 January 2020, the book entered the public domain in the European Union (70 years after the author's death). Under an extension of copyright law, "Gone with the Wind" will not enter the public domain in the United States until 2031, however.

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The Confessions of Nat Turner The Confessions of Nat Turner is a 1967 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by American writer William Styron. Presented as a first-person narrative by historical figure Nat Turner, the novel concerns the slave revolt in Virginia in 1831. It is based on "The Confessions of Nat Turner: The Leader of the Late Insurrection in Southampton, Virginia", a first-hand account of Turner's confessions published by a local lawyer, Thomas Ruffin Gray, in 1831. "Time Magazine" included the novel in its "TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005". Historical background. The novel is based on an extant document, the "confession" of Turner to the white lawyer Thomas Ruffin Gray. In the historical confessions, Turner claims to have been divinely inspired, charged with a mission from God to lead a slave uprising and destroy the white race. Styron's ambitious novel attempts to imagine the character of Nat Turner; it does not purport to describe accurately or authoritatively the events as they occurred. Some historians consider Gray's account of Turner's "confessions" to be told with prejudice, and recently one writer has alleged that Gray's account is itself a fabrication. Plot summary. The time is November, 1831. African American slave Nat Turner sits in a Virginia jail awaiting execution for his crimes. Nat led a slave rebellion which ended in the deaths of dozens of white people as well as many of his own closest friends. Thomas Gray, a smug, oily prosecuting attorney, urges Nat to "confess" his crimes and make peace with God. Nat begins to think back on his past life and tells the novel in a series of flashbacks. Nat's first master was Samuel Turner, a wealthy Virginia aristocrat who believed in educating his slaves. Nat learned to read and write, and also became a skilled carpenter. Unfortunately, when he was still a child Nat's mother was brutally raped by an Irish overseer while the master was away. This traumatic experience gives Nat both a burning hatred of white people and a secret revulsion from women's bodies and the sexual act. Samuel Turner has vaguely promised Nat his freedom, but through a series of misunderstandings Nat is sold instead to an impoverished preacher named Reverend Eppes. Eppes is a filthy, drooling homosexual who is obsessed with young boys, and he is determined to make Nat "pleasure" him at the earliest opportunity. Though Nat is not especially interested in young women at this point, he finds Eppes physically distasteful and shies away from physical contact. Discouraged, Eppes soon sells young Nat to a pair of cruel redneck farmers who brutally whip the frightened, timid slave and treat him like an animal. This intensifies his growing hostility towards whites. After bouncing around different masters for a number of years, Nat finally ends up as the property of a decent, hard-working farmer named Travis. Travis allows Nat to do skilled work as a carpenter and to read his Bible and preach to other slaves. During his religious fasts deep in the deserted woods, Nat begins to have strange visions of black and white angels fighting in the sky. Gradually he comes to believe these visions mean he is to lead the black race in a holy war to destroy all whites. Complications arise, however, when Nat meets Margaret Whitehead, the beautiful, vivacious daughter of a wealthy widow who lives nearby. Though her family owns many slaves, high-spirited Margaret opposes slavery and openly admires Nat's preaching. Gradually the two of them become friends, though Nat is haunted by the fear that if his plans succeed lovely Margaret must die. With several loyal slaves behind him, Nat finally launches his rebellion in late August 1831. This is a time when most wealthy whites are away on vacation, which will make it easier for the slaves to seize weapons and attack the nearby town of Jerusalem. From the very beginning, however, Nat's rebellion goes all wrong. His recruits get drunk and waste precious time plundering and raping. A crazed, axe-wielding, sex-obsessed slave named Will begins ridiculing Nat's leadership and attempting to seize control of the tiny slave army. And Nat himself, unexpectedly sickened by the sight of blood and the screams of his white victims, begins to doubt both his own mission and God's plan for his life. The final crisis occurs as the slaves storm the Whitehead plantation. In a tragic twist, Margaret and her sisters have not gone away on vacation after all. Filled with unreasoning hatred, Will the axe-wielding maniac slays all the white women but Margaret, openly taunting Nat and daring him to prove his black manhood to the rest of the recruits. With a heavy heart, Nat grabs his sword and chases Margaret into a nearby field, where he slays her with great reluctance. As the breath leaves her body, the pure young maiden sighs her forgiveness for her unwilling executioner. Back in the jail cell, lawyer Gray smugly announces that the hangman is ready to punish Nat for his crimes. As he concludes their final interview, he asks the failed black leader if he has any regrets for having caused so much suffering and death. Literary significance and criticism. Despite defenses by notable African-American authors Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin, the novel was criticised by some black Americans. Styron's portrayal of a legendary black resistance leader as a reluctant warrior who bumbles every attack and fumbles his way to total defeat generated enormous resentment. Moreover, different readers of the novel, depending on their political perspective, hold differing views of their interpretation of characters and events in the novels. " No less offensive to many black readers was the narrator's flattering portrayal of many of the novel's slaveowners, such as the "saintly" Samuel Turner. The character of Margaret Whitehead, in particular, seemed to enrage black readers, as she is permitted to flirt with Nat and chatter on endlessly about her love for poor downtrodden blacks while remaining sunnily unaware of her own slaveowning status. For much of the novel Nat sighs over the slim, virginal blonde like a love-struck adolescent, while showing little or no interest in women of his own race." Issues of class divided readers as well. While the white slaveowners in the novel, especially the wealthy ones, are represented as generous, courteous, and basically decent, poor whites are held up to ridicule as simpletons and deviants. Turner and his supporters (particularly the scene-stealing, scenery-chewing madman Will, who many readers saw as a thinly disguised version of black rock and roll pioneer Little Richard) are caricatured as disturbed, monstrous figures. Nat and his rival Will are both continually shown fantasizing about sexually assaulting white women. Critics took issue with Styron using the "myth of the black rapist", as portraying black men as prone to sexual violence against white women. Suspected sexual assault was a longstanding racist stereotype used as rhetorical justification for lynching black men. In order to address these concerns, ten black intellectuals wrote essays criticizing the work, collected in "William Styron's Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond" (1968). Elsewhere, historian Eugene D. Genovese defended Styron's right to imagine Turner as a fictional character. Despite protests against the novel, Styron's work won critical acclaim and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1968. In "Slaughterhouse-Five", Kurt Vonnegut has Billy Pilgrim in a Manhattan radio studio amongst a group of literary critics there "to discuss whether the novel was dead or not." "One of them said that it would be a fine time to bury the novel now that a Virginian, one hundred years after Appomattox, had written "Uncle Tom's Cabin" – "a reference to Styron's novel. Bill Clinton has cited the novel as one of his favorite books.

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A Mercy A Mercy is Toni Morrison's ninth novel. It was published in 2008. "A Mercy" reveals what lies beneath the surface of slavery in early America. It is both the story of mothers and daughters and the story of a primitive America. It made the "New York Times Book Review" list of "10 Best Books of 2008" as chosen by the paper's editors. In Fall 2010 it was chosen for the One Book, One Chicago program. Synopsis. Florens, a slave, lives and works on Jacob Vaark's rural New York farm. Lina, a Native American and fellow laborer on the Vaark farm, relates in a parallel narrative how she became one of a handful of survivors of a smallpox plague that destroyed her tribe. Vaark's wife Rebekka describes leaving England on a ship for the new world to be married to a man she has never seen. The deaths of their subsequent children are devastating, and Vaark accepts a young Florens from a debtor in the hopes that this new addition to the farm will help alleviate Rebekka's loneliness. Vaark, himself an orphan and poorhouse survivor, describes his journeys from New York to Maryland and Virginia, commenting on the role of religion in the culture of the different colonies, along with their attitudes toward slavery. All these characters are bereft of their roots, struggling to survive in a new and alien environment filled with danger and disease. When smallpox threatens Rebekka's life, Florens, now 16, is sent to find a black freedman who has some knowledge of herbal medicines. Her journey is dangerous, ultimately proving to be the turning point in her life. Morrison examines the roots of racism going back to slavery's earliest days, providing glimpses of the various religious practices of the time, and showing the relationship between men and women in early America that often ended in female victimization. They are "of and for men", people who "never shape the world, The world shapes us". As the women journey toward self-enlightenment, Morrison often describes their progress in Biblical cadences, and by the end of this novel, the reader understands the significance of the title, "a mercy".

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Fire on the Mountain (Bisson novel) Fire on the Mountain is a 1988 novel by the American author Terry Bisson. It is an alternate history describing the world as it would have been had John Brown succeeded in his raid on Harper's Ferry and touched off a slave rebellion in 1859, as he intended. Plot. The difference from actual history starts with the participation of Harriet Tubman in Brown's uprising in 1859; her sound tactical and strategic advice helps Brown avoid mistakes which in real history led to his downfall. As a result, instead of the American Civil War, the U.S. faces a full-scale slave revolt throughout the South helped by a handful of white sympathizers and various European revolutionaries such as Giuseppe Garibaldi, and an invasion by Mexico, which seeks to regain the territory it lost in 1848. After a great deal of bloody fighting and an increasing dissatisfaction in the North which is required to send troops to fight the rebellious slaves, the blacks succeed in emancipating themselves and create a republic in the Deep South, led by Tubman and Frederick Douglass. (Brown himself did not survive to see the victory of what he started.) Abraham Lincoln – a Whig politician who never got to be President – tries to start a war to bring back the secessionist black states into the Union, but he fails and is himself killed in that war. Blacks remember him as their archenemy. Later, the black state (named "Nova Africa") becomes Socialist, touching off a whole string of revolutions and civil wars in Europe. The Paris Commune wins out in 1871 instead of being crushed by the French Third Republic, Ireland breaks away from British rule in the 1880s, and the Russian Revolution is just one of many similar revolutions in different countries. Finally Socialism also wins out in the rump U.S., following a revolutionary outbreak in Chicago. Socialism works out as predicted by the German philosopher Karl Marx, bringing happiness and prosperity to all of humanity. (Marx himself is mentioned in the book as an enthusiastic supporter of the rebellious slaves, though he does not personally come to America to help them.) The book has two levels. The overt plot takes place in 1959, in a Utopian Socialist world far in advance of ours in all ways. To mark the centennial of Brown's raid, black astronauts lead a manned landing on Mars. However, the story of the protagonist, a young black woman grieving the death of her husband on an earlier Mars mission, is mainly the framework for excerpts from the vivid diaries of two people who lived through the stirring events of 1859 and its aftermath – her ancestor, who was then a young black slave, and a white Virginian doctor who sympathized with the rebellion. In this world, an alternate history book is published called "John Brown's Body", which describes a world in which Brown failed and was executed, the slaves were emancipated by Lincoln rather than by themselves after a war between two white factions, and capitalism survived as a political and economic system. It is considered a dystopia, describing a horrible world in all ways inferior to the one which the people in the book know. Reception. David Pringle rated "Fire on the Mountain" three stars out of four and described the novel as "a skilful evocation of an unlikely alternate history".

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Property (novel) Property is a 2003 novel by Valerie Martin, and was the winner of the 2003 Orange Prize. In 2012, "The Observer" named "Property" as one of "The 10 best historical novels". Plot summary. The book is set on a sugar plantation near New Orleans in 1828, and tells the story of Manon Gaudet, the wife of the plantation's owner, and Sarah, the slave Manon was given as a wedding present and who she has brought with her from the city. The story is centred on Manon and her resentment of Sarah. Sarah is not only Manon's slave, but also her husband's sex slave. The private drama of the estate is played out against the backdrop of civil unrest and slave rebellion.

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Mandingo (novel) Mandingo is a novel by Kyle Onstott, published in 1957. The book is set in the 1830s in the antebellum South primarily around Falconhurst, a fictional plantation in Alabama owned by the planter Warren Maxwell. The narrative centers on Maxwell, his son Hammond, and the Mandingo slave Ganymede, or Mede. "Mandingo" is a tale of cruelty toward the black people of that time and place, detailing the overwhelmingly dehumanizing behavior meted out to the slaves, as well as vicious fights, poisoning, and violent death. The novel was made into a film of the same name in 1975. Author. Kyle Elihu Onstott was born on January 12, 1887, in Du Quoin, Illinois. Although he never had a steady job, Onstott was from an affluent family, and, living with his widowed mother in California in the early 1900s, was able to pursue his main hobby, that of a dog breeder and judge in regional dog shows, in lieu of any professional calling. Onstott was a lifelong bachelor, but at age 40, he chose to adopt a 23-year-old college student, Philip, who had lost his own parents. Philip eventually married a woman named Vicky and the two remained close to Onstott for the rest of his life. Onstott dedicated "Mandingo" to Philip and Vicky. Onstott began writing "Mandingo" when he was 65 years old. He based some of the events in the novel on "bizarre legends" he heard while growing up: tales of slave breeding and sadistic abuse of slaves. Having collaborated with his adopted son on a book about dog breeding, he decided to write a book that would make him rich. "Utilizing his [adopted] son's anthropology research on West Africa, he handwrote "Mandingo" and his son served as editor. Denlinger's, a small Virginia publisher, released it and it became a national sensation." He was invited to write an article for "True: The Man's Magazine" in 1959 about the horrors of slavery. Publication. "Mandingo" was first published in 1957 in hardcover. It was 659 pages long and sold around 2.7 million copies. Subsequent paperback editions whittled the novel down to 423 pages. The novel sold a total of 5 million copies in the United States. "Mandingo" is the only novel of the Falconhurst series that Onstott wrote, but he edited the next three novels in the series. All of the sequels were penned by either Lance Horner or Henry Whittington (Ashley Carter). Plot. "Mandingo" takes place in 1832 on the fictional plantation Falconhurst, located close to Tombigbee River near Benson, Alabama. Warren Maxwell is the elderly and infirm owner of Falconhurst and he lives there with his 19-year-old son, Hammond. Falconhurst is a slave-breeding plantation where slaves are encouraged to mate and produce children ("suckers"). Because of the nature of the plantation, the slaves are well fed, not overworked, and rarely punished in a brutal manner. However, the slaves are treated as animals to be utilized as the Maxwells wish. Warren Maxwell, for example, sleeps with his feet against a naked slave to drain his rheumatism. Although Hammond keeps a "bed-wench" for sexual satisfaction, his father wishes him to marry and produce a pure white heir. Hammond is skeptical and is not sexually attracted to white women. Despite his misgivings, he travels to his Cousin Beatrix's plantation, Crowfoot, and there meets his 16-year-old cousin, Blanche. He asks Blanche's father, Major Woodford, permission to marry her within four hours of meeting her. After receiving the Major's permission, Hammond and Charles Woodford, Blanche's brother, travel to the Coign plantation where Hammond purchases a "fightin' nigger", Ganymede (aka Mede), and a young, female slave named Ellen. Later, Hammond reveals his love for Ellen, despite his intentions to wed Blanche. Back at Falconhurst, Hammond and Warren mate Mede, a pure Mandingo slave, with Big Pearl, another Mandingo slave. It turns out that Mede and Big Pearl are brother and sister, but no one shows concern over the incestuous act. Charles and Hammond take Mede to a bar to fight with other slaves. Hammond plans to use his winnings to buy a diamond ring for Blanche. When it is Mede's turn to fight, he easily beats the other slave, Cudjo, in 20 seconds and neither man is seriously injured. Mede is clearly an extremely strong and powerful man. Hammond sets off with his "body nigger", Omega (Meg), to the Crowfoot plantation to wed Blanche. Once he arrives at Crowfoot, Hammond learns that Charles never returned to the plantation, taking with him $2,500 that Hammond loaned Major Woodford and the diamond ring for Blanche. Despite the confusion, the Major consents to let Blanche and Hammond marry. They do so that evening, with Dick Woodford (Blanche's brother, a preacher) performing the ceremony. On their wedding night, Hammond leaves his and Blanche's room in the middle of the night. Hammond believes that Blanche is not a virgin. Although she denies having previous sex partners, it turns out that Blanche lost her virginity to her brother, Charles, at age 13. She does not reveal this fact to Hammond. After a few months at Falconhurst, Blanche is bored and dissatisfied. She begins drinking heavily and is jealous of Hammond's continuing preference for his "bed wench", Ellen, who is now pregnant. Soon, Blanche is also pregnant. Hammond and Warren take Mede to another slave fight, where Mede is nearly beaten by a stronger slave, Topaz, but ends up killing Topaz by biting through his jugular vein. Later, Hammond travels again, this time to Natchez, Mississippi, to sell a coffle of slaves. When Blanche reveals her fear that Hammond will sleep around with "white whores", Hammond bluntly states, "White ladies make me puke." While Hammond is away, Blanche calls Ellen to her room and whips her. Ellen miscarries and it is unclear whether her miscarriage is caused by the whipping. While in Mississippi, Hammond sells one of his male slaves to a German woman, who obviously wants the slave for sex. When the other men in the group explain this to Hammond, he is physically repulsed and denies that a white woman would ever willingly sleep with a black slave. Blanche has her baby, a girl, Sophy. Despite giving birth and Ellen's miscarriage, Blanche's jealousy of Ellen continues to grow. When Hammond travels to an estate auction and secretly takes Ellen along, Blanche becomes apoplectic. She orders Mede to come to her room and have sex with her. Before he leaves, she forcibly pierces Mede's ears with a pair of earrings Hammond gave her. This is a particularly poignant act of retaliation against Hammond because he bought an identical pair of earrings for Ellen. Blanche becomes pregnant again and does not know if the baby is Mede's or Hammond's. She realizes it is too late to accuse Mede of rape. In the final chapter of the book she gives birth and the child is dark-skinned and looks like Mede. Blanche's mother, visiting Falconhurst, kills the baby by crushing its skull. When Hammond finds out, he calmly asks the doctor for some poison, mixes it in a hot toddy, and gives it to Blanche, killing her. He then boils water in a giant kettle and forces Mede to get in. When Mede resists, he uses a pitchfork to stab the slave to death and then orders the other slaves to keep the fire going, thus turning Mede into a soup. He buries Blanche and pours Mede's remains onto her grave. The novel ends with Hammond and Warren discussing Hammond's plans to leave Falconhurst and forge a new life out west. Themes. Slave breeding. In "Slave Breeding: Sex, Violence, and Memory in African American History", Gregory Smithers traces the history of coercive reproductive and sexual practices in the Antebellum South, as well as reactions and denials of the practice of slave breeding by historians throughout the twentieth century. Smithers goes into great detail about "Mandingo", a novel that is explicitly about slave breeding. In the novel, Warren Maxwell, owner of the Falconhurst plantation, reiterates time and again that cotton is not a reliable crop and the real money is in breeding "niggers". Over the course of the novel, four female slaves give birth (and another miscarries), and in each instance the Maxwells give the slaves a dollar and a new dress. The Maxwells, particularly the elder Warren, wax poetic about slave breeding, arguing that while slaves with white (or "human" as the Maxwells put it in the novel) blood are smarter and better looking, purebred Mandingos are among the strongest and most submissive slaves. While Hammond Maxwell is more interested in satisfying his own sexual appetites and preparing his prize slave, Mede, for fights, Warren Maxwell spends much time planning how to mate various slaves to produce the best "suckers". There is much discussion over the virility of male slaves, such as when the cook, Lucretia Borgia, and Warren Maxwell have a discussion about who the father of her baby is: "So that Napoleon boy I give you had a nigger in him after all? A long time comin' out," commented Maxwell. "I reckons I didn't git it from 'Poleon. That squirt no good. This baby is Memnon's, I figures. Masta Ham tole me to try Memnon agin, and I been pesterin' with him fer about a month." Such discussions of intimate details of slave bodies, genitals, and sexuality are rampant throughout the novel, and the reader becomes aware that for a slave at Falconhurst, nothing is private or sacred—not even sexual intimacy. Kyle Onstott's lifelong interest in dog breeding most certainly affected the theme of breeding slaves and slave typologies in "Mandingo". Onstott even comments on this in a "Newsweek" article about "Mandingo": "I've always felt that the human race could be regenerated by selective breeding. But "Mandingo" isn't the sort of thing I mean." Sexual relations between white men and black women. In "Mandingo", it is expected and assumed that white men will sleep with their own and others' female slaves. In addition to keeping a "bed wench" at home, when Hammond Maxwell travels to various locations, his hosts usually offer a slave to sleep with, along with dinner and a bed. When he visits the Woodfords and meets his future wife, Blanche, Hammond shares a bed with Charles Woodford and is given a slave to have sex with. While Hammond kicks the slave, Sukey, out of bed when he's done with her, he is shocked that Charles and his "bed wench", Katy, have sex—including kissing on the mouth—right next to him. Later, when Charles and Hammond travel to the Coign plantation, the owner, Mr. Wilson, gives Hammond a slave, Ellen, to sleep with. Hammond ends up falling in love and buying Ellen from Wilson. The white men in "Mandingo" take for granted their entitlement to sleep with female slaves, and offering a "bed wench" to a (male) guest is part of the code of southern hospitality. However, there are limits to the actions and feelings that are acceptable between black women and white men. As pointed out above, Hammond is shocked when he sees Charles and Katy kiss on the lips: "It was disgust, bordering upon nausea, that a white man should assume an amatory equality with a Negro wench. It was beneath the dignity of his race—somehow bestial. A wench was an object for a white man's use when he should need her, not a goal of his affections, to be commanded and not to be wheedled." Later, when Hammond is married to Blanche, yet still sleeping with Ellen almost every night, Blanche is upset not because her husband sleeps with female slaves, but because he sleeps with one female slave: "Her husband's philandering with his wenches she would not have resented, but his dalliance with a single wench aroused her ire." Blanche's anger at Hammond and jealousy of Ellen grow throughout the final third of the book until she retaliates by sleeping with the Mandingo slave, Mede. But unlike a white man having sex with a black woman, a white woman voluntarily having sex with a black man is so beyond the parameters of acceptable behavior, it can only be punished by death. Sexual relations between white women and black men. The cultural taboo of white women having sex with black male slaves in "Mandingo" is filtered through the mind and experiences of Hammond Maxwell. The issue is not brought up until chapter 35, when Hammond sells a male slave to a German woman. The men Hammond is with understand and are amused by the fact that the woman is obviously buying the slave for sex. Hammond does not realize this at first and when he is made aware of it, his first instinct is denial: "'You gen'lemen wrong,' said Hammond. 'She white, an' ain't no white lady goin' to pester with no nigger buck. You wrong.'" When he comes to accept the obvious, he becomes physically ill: "He lay awake, obsessed and horrified by the fantasy of the German woman in the black man's arms." Hammond's repulsion foreshadows his own fate: his wife sleeping with and bearing the child of his own prize "nigger buck". After Blanche sleeps with Mede, she pierces his ears with the earrings Hammond got for her (of which there was an identical pair for Ellen) as a way to "mark" Mede as hers and also retaliate at Hammond. Hammond sees Mede wearing the earrings as Blanche's silly form of revenge and it amuses him: "...but that there was more to the story never entered his imagination. That his wife, a white woman, should have willing carnal commerce with a Negro...was literally unthinkable, and Hammond did not think it." When the evidence of Blanche's affair comes forth in the form of a black baby, Hammond immediately asks the doctor for poison to kill Blanche. Although he certainly does not announce his intentions, both the doctor and his father know he is going to murder Blanche and neither one stops him because "who could blame the young husband?" The calmness with which Hammond poisons Blanche and then gruesomely murders Mede by boiling him alive in a kettle reveals that, at least in the world of "Mandingo", for a white lady to sleep with a black man was beyond taboo; it was a crime against nature so ghastly that immediate death for both parties was the only possible consequence. "There ain't no other way" explains Hammond to Warren. Earl Bargainnier points out that the trope of the sexually insatiable and adulterous white woman is very common in all the Falconhurst novels, not just "Mandingo", and that these white female characters have an intense lust for black men. Bargainnier explains, "These unattractive representations of southern white women as sexually insatiable and totally unfaithful...are also meant to destroy the earlier image of the chaste and delicate plantation belle of Thomas Nelson Page and numerous other authors of moonlight and magnolias fiction." Tim A. Ryan echoes this statement, writing, "Kyle Onstott's sensationalist "Mandingo" (1957) turns the myth of Tara on its head with unashamed vulgarity." And the myth extended beyond literature to real life beliefs about the Antebellum South. Smithers writes that "Two of the most enduring fictions to emerge in Lost Cause mythology were the trope of the chivalrous white southern male and the dutiful (and asexual) white woman." That Onstott so thoroughly skewered these beloved beliefs of those who glamorized the Antebellum South shows how radical a novel "Mandingo" was, despite its flaws. Critical reactions. Although "Mandingo" was a national and international best-seller, selling 5 million copies nationwide, critical opinions about the novel were—and continue to be—mixed. While black novelist Richard Wright praised "Mandingo" as "a remarkable book based on slave period documents", other critics have deemed the book sensationalist and offensive. Van Deburg writes that "None of the three contributors to the [Falconhurst] series could be considered knowledgeable about the black experience" and argued that "The Falconhurst novels reveled in white sexual exploitation of black slaves." Van Deburg's use of the word "reveled" suggests that the authors of the Falconhurst series wrote mainly to titillate the audience rather than to criticize the culture of American slavery. Seidel writes off the character of Blanche as a nymphomaniac without considering the character's complexities. In a 1967 "New York Times" article about American books published in France, Jacques Cabau refers to "Mandingo" as "a sort of Uncle Sade's Cabin that reflects less on racism than on its readers' perversion." Eliot Fremont-Smith, a "New York Times" critic, mocked the Falconhurst series by using them as a litmus test for other "bad" fiction: "I am compelled to name the absolute worst, most regurgitory new-and-advertised book that I've read in 1975, the one most deserving of the Kyle Onstott Memorial Award..." Such critical reactions show a disgust at the atrocities portrayed in Onstott's novel. However, Paul Talbot points out that some contemporary reviews accepted the novel as shocking, yet truthful. He quotes Earl Conrad of "The Negro Press": ""Mandingo" has aroused in me a wild enthusiasm. It is just about the most sensational, yet the truest book I have ever read..." He quotes John Henry Faulk, a TV humorist who praised "Mandingo" as "...one of the most compellingly powerful novels I have ever read." Nearly all critics were quick to point out the "morbid, revolting, interesting, sadistic..." nature of the content while also accepting Onstott's vision of the Antebellum South as accurate: "...it carries with it the power of absolute conviction, and this quality may demand that we revise our notions of American history, for it confounds us with the evils of our past." It seems that whatever opinion critics had of "Mandingo", they could not deny its emotional impact on readers and its challenge to the romanticization of the Antebellum South. Legacy. Adaptations. A play based on the novel and written by Jack Kirkland opened at the Lyceum Theater in New York in May, 1961, with Franchot Tone and Dennis Hopper in the cast; it ran for only eight performances. The novel and play were the basis for the 1975 Paramount Pictures film "Mandingo". Literary sequels and prequels. "Mandingo" was followed by several sequels over the next three decades, some of which were co-written by Onstott with Lance Horner and in later years written by Harry Whittington under the pseudonym "Ashley Carter". In order by publication date: In order of internal series chronology:

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Isle of Canes Isle of Canes (), a novel by Elizabeth Shown Mills, follows an African family from its importation and enslavement in 1735 through four generations of freedom in Creole Louisiana to its re-subjugation by Jim Crow at the close of the nineteenth century. Mills explores the family's "struggle to find a place in [a] tightly defined world of black and white" — a world made more complex by the larger struggle of Louisiana's native "ancien regime" to preserve its culture amid the Anglo-Protestant "invasion" that followed the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 and the resulting battle for political and social hegemony. "Isle's" central theme is the ambiguous lives of those who escaped colonial slavery only to find they could not survive as free without complicity in the slave regime. The novel's subject-family is one that has been both romanticized and excoriated by journalists, academics, descendants, and current websites over the past half-century. "Isle's" interpretation of their controversial role is based heavily on the author's original research across three decades in the archives of six nations, and actual documents are interspersed throughout the novel. The author's research began in 1972 when she was employed by a preservation society to document the history of one Isle landmark, Melrose Plantation. Critical assessments of "Isle of Canes" focus on its upturning of stereotypes. "Contemporary Lit" describes the focus as ""Gone with the Wind" from a vastly different, more important perspective ... not that of the plantation owner or the poor white ... but "homme de couleur libre" and slave ... capturing the agonizing decisions which tore families and communities apart." "Historical Novels Review" similarly observes, "The Metoyers, a historical family both black and white and yet neither, challenge all perceptions of racial boundaries. You may never look at American History the same way again." The Isle community is also the focus in Lalita Tademy's Oprah Book Club pick, "Cane River". Mills's "Isle" explores the colonial roots of the community and the experience of slaves who achieved freedom prior to the onset of Louisiana's Creole-Anglo conflict. Tademy's story, whose earliest slave generations are based upon research by Mills and her daughter, portrays the mid-nineteenth– and early-twentieth-century experiences of the community's slave families who envied, respected, and resented the free status of the Isle's "Creoles de couleur libre"—some of whose blood they shared. A third, much older novel, Lyle Saxon's "Children of Strangers," depicts the state of servitude into which the Islanders were subjected by the early twentieth-century. Saxon's era was one in which the chatelaine of the family's last remaining manor house (Melrose Plantation, a National Historic Landmark since 1976) was an Anglo patroness of the arts, who encouraged Saxon to visit and "observe" the community first hand. Saxon's portrayal captures the mindset of that era's white population, who vacillated between economic exploitation of the Islanders, sexual attraction to their women, and a paternalistic view of the multiracial Creoles as "simple people, but our people." Historians struggle to understand the complexities of the Peculiar Institution—particularly the motivation that compelled a significant number of freed American slaves to purchase other humans once free to do so. Edward P. Jones lays out one psychological path in "The Known World" creating a fictional anti-hero, the Black Virginian Henry Townsend, who is consumed by his self-centered ambition. "Isle of Canes" reconstructs the world of an actual family to define a radically different but equally uncomfortable trajectory by which more than a few ex-slaves survived a status many historians consider "neither slave nor free." Major characters. Generation 1. François and Fanny, the African artisan and chieftain's daughter, captured into slavery and brought to the wilds of Louisiana in 1735. He accepted their fate and insisted that she accept it, too. Generation 2. Coincoin "ditte" Marie Thérèse Metoyer, who swore over the dead bodies of her parents that one day their family would be free, rich, and proud. She kept her oath. Generation 3. Sieur Nicolas Augustin Metoyer, f.m.c., half-African and half-French, who hacked a cane brake from the wilderness then ruled over the Isle of Canes as patriarch of a legendary colony of "creoles de couleur." They lived in pillared homes, yet toiled beside the 500 slaves who tilled their 18,000 acres (73 km²). Generation 4. Perine (Mme. François Gassion) Metoyer Metoyer Dupré, who was born to riches but aged in shame. She never forgot the heritage of her family or the brutality that destroyed it. Through the persecutions of Louisiana's Creole-Anglo conflicts and Reconstruction-era Jim Crow, hers was a different vow: Never would she allow her family to forget who they were until they could reclaim their Isle. She, too, kept her promise.

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Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (or, as it is known in more recent editions, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) is a novel by American author Mark Twain, which was first published in the United Kingdom in December 1884 and in the United States in February 1885. Commonly named among the Great American Novels, the work is among the first in major American literature to be written throughout in vernacular English, characterized by local color regionalism. It is told in the first person by Huckleberry "Huck" Finn, the narrator of two other Twain novels ("Tom Sawyer Abroad" and "Tom Sawyer, Detective") and a friend of Tom Sawyer. It is a direct sequel to "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer". The book is noted for its colorful description of people and places along the Mississippi River. Set in a Southern antebellum society that had ceased to exist over 20 years before the work was published, "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" is an often scathing satire on entrenched attitudes, particularly racism. Perennially popular with readers, "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" has also been the continued object of study by literary critics since its publication. The book was widely criticized upon release because of its extensive use of coarse language. Throughout the 20th century, and despite arguments that the protagonist and the tenor of the book are anti-racist, criticism of the book continued due to both its perceived use of racial stereotypes and its frequent use of the racial slur "nigger". Characters. In order of appearance: Plot summary. In Missouri. The story begins in fictional St. Petersburg, Missouri (based on the actual town of Hannibal, Missouri), on the shore of the Mississippi River "forty to fifty years ago" (the novel having been published in 1884). Huckleberry "Huck" Finn (the protagonist and first-person narrator) and his friend, Thomas "Tom" Sawyer, have each come into a considerable sum of money as a result of their earlier adventures (detailed in "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer"). Huck explains how he is placed under the guardianship of the Widow Douglas, who, together with her stringent sister, Miss Watson, are attempting to "sivilize" him and teach him religion. Huck finds civilized life confining. His spirits are raised when Tom Sawyer helps him to slip past Miss Watson's slave, Jim, so he can meet up with Tom's gang of self-proclaimed "robbers". Just as the gang's activities begin to bore Huck, his shiftless father, "Pap", an abusive alcoholic, suddenly reappears. Huck, who knows his father will spend the money on alcohol, is successful keeping his fortune out of his father's hands. Pap, however, kidnaps Huck and takes him out of town. In Illinois, Jackson's Island and while going Downriver. Pap forcibly moves Huck to his isolated cabin in the woods along the Illinois shoreline. Because of Pap's drunken violence and imprisonment of Huck inside the cabin, Huck, during one of his father's absences, elaborately fakes his own murder by non-existent robbers, steals his father's provisions, escapes from the cabin, and sets off downriver in a 13/14-foot long canoe he finds drifting down. He settles comfortably, on Jackson's Island. Here, Huck reunites with Jim, Miss Watson's slave. Jim has also run away after he overheard Miss Watson planning to sell him "down the river" to presumably more brutal owners. Jim plans to make his way to the town of Cairo in Illinois, a free state, so that he can later buy the rest of his enslaved family's freedom. At first, Huck is conflicted about the sin and crime of supporting a runaway slave, but as the two talk in-depth and bond over their mutually held superstitions, Huck emotionally connects with Jim, who increasingly becomes Huck's close friend and guardian. After heavy flooding on the river, the two find a raft (which they keep) as well as an entire house floating on the river (Chapter 9: "The House of Death Floats By"). Entering the house to seek loot, Jim finds the naked body of a dead man lying on the floor, shot in the back. He prevents Huck from viewing the corpse. To find out the latest news in town, Huck dresses as a girl and enters the house of Judith Loftus, a woman new to the area. Huck learns from her about the news of his own supposed murder; Pap was initially blamed, but since Jim ran away he is also a suspect and a reward of 300 dollars for Jim's capture has initiated a manhunt. Mrs. Loftus becomes increasingly suspicious that Huck is a boy, finally proving it by a series of tests. Huck develops another story on the fly and explains his disguise as the only way to escape from an abusive foster family. Once he is exposed, she nevertheless allows him to leave her home without commotion, not realizing that he is the allegedly murdered boy they have just been discussing. Huck returns to Jim to tell him the news and that a search party is coming to Jackson's Island that very night. The two hastily load up the raft and depart. After a while, Huck and Jim come across a grounded steamer. Searching it, they stumble upon two thieves named Bill and Jake Packard discussing murdering a third named Jim Turner, but they flee before being noticed in the thieves' boat as their raft has drifted away. They find their own raft again and keep the thieves' loot and sink the thieves' boat. Huck tricks a watchman on a steamer into going to rescue the thieves stranded on the wreck to assuage his conscience. They are later separated in a fog, making Jim (on the raft) intensely anxious, and when they reunite, Huck tricks Jim into thinking he dreamed the entire incident. Jim is not deceived for long and is deeply hurt that his friend should have teased him so mercilessly. Huck becomes remorseful and apologizes to Jim, though his conscience troubles him about humbling himself to a Black man. In Kentucky: the Grangerfords and Shepherdsons. Traveling onward, Huck and Jim's raft is struck by a passing steamship, again separating the two. Huck is given shelter on the Kentucky side of the river by the Grangerfords, an "aristocratic" family. He befriends Buck Grangerford, a boy about his age, and learns that the Grangerfords are engaged in a 30-year blood feud against another family, the Shepherdsons. The Grangerfords and Shepherdsons go to the same church, which ironically preaches brotherly love. The vendetta finally comes to a head when Buck's older sister elopes with a member of the Shepherdson clan. In the resulting conflict, all the Grangerford males from this branch of the family are shot and killed, including Buck, whose horrific murder Huck witnesses. He is immensely relieved to be reunited with Jim, who has since recovered and repaired the raft. In Arkansas: the Duke and the King. Near the Arkansas-Missouri-Tennessee border, Jim and Huck take two on-the-run grifters aboard the raft. The younger man, who is about thirty, introduces himself as the long-lost son of an English duke (the Duke of Bridgewater). The older one, about seventy, then trumps this outrageous claim by alleging that he himself is the Lost Dauphin, the son of Louis XVI and rightful King of France. The "duke" and "king" soon become permanent passengers on Jim and Huck's raft, committing a series of confidence schemes upon unsuspecting locals all along their journey. To divert public suspicion from Jim, they pretend he is a runaway slave who has been recaptured, but later paint him blue and call him the "Sick Arab" so that he can move about the raft without bindings. On one occasion, the swindlers advertise a three-night engagement of a play called "The Royal Nonesuch". The play turns out to be only a couple of minutes' worth of an absurd, bawdy sham. On the afternoon of the first performance, a drunk called Boggs is shot dead by a gentleman named Colonel Sherburn; a lynch mob forms to retaliate against Sherburn; and Sherburn, surrounded at his home, disperses the mob by making a defiant speech describing how true lynching should be done. By the third night of "The Royal Nonesuch", the townspeople prepare for their revenge on the duke and king for their money-making scam, but the two cleverly skip town together with Huck and Jim just before the performance begins. In the next town, the two swindlers then impersonate brothers of Peter Wilks, a recently deceased man of property. To match accounts of Wilks's brothers, the king attempts an English accent and the duke pretends to be a deaf-mute while starting to collect Wilks's inheritance. Huck decides that Wilks's three orphaned nieces, who treat Huck with kindness, do not deserve to be cheated thus and so he tries to retrieve for them the stolen inheritance. In a desperate moment, Huck is forced to hide the money in Wilks's coffin, which is abruptly buried the next morning. The arrival of two new men who seem to be the real brothers throws everything into confusion, so that the townspeople decide to dig up the coffin in order to determine which are the true brothers, but, with everyone else distracted, Huck leaves for the raft, hoping to never see the duke and king again. Suddenly, though, the two villains return, much to Huck's despair. When Huck is finally able to get away a second time, he finds to his horror that the swindlers have sold Jim away to a family that intends to return him to his proper owner for the reward. Defying his conscience and accepting the negative religious consequences he expects for his actions—"All right, then, I'll go to hell!"—Huck resolves to free Jim once and for all. On the Phelps' farm. Huck learns that Jim is being held at the plantation of Silas and Sally Phelps. The family's nephew, Tom, is expected for a visit at the same time as Huck's arrival, so Huck is mistaken for Tom and welcomed into their home. He plays along, hoping to find Jim's location and free him; in a surprising plot twist, it is revealed that the expected nephew is, in fact, Tom Sawyer. When Huck intercepts the real Tom Sawyer on the road and tells him everything, Tom decides to join Huck's scheme, pretending to be his own younger half-brother, Sid, while Huck continues pretending to be Tom. In the meantime, Jim has told the family about the two grifters and the new plan for "The Royal Nonesuch", and so the townspeople capture the duke and king, who are then tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail. Rather than simply sneaking Jim out of the shed where he is being held, Tom develops an elaborate plan to free him, involving secret messages, a hidden tunnel, snakes in a shed, a rope ladder sent in Jim's food, and other elements from adventure books he has read, including an anonymous note to the Phelps warning them of the whole scheme. During the actual escape and resulting pursuit, Tom is shot in the leg, while Jim remains by his side, risking recapture rather than completing his escape alone. Although a local doctor admires Jim's decency, he has Jim arrested in his sleep and returned to the Phelps. After this, events quickly resolve themselves. Tom's Aunt Polly arrives and reveals Huck and Tom's true identities to the Phelps family. Jim is revealed to be a free man: Miss Watson died two months earlier and freed Jim in her will, but Tom (who already knew this) chose not to reveal this information to Huck so that he could come up with an artful rescue plan for Jim. Jim tells Huck that Huck's father (Pap Finn) has been dead for some time (he was the dead man they found earlier in the floating house), and so Huck may now return safely to St. Petersburg. Huck declares that he is quite glad to be done writing his story, and despite Sally's plans to adopt and civilize him, he intends to flee west to Indian Territory. Themes. "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" explores themes of race and identity. A complexity exists concerning Jim's character. While some scholars point out that Jim is good-hearted and moral, and he is not unintelligent (in contrast to several of the more negatively depicted white characters), others have criticized the novel as racist, citing the use of the word "nigger" and emphasizing the stereotypically "comic" treatment of Jim's lack of education, superstition and ignorance. Throughout the story, Huck is in moral conflict with the received values of the society in which he lives. Huck is unable consciously to rebut those values even in his thoughts but he makes a moral choice based on his own valuation of Jim's friendship and human worth, a decision in direct opposition to the things he has been taught. Twain, in his lecture notes, proposes that "a sound heart is a surer guide than an ill-trained conscience" and goes on to describe the novel as "...a book of mine where a sound heart and a deformed conscience come into collision and conscience suffers defeat". To highlight the hypocrisy required to condone slavery within an ostensibly moral system, Twain has Huck's father enslave his son, isolate him and beat him. When Huck escapes, he immediately encounters Jim "illegally" doing the same thing. The treatments both of them receive are radically different, especially in an encounter with Mrs. Judith Loftus who takes pity on who she presumes to be a runaway apprentice, Huck, yet boasts about her husband sending the hounds after a runaway slave, Jim. Some scholars discuss Huck's own character, and the novel itself, in the context of its relation to African-American culture as a whole. John Alberti quotes Shelley Fisher Fishkin, who writes in her 1990s book "Was Huck Black?: Mark Twain and African-American Voices", "by limiting their field of inquiry to the periphery," white scholars "have missed the ways in which African-American voices shaped Twain's creative imagination at its core." It is suggested that the character of Huckleberry Finn illustrates the correlation, and even interrelatedness, between white and Black culture in the United States. Illustrations. The original illustrations were done by E.W. Kemble, at the time a young artist working for "Life" magazine. Kemble was hand-picked by Twain, who admired his work. Hearn suggests that Twain and Kemble had a similar skill, writing that: Whatever he may have lacked in technical grace ... Kemble shared with the greatest illustrators the ability to give even the minor individual in a text his own distinct visual personality; just as Twain so deftly defined a full-rounded character in a few phrases, so too did Kemble depict with a few strokes of his pen that same entire personage. As Kemble could afford only one model, most of his illustrations produced for the book were done by guesswork. When the novel was published, the illustrations were praised even as the novel was harshly criticized. E.W. Kemble produced another set of illustrations for Harper's and the American Publishing Company in 1898 and 1899 after Twain lost the copyright. Publication's effect on literary climate. Twain initially conceived of the work as a sequel to "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" that would follow Huckleberry Finn through adulthood. Beginning with a few pages he had removed from the earlier novel, Twain began work on a manuscript he originally titled "Huckleberry Finn's Autobiography." Twain worked on the manuscript off and on for the next several years, ultimately abandoning his original plan of following Huck's development into adulthood. He appeared to have lost interest in the manuscript while it was in progress, and set it aside for several years. After making a trip down the Hudson River, Twain returned to his work on the novel. Upon completion, the novel's title closely paralleled its predecessor's: "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer's Comrade)". Mark Twain composed the story in pen on notepaper between 1876 and 1883. Paul Needham, who supervised the authentication of the manuscript for Sotheby's books and manuscripts department in New York in 1991, stated, "What you see is [Clemens'] attempt to move away from pure literary writing to dialect writing". For example, Twain revised the opening line of "Huck Finn" three times. He initially wrote, "You will not know about me", which he changed to, "You do not know about me", before settling on the final version, "You don't know about me, without you have read a book by the name of 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer'; but that ain't no matter." The revisions also show how Twain reworked his material to strengthen the characters of Huck and Jim, as well as his sensitivity to the then-current debate over literacy and voting. A later version was the first typewritten manuscript delivered to a printer. Demand for the book spread outside of the United States. "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" was eventually published on December 10, 1884, in Canada and the United Kingdom, and on February 18, 1885, in the United States. The illustration on page 283 became a point of issue after an engraver, whose identity was never discovered, made a last-minute addition to the printing plate of Kemble's picture of old Silas Phelps, which drew attention to Phelps' groin. Thirty thousand copies of the book had been printed before the obscenity was discovered. A new plate was made to correct the illustration and repair the existing copies. In 1885, the Buffalo Public Library's curator, James Fraser Gluck, approached Twain to donate the manuscript to the library. Twain did so. Later it was believed that half of the pages had been misplaced by the printer. In 1991, the missing first half turned up in a steamer trunk owned by descendants of Gluck's. The library successfully claimed possession and, in 1994, opened the Mark Twain Room to showcase the treasure. In relation to the literary climate at the time of the book's publication in 1885, Henry Nash Smith describes the importance of Mark Twain's already established reputation as a "professional humorist", having already published over a dozen other works. Smith suggests that while the "dismantling of the decadent Romanticism of the later nineteenth century was a necessary operation," "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" illustrated "previously inaccessible resources of imaginative power, but also made vernacular language, with its new sources of pleasure and new energy, available for American prose and poetry in the twentieth century." Critical reception and banning. While it is clear that "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" was controversial from the outset, Norman Mailer, writing in "The New York Times" in 1984, concluded that Twain's novel was not initially "too unpleasantly regarded." In fact, Mailer writes: "the critical climate could hardly anticipate T. S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway's encomiums 50 years later," reviews that would remain longstanding in the American consciousness. Alberti suggests that the academic establishment responded to the book's challenges both dismissively and with confusion. During Twain's time, and today, defenders of "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" "lump all nonacademic critics of the book together as extremists and ‘censors' thus equating the complaints about the book's ‘coarseness' from the genteel bourgeois trustees of the Concord Public Library in the 1880s with more recent objections based on race and civil rights." Upon issue of the American edition in 1885 several libraries banned it from their shelves. The early criticism focused on what was perceived as the book's crudeness. One incident was recounted in the newspaper the "Boston Transcript": The Concord (Mass.) Public Library committee has decided to exclude Mark Twain's latest book from the library. One member of the committee says that, while he does not wish to call it immoral, he thinks it contains but little humor, and that of a very coarse type. He regards it as the veriest trash. The library and the other members of the committee entertain similar views, characterizing it as rough, coarse, and inelegant, dealing with a series of experiences not elevating, the whole book being more suited to the slums than to intelligent, respectable people. Writer Louisa May Alcott criticized the book's publication as well, saying that if Twain "[could not] think of something better to tell our pure-minded lads and lasses he had best stop writing for them". Twain later remarked to his editor, "Apparently, the Concord library has condemned Huck as 'trash and only suitable for the slums.' This will sell us another twenty-five thousand copies for sure!" In 1905, New York's Brooklyn Public Library also banned the book due to "bad word choice" and Huck's having "not only itched but scratched" within the novel, which was considered obscene. When asked by a Brooklyn librarian about the situation, Twain sardonically replied: I am greatly troubled by what you say. I wrote 'Tom Sawyer' & 'Huck Finn' for adults exclusively, & it always distressed me when I find that boys and girls have been allowed access to them. The mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean. I know this by my own experience, & to this day I cherish an unappeased bitterness against the unfaithful guardians of my young life, who not only permitted but compelled me to read an unexpurgated Bible through before I was 15 years old. None can do that and ever draw a clean sweet breath again on this side of the grave. Many subsequent critics, Ernest Hemingway among them, have deprecated the final chapters, claiming the book "devolves into little more than minstrel-show satire and broad comedy" after Jim is detained. Although Hemingway declared, "All modern American literature comes from" "Huck Finn", and hailed it as "the best book we've had", he cautioned, "If you must read it you must stop where the Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys . That is the real end. The rest is just cheating." However, the noted African-American writer Ralph Ellison argues that "Hemingway missed completely the structural, symbolic and moral necessity for that part of the plot in which the boys rescue Jim. Yet it is precisely this part which gives the novel its significance." Pulitzer Prize winner Ron Powers states in his Twain biography ("Mark Twain: A Life") that "Huckleberry Finn endures as a consensus masterpiece despite these final chapters", in which Tom Sawyer leads Huck through elaborate machinations to rescue Jim. Controversy. In his introduction to "The Annotated Huckleberry Finn", Michael Patrick Hearn writes that Twain "could be uninhibitedly vulgar", and quotes critic William Dean Howells, a Twain contemporary, who wrote that the author's "humor was not for most women". However, Hearn continues by explaining that "the reticent Howells found nothing in the proofs of Huckleberry Finn so offensive that it needed to be struck out". Much of modern scholarship of "Huckleberry Finn" has focused on its treatment of race. Many Twain scholars have argued that the book, by humanizing Jim and exposing the fallacies of the racist assumptions of slavery, is an attack on racism. Others have argued that the book falls short on this score, especially in its depiction of Jim. According to Professor Stephen Railton of the University of Virginia, Twain was unable to fully rise above the stereotypes of Black people that white readers of his era expected and enjoyed, and, therefore, resorted to minstrel show-style comedy to provide humor at Jim's expense, and ended up confirming rather than challenging late-19th century racist stereotypes. In one instance, the controversy caused a drastically altered interpretation of the text: in 1955, CBS tried to avoid controversial material in a televised version of the book, by deleting all mention of slavery and omitting the character of Jim entirely. Because of this controversy over whether "Huckleberry Finn" is racist or anti-racist, and because the word "nigger" is frequently used in the novel (a commonly used word in Twain's time that has since become vulgar and taboo), many have questioned the appropriateness of teaching the book in the U.S. public school system—this questioning of the word "nigger" is illustrated by a school administrator of Virginia in 1982 calling the novel the "most grotesque example of racism I've ever seen in my life". According to the American Library Association, "Huckleberry Finn" was the fifth most frequently challenged book in the United States during the 1990s. There have been several more recent cases involving protests for the banning of the novel. In 2003, high school student Calista Phair and her grandmother, Beatrice Clark, in Renton, Washington, proposed banning the book from classroom learning in the Renton School District, though not from any public libraries, because of the word "nigger". Clark filed a request with the school district in response to the required reading of the book, asking for the novel to be removed from the English curriculum. The two curriculum committees that considered her request eventually decided to keep the novel on the 11th grade curriculum, though they suspended it until a panel had time to review the novel and set a specific teaching procedure for the novel's controversial topics. In 2009, a Washington state high school teacher called for the removal of the novel from a school curriculum. The teacher, John Foley, called for replacing "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" with a more modern novel. In an opinion column that Foley wrote in the "Seattle Post Intelligencer", he states that all "novels that use the ‘N-word' repeatedly need to go." He states that teaching the novel is not only unnecessary, but difficult due to the offensive language within the novel with many students becoming uncomfortable at "just hear[ing] the N-word." He views this change as "common sense," with Obama's election into office as a sign that Americans "are ready for a change," and that by removing these books from the reading lists, they would be following this change. In 2016, "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" was removed from a public school district in Virginia, along with the novel "To Kill a Mockingbird", due to their use of racial slurs. Expurgated editions. Publishers have made their own attempts at easing the controversy by way of releasing editions of the book with the word "nigger" replaced by less controversial words. A 2011 edition of the book, published by NewSouth Books, employed the word "slave" (although the word is not properly applied to a freed man). Mark Twain scholar Alan Gribben said he hoped the edition would be more friendly for use in classrooms, rather than have the work banned outright from classroom reading lists due to its language. According to publisher Suzanne La Rosa, "At NewSouth, we saw the value in an edition that would help the works find new readers. If the publication sparks good debate about how language impacts learning or about the nature of censorship or the way in which racial slurs exercise their baneful influence, then our mission in publishing this new edition of Twain's works will be more emphatically fulfilled." Another scholar, Thomas Wortham, criticized the changes, saying the new edition "doesn't challenge children to ask, 'Why would a child like Huck use such reprehensible language?'"

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The Sellout (novel) The Sellout is a 2015 novel by Paul Beatty published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and in the UK by Oneworld Publications in 2016. The novel takes place in and around Los Angeles, California, and muses about the state of racial relations in the U.S. today. In October 2016, it won the Man Booker Prize, making Beatty the first US writer to win that award. Background. Published in 2015, "The Sellout" was the latest in Paul Beatty’s body of work that explores racial identity in America and the pervasive historical effects of racism. Beatty’s other notable works include "The White Boy Shuffle", "Tuff", and "Slumberland". Beatty has stated his motivation for writing the novel was that "[he] was broke". Although "The Sellout" was not written in response to any specific event, the novel was released during a time of racial reckoning surrounding multiple instances of police brutality and the Ferguson, Missouri protests. Plot Summary. The story begins with the narrator (referred to as either “me” or “Bonbon”) standing trial before the Supreme Court for crimes related to his attempt to restore slavery and segregation in his hometown of Dickens, an “agrarian ghetto” on the outskirts of Los Angeles, California. Sitting before the court, Bonbon starts to reflect on what led up to this moment and recounts his upbringing. Bonbon had a tenuous relationship with his father, an unorthodox sociologist who performed numerous traumatizing social experiments on him as a child and held lofty expectations for Bonbon to become a  respected community leader in Dickens. A few years before the Supreme Court case, Bonbon’s father is murdered by the police, and an ambivalent Bonbon struggles to find his purpose in life. At first, Bonbon is content to withdraw from the community and continue his agricultural endeavors of growing artisanal watermelons and marijuana without his father’s judgement. One day, however, the town of Dickens spontaneously disappears from the map and becomes unincorporated, a change that Bonbon attributes to Dickens’ undesirable socioeconomic and racial demographics. Bonbon sets out to restore Dickens’ existence through any means possible. Bonbon enlists the help of Hominy Jenkins, an old man and former child actor, to paint provocative road signs and boundary lines that draw attention to Dickens’ existence. After those attempts are fruitless, Bonbon continues a step further and attempts to reinstitute both slavery and segregation in Dickens and bring back what he believes to be a unifying power structure in the town. He first attempts to re-segregate a public bus driven by his ex-girlfriend by posting “white-only signs” in the front of the bus. He later tries to open an all-white school next to the local high school. Meanwhile, Hominy offers to become Bonbon’s slave, to which a reluctant Bonbon eventually agrees. As the absurdity of Bonbon’s actions are noticed on a wider scale, Hominy causes a large accident that ultimately leads to the supreme court case. Genre. "The Sellout" is a fictitious, satirical novel about racial relations in the U.S. Beatty utilizes stereotypes and parody throughout the story to inject social commentary. Beatty’s other works are mostly humorous as well, but Beatty has claimed that he does not view himself as a satirical author. Analysis. "The Sellout" has been seen by many as a critique of the idea that American society is post-racial. According to literary scholar Henry Ivry, the satirical devices used throughout the book bring attention to the current issues of systemic racism and mock the conventional approaches that American society has taken to remedy these issues. Similarly, University of Albany professor Steven Delmagori notes that the pointed comedy in the novel establishes white privilege as a central issue facing American society, but Beatty simultaneously pokes fun at the overly individualistic view that has dominated the discourse around white privilege. Another scholar, Judit Friedrich, stipulates that Beatty’s writing may seem taboo at first, but his flippant treatment of serious racial issues -- from segregation to economic inequality -- call out society’s unwillingness to discuss and substantively address these issues. Reception. The novel was well received by critics, who praised its humor, ostensibly satirical content, and rich social commentary. In "The Guardian", Elisabeth Donnelly described it as "a masterful work that establishes Beatty as the funniest writer in America", while reviewer Reni Eddo-Lodge called it a "whirlwind of a satire", going on to say: "Everything about "The Sellout"s plot is contradictory. The devices are real enough to be believable, yet surreal enough to raise your eyebrows." The "HuffPost" concluded: ""The Sellout" is a hilarious, pop-culture-packed satire about race in America. Beatty writes energetically, providing insight as often as he elicits laughs." Historian Amanda Foreman, chair of the judges of the Man Booker prize, said: ""The Sellout" is one of those very rare books that is able to take satire, which is in itself a very difficult subject and not always done well, and it plunges into the heart of contemporary American society and, with absolutely savage wit, of the kind I haven't seen since Swift or Twain, both manages to eviscerate every social taboo and politically correct, nuanced, every sacred cow, and while both making us laugh, making us wince. It is both funny and painful at the same time and it is really a novel of our times." Beatty has indicated surprise that critics refer to the novel as a comic one, indicating his belief that discussing the comic aspects of the novel prevents critics from having to discuss its more serious themes. Awards and honors. "The Sellout" was the first American book to win the prestigious Man Booker prize, an award traditionally reserved for English-language literature not from the U.S. The contest began considering American literature in 2002. Publication. "The Sellout" was published in 2015 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux and UK publishing house Oneworld Publications.

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The Underground Railroad (novel) The Underground Railroad is a historical fiction novel by American author Colson Whitehead, published by Doubleday in 2016. The alternate history novel tells the story of Cora and Caesar, two slaves in the southeastern United States during the 19th century, who make a bid for freedom from their Georgia plantation by following the Underground Railroad, which the novel depicts as a rail transport system with safe houses and secret routes. The book was a critical and commercial success, hitting the bestseller lists and winning several literary awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the National Book Award for Fiction, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and the 2017 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence. A TV series adaptation written and directed by Barry Jenkins was released in May 2021. Plot. The story is told in the third person, focusing mainly on Cora. Scattered chapters also focus on Cora's mother Mabel, the slave catcher Ridgeway, a reluctant slave sympathizer named Ethel, and Cora's fellow slave Caesar. Cora is a slave on a plantation in Georgia and an outcast after her mother Mabel ran off without her. She resents Mabel for escaping, although it is later revealed that her mother tried to return to Cora but died from a snake bite and never reached her. Caesar approaches Cora about a plan to flee. Reluctant at first, she eventually agrees as her situation with her master and fellow slaves worsens. During their escape, they encounter a group of slave catchers, who capture Cora's young friend Lovey. Cora is forced to kill a teenage boy to protect herself and Caesar, eliminating any possibility of merciful treatment should she be recaptured. With the help of an inexperienced abolitionist, Cora and Caesar find the Underground Railroad, depicted as a literal underground train system that runs throughout the south, transporting runaways northwards. They take a train to South Carolina. Upon learning of their escape, Ridgeway begins a hunt for the pair, largely in revenge for Mabel, who is the only escapee he has ever failed to capture. Cora and Caesar have taken up comfortable residence in South Carolina under assumed names. South Carolina is enacting a program where the government owns former slaves but employs them, provides medical treatment, and gives them communal housing. The two enjoy their time there and put off the decision to leave until Cora learns of plans to sterilize black women and use black men as test subjects in an experiment to track the spread of syphilis. Ridgeway arrives before the two can leave and Cora is forced to return to the Railroad alone. She later learns that Caesar was killed by an angry mob after having been caught and jailed by Ridgeway. Cora eventually arrives in a closed-down station in North Carolina. She is found by Martin, the son of the station's former operator. North Carolina has recently decided to abolish slavery, using indentured servants instead, and violently executes any runaway slaves found in the state (as well as some freedmen). Martin, terrified of what the North Carolinians might do to an abolitionist, hides Cora in his attic for several months. Cora becomes ill and is reluctantly treated by Martin's wife, Ethel. While Cora is down from the attic, a raid is conducted on the house, and she is recaptured by Ridgeway, while Martin and Ethel are executed by the mob. Ridgeway takes Cora back toward Georgia, detouring through Tennessee to return another slave to his master. While stopped in Tennessee, Ridgeway's traveling party is attacked by escaped slaves, who release Cora. Cora travels to a farm in Indiana owned by a free black man named Valentine, along with one of her rescuers, a man called Royal. The farm is populated by a number of freedmen and escapees, living and working in harmony. Royal, an operator on the Railroad, begins a romantic relationship with Cora, although she remains hesitant because of a rape by other slaves in her childhood. A small faction of freedmen, fearing that their peaceful life will be ruined by the presence of escaped slaves, tips off slave catchers to their presence. The farm is burned and many people, including Royal, are killed in a raid by white Hoosiers. Ridgeway recaptures Cora and forces her to take him to a closed-down Railroad station nearby. When they arrive, she pushes him down a flight of stairs, severely injuring him. She then runs off down the tracks. Eventually, she emerges from underground to find a caravan traveling out West. She is given a ride by one of the wagons' black drivers. Literary influences and parallels. In the "Acknowledgments", Whitehead mentions two famous escaped slaves: "Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, obviously." While in Jacobs's native North Carolina, Cora has to hide in an attic where, like Jacobs, she is not able to stand, but like her can observe the outside life through a hole that "had been carved from the inside, the work of a previous occupant". Martin Ebel, who observed this parallel in a review for the Swiss "Tages-Anzeiger", also observes that the "Freedom Trail", where the victims of North Carolinian lynchings hang from trees, has a historic predecessor in the crosses the Romans raised along the Appian Way to kill the slaves who had joined Spartacus' slave rebellion, written on by Arthur Koestler in his novel "The Gladiators". Ridgeway reminds Ebel of inspector Javert, the hero's merciless persecutor in Victor Hugo's "Les misérables". In "The New Yorker", Kathryn Schulz likens Ridgeway to both Captain Ahab of "Moby-Dick" and the slave catcher August Pullman of the TV series "Underground": "Ridgeway ... and August Pullman, in "Underground," are Ahab-like characters, privately and demonically obsessed with tracking down specific fugitives". Both Ahab and Ridgeway have a soft spot for a black boy: Ahab for the cabin-boy Pip, and Ridgeway for 10-year-old Homer, whom he bought as a slave and set free the next day. In Whitehead's North Carolina, all blacks have been "abolished". Martin Ebel observes the parallel to the Nazi exterminations of Jews and also the parallel between Cora's concealment and Anne Frank's. Another parallel to literature on Nazi Germany may be found in the erection of three gallows by Cora's plantation master. He had the three gallows erected for Cora and her two fellow fugitives to put them to a cruel death as soon as each is returned. In Anna Seghers's novel "The Seventh Cross", written in exile between 1938 and 1942, seven prisoners escape from a concentration camp, and the camp commander has a cross erected for each of them to be tortured there after being returned. Reception. Critical reception. The novel received positive reviews from critics. Reviewers praised it for its commentary on the past and present of the United States. In 2019, "The Underground Railroad" was ranked 30th on "The Guardian"s list of the 100 best books of the 21st century. The novel was voted the greatest of its decade in "Paste" and was third place (along with Jennifer Egan’s "A Visit from the Goon Squad") in a list by Literary Hub. Honors and awards. The novel has received a number of awards, including the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the 2016 National Book Award for Fiction. The previous book to win both the Pulitzer and the National Book prizes was "The Shipping News", by E. Annie Proulx, in 1993. While awarding the Pulitzer Prize, the committee recognized this novel for a "smart melding of realism and allegory that combines the violence of slavery and the drama of escape in a myth that speaks to contemporary America". "The Underground Railroad" was also awarded the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction literature and the 2017 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence, and was longlisted for the 2017 Man Booker Prize. When "The Underground Railroad" was published in the United States in August 2016, it was selected for Oprah's Book Club. On August 5, 2020, a crater on Pluto's moon Charon was named Cora, after the character in the novel, by the International Astronomical Union's Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature. Television adaptation. It was announced in March 2017 that Amazon is making a limited drama series based on "The Underground Railroad", written and directed by Barry Jenkins. The series was released on Prime Video on May 14, 2021.

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Swords of Steel Swords of Steel is a children's historical novel by Elsie Singmaster. Set before and during the American Civil War, it tells of the childhood and coming of age of a boy from the North and his involvement with the war. The novel, illustrated by David Hendrickson, was first published in 1933 and was a Newbery Honor recipient in 1934. Plot summary. In 1859 a 12-year-old John Deane lives in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania with his family. He is friends with Nicholas, a black servant, with whom he is training a colt. He is devastated when Nicholas is kidnapped by slave catchers and sent to the South to be sold. He learns that his father is a conductor on the Underground Railroad, and he visits Harper's Ferry where he witnesses John Brown's raid. When the war reaches Pennsylvania, his house is seized by the Confederates, and he is locked in the cellar. However, he is helped by the troop's cook, his old friend Nicholas. Later he joins the Union Army and sees the final events of the war.

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True North (novel) True North is a 1996 historical novel for young adults by Kathryn Lasky, and published by Scholastic Corporation Set in 1850s America, it is a story about the Underground Railroad. Afrika, a slave girl from Virginia, and Lucy, an independent girl constricted by Boston society, take different paths in life, Lucy exploring her family's history, and Afrika desperately searching for freedom, narrowly escaping capture.

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Middle Passage (novel) Middle Passage (1990) is a historical novel by American writer Charles R. Johnson about the final voyage of an illegal American slave ship on the Middle Passage. Set in 1830, it presents a personal and historical perspective of the illegal slave trade in the United States, telling the story of Rutherford Calhoun, a freed slave who unknowingly boards a slave ship bound for Africa in order to escape a forced marriage. The novel received critical acclaim, winning the 1990 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. Plot summary. The protagonist is Rutherford Calhoun, a freed slave, who flees from New Orleans on a ship called the "Republic" to escape being blackmailed into marriage by Isadora Bailey, a schoolteacher who convinces Calhoun's creditor, Papa Zeringue, that she will pay Calhoun's debts if he will marry her. Drinking to forget his troubles, Calhoun meets the drunken cook of the "Republic" and decides to escape Isadora and Zeringue by stowing away aboard the ship, where he is quickly discovered and put to work without pay. The ship travels to Africa to capture members of the Allmuseri tribe to take back to America to sell as slaves. Although an educated man, Calhoun is at first self-absorbed and thus initially unable to grasp the hardships of slave life. During the voyage, he is humbled by the conditions he observes, learning lessons that teach him to value and respect humanity, which includes identification with his own country, America. Calhoun discovers that the Allmuseri are not the only cargo on board: the captain of the "Republic", a philosophical but tyrannical man named Ebenezer Falcon, also uses his voyages to plunder cultural artifacts that could be sold to museums, and on this trip he has purchased what he claims to be the Allmuseri's god. The other sailors, already believing the Allmuseri to be sorcerers, begin to worry that their voyage is doomed; when they send down a young man to check out the secret cargo, he returns insane. Shortly after the ship sets back for the States, a violent storm hits, worse than any the sailors have seen. Barely escaping with their lives, several of the sailors decide to mutiny, but they are preempted when the Allmuseri get the keys to the shackles and take over the ship first. Calhoun convinces the Allmuseri to leave alive the few remaining white sailors in order to navigate the ship back to Africa, but Falcon commits suicide rather than help them. The first mate, Peter Cringle, tries to steer the ship, but cannot figure out where in the ocean they are, claiming that since the storm, none of the constellations are where they are supposed to be. During this time, Calhoun takes his turn going down to the cargo hold to feed the creature, who gives him a mystical vision of his life and family that renders him unconscious for three days. When he awakens, he learns that Cringle has been murdered and cannibalized, reportedly on Cringle's own suggestion, leaving only himself, the cook, and several Allmuseri on board the ship, which is rapidly falling apart. Before completely disintegrating into the ocean, the ship is seen by another vessel, the "Juno", which manages to rescue five survivors: Calhoun, the cook, and three Allmuseri youth. Calhoun discovers that Isadora is aboard the "Juno" and is being forced to marry Papa Zeringue, who partially owns the "Republic". Papa learns that Calhoun has the ship's log, documenting Zeringue's immoral and illegal dealings, and he bargains with Calhoun to get possession of it. Calhoun mentions that the ship was illegally dealing in the slave trade and uses the ties of Santos, Papa's black servant, to the Allmuseri to get Zeringue to let Santos and Isadora go free. Calhoun has been profoundly changed by his experience during the Middle Passage. Falcon, the Allmuseri, his mystical encounter with the god, and the ship's ultimate sinking have caused him to reflect deeply on his own life and attitude, and he is able to resolve many of his internal conflicts (such as his anger toward his runaway father and his over-accommodating brother); he is now able to care for other people, including Isadora as well as one of the Allmuseri children who had adopted him as her surrogate parent on the ship. Isadora, who is knitting booties for her cats and dogs whom Papa is making her give up, leaves Papa and marries Rutherford. References. Johnson, Charles R. Middle Passage. New York, NY: Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1998.

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A Picture of Freedom A Picture of Freedom is a children's historical novel written by Patricia C. McKissack and published by Scholastic in 1997 as part of their Dear America series. Plot summary. The book is written in the form of a diary kept by Clotee, a young slave girl on a Virginia plantation in 1859. Clotee secretly teaches herself to read and write while fanning William, her owner's young son, during his lessons with his mother Miz Lilly. Clotee is discovered by Mr Harms, the tutor, who is actually an abolitionist working to help slaves escape via the Underground Railroad. When Clotee is given the opportunity to escape, she must decide whether to run away to freedom or stay behind to help other slaves escape. Clotee's best friend on the plantation is a very strong girl named Spicy. Spicy desperately wants to change her name to Rose (the name her mother picked out for her), but is forced to accept the name given by her owners. Clotee later writes in Spicy's Bible, the only keepsake that Spicy has from her mother, that Spicy's name is actually Rose. Spicy is also in love with Hince, the person who Clotee calls her "brother-friend". Clotee and Spicy are the property of "Mas' Henley," a cruel man. While Master Henley never whips or beats Clotee in the book, he does strike Spicy across the face in the final chapter. Mistress Lilly Henley is a weak, foolish woman and a disinterested mother. Clotee's mother was Lilly Henley's personal maid, but Master Henley forced his wife to sell her maid; Clotee's mother later died far from her daughter. Clotee's father is not present in the story as he drowned in the river before she was born. Mistress Lilly often tries to make Clotee her little pet, claiming that Clotee's mother was a very good friend of hers. Clotee always finds a way to decline and Lilly soon gives up, taking another housemaid under her wing and trying to turn the household servants against each other. When Ely Harms is driven off the Henley Plantation, Clotee takes his place as a conductor on the Underground Railroad. Clotee comes up with a plan so that Mr Harms didn't get arrested. Clotee eventually runs away; we later learn that she has become a teacher. She also keeps up correspondence with William Henley, who becomes an abolitionist as well. Clotee dies at the age of 92, and the book ends with the quote from her gravestone: "Freedom is more than a word". Adaptations. In 1997, the book was adapted for television by HBO for their Dear America miniseries. The episode starred Shadia Simmons as Clotee.

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The Known World The Known World is a 2003 historical novel by Edward P. Jones. Set in Virginia during the antebellum era, it examines the issues regarding the ownership of black slaves by both white and black Americans. The book was published to acclaim, which praised its story and Jones's prose. In particular, his ability to intertwine stories within stories received great praise from "The New York Times". The narration of "The Known World" is from the perspective of an omniscient figure who does not voice judgment. This allows the reader to experience the story without bias. Awards and nominations. The novel won a National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2004. In 2005 it won the International Dublin Literary Award, one of the richest literary awards for a novel in the English language. It was a finalist for the 2003 National Book Award. In 2009, website "The Millions" polled 48 critics, writers, and editors; the panel voted "The Known World" the second best novel since 2000. External links. Interviews Reviews Misc

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Absalom, Absalom! Absalom, Absalom! is a novel by the American author William Faulkner, first published in 1936. Taking place before, during, and after the American Civil War, it is a story about three families of the American South, with a focus on the life of Thomas Sutpen. Plot summary. "Absalom, Absalom!" details the rise and fall of Thomas Sutpen, a white man born into poverty in West Virginia who moves to Mississippi with the complementary aims of gaining wealth and becoming a powerful family patriarch. The story is told entirely in flashbacks narrated mostly by Quentin Compson to his roommate at Harvard University, Shreve, who frequently contributes his own suggestions and surmises. The narration of Rosa Coldfield, and Quentin's father and grandfather, are also included and re-interpreted by Shreve and Quentin, with the total events of the story unfolding in nonchronological order and often with differing details. This results in a peeling-back-the-onion revelation of the true story of the Sutpens. Rosa initially narrates the story, with long digressions and a biased memory, to Quentin Compson, whose grandfather was a friend of Sutpen's. Quentin's father then fills in some of the details to Quentin. Finally, Quentin relates the story to his roommate Shreve, and in each retelling, the reader receives more details as the parties flesh out the story by adding layers. The final effect leaves the reader more certain about the attitudes and biases of the characters than about the facts of Sutpen's story. Thomas Sutpen arrives in Jefferson, Mississippi, with some slaves and a French architect who has been somehow forced into working for him. Sutpen obtains one hundred square miles of land from a local Native American tribe and immediately begins building a large plantation called Sutpen's Hundred, including an ostentatious mansion. All he needs to complete his plan is a wife to bear him a few children (particularly a son to be his heir), so he ingratiates himself with a local merchant and marries the man's daughter, Ellen Coldfield. Ellen bears Sutpen two children, a son named Henry and a daughter named Judith, both of whom are destined for tragedy. Henry goes to the University of Mississippi and meets fellow student Charles Bon, who is ten years his senior. Henry brings Charles home for Christmas, and Charles and Judith begin a quiet romance that leads to a presumed engagement. However, Thomas Sutpen realizes that Charles Bon is his son from an earlier marriage and moves to stop the proposed union. Sutpen had worked on a plantation in the French West Indies as overseer and, after subduing a slave uprising, was offered the hand of the plantation owner's daughter, Eulalia Bon. She bore him a son, Charles. Sutpen did not know that Eulalia was of mixed race until after the marriage and birth of Charles, but when he discovered that he had been deceived, he renounced the marriage as void and left his wife and child (though leaving them his fortune as part of his own moral recompense). The reader also later learns of Sutpen's childhood, when young Thomas learned that society could base human worth on material worth. It is this episode that sets into motion Thomas' plan to start a dynasty. When Sutpen tells Henry that Charles is his half-brother and that Judith must not be allowed to marry him, Henry refuses to believe it, repudiates his birthright, and accompanies Charles to his home in New Orleans. They then return to Mississippi to enlist in their University company, joining the Confederate Army to fight in the Civil War. During the war, Henry wrestles with his conscience until he presumably resolves to allow the marriage of half-brother and sister; this resolution changes, however, when Sutpen reveals to Henry that Charles is part black. At the conclusion of the war, Henry enacts his father's interdiction of marriage between Charles and Judith, killing Charles at the gates to the mansion and then fleeing into self-exile. Thomas Sutpen returns from the war and begins to repair his dynasty and his home, whose hundred square miles have been reduced by carpetbaggers and punitive northern action to one square mile. He proposes to Rosa Coldfield, his dead wife's younger sister, and she accepts. However, Sutpen insults Rosa by demanding that she bear him a son before the wedding takes place, prompting her to leave Sutpen's Hundred. Sutpen then begins an affair with Milly, the 15-year-old granddaughter of Wash Jones, a squatter who lives on the Sutpen property. The affair continues until Milly becomes pregnant and gives birth to a daughter. Sutpen is terribly disappointed, because the last hope of repairing his Sutpen dynasty rested on Milly giving birth to a son. Sutpen casts Milly and the child aside, telling them that they are not worthy of sleeping in the stables with his horse, who had just sired a male. An enraged Wash Jones kills Sutpen, his own granddaughter, Sutpen's newborn daughter, and finally himself by resisting arrest. The story of Thomas Sutpen's legacy ends with Quentin taking Rosa back to the seemingly abandoned Sutpen's Hundred plantation, where they find Henry Sutpen and Clytemnestra (Clytie), the daughter of Thomas Sutpen by a slave woman. Henry has returned to the estate to die. Three months later, when Rosa returns with medical help for Henry, Clytie mistakes them for law enforcement and starts a fire that consumes the plantation and kills Henry and herself. The only remaining Sutpen is Jim Bond, Charles Bon's black grandson, a young man with severe mental handicaps, who remains on Sutpen's Hundred. Analysis. Like other Faulkner novels, "Absalom, Absalom!" allegorizes Southern history; the title itself is an allusion to the Biblical story of King David and Absalom, a wayward son fighting the empire his father built. The history of Thomas Sutpen mirrors the rise and fall of Southern plantation culture. Sutpen's failures necessarily reflect the weaknesses of an idealistic South. Rigidly committed to his "design", Sutpen proves unwilling to honor his marriage to a part-black woman, setting in motion his own destruction. Discussing "Absalom, Absalom!", Faulkner stated that the curse under which the South labors is slavery, and that Thomas Sutpen's personal curse, or flaw, was his belief that he was too strong to need to be a part of the human family. "Absalom, Absalom!" juxtaposes ostensible fact, informed guesswork, and outright speculation—with the implication that reconstructions of the past remain irretrievable and therefore imaginative. Faulkner stated that, although none of the narrators got the facts right since "no one individual can look at truth", a truth exists that the reader can ultimately know it. Most critics have tried to reconstruct this truth behind the shifting narratives, or to show that such a reconstruction cannot be done with certainty or even to prove that there are factual and logical inconsistencies that cannot be overcome. But some critics have stated that, fictional truth being an oxymoron, it is best to take the story as a given, and regard it on the level of myth and archetype, a fable that allows us to glimpse the deepest levels of the unconscious and thus better understand the people who accept (and are ruled by) that myth—Southerners in general and Quentin Compson in particular. By using various narrators expressing their interpretations, the novel alludes to the historical cultural zeitgeist of Faulkner's South, where the past is always present and constantly in states of revision by the people who tell and retell the story over time; it thus also explores the process of myth-making and the questioning of truth. The use of Quentin Compson as the primary perspective (if not exactly the focus) of the novel makes it something of a companion piece to Faulkner's earlier work "The Sound and the Fury", which tells the story of the Compson Family, with Quentin as a main character. Although the action of that novel is never explicitly referenced, the Sutpen family's struggle with dynasty, downfall, and potential incest parallel the familial events and obsessions that drive Quentin and Miss Rosa Coldfield to witness the burning of Sutpen's Hundred. Influence and significance. "Absalom, Absalom!", along with "The Sound and the Fury", helped Faulkner win the Nobel Prize in Literature. In 2009, a panel of judges called "Absalom, Absalom!" the best Southern novel of all time. The title refers to the Biblical story of Absalom, a son of David who rebelled against his father (then King of the Kingdom of Israel) and was killed by David's general Joab in violation of David's order to deal gently with his son, thus causing heartbreak to David. The 1983 "Guinness Book of World Records" says the "Longest Sentence in Literature" is a sentence from "Absalom, Absalom!" containing 1,288 words. The sentence can be found in Chapter 6; it begins with the words "Just exactly like father", and ends with "the eye could not see from any point". The passage is entirely italicized and incomplete. The final lyric of "Distant Early Warning", a single released by the Canadian rock band Rush, is the word 'Absalom' repeated three times. Drummer Neil Peart, the band's lyricist, said he "loved the sound of" the title of Faulkner's novel and was inspired to look up the Biblical story of Absalom after reading the novel. "Since one of the main themes of the song was compassion, it occurred to me that the Biblical story was applicable."

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Cane River (novel) Cane River is a 2001 family saga by Lalita Tademy. It was chosen as an Oprah's Book Club selection. In a blend of fact and fiction, Tademy tells the story of four generations of her slave-born female ancestors — Elisabeth, Suzette, Philomene, and Emily — following their trajectories from the 1830s to the 1930s. The culture she explores, that of slaves who remained in bondage until after the American Civil War, bears some core similarities but radical dissimilarities to that of Cane River's Melrose-St. Augustine society, whose families had lived as free from the late Spanish period of Louisiana history.

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Nightjohn Nightjohn is a book Gary Paulsen, first published in 1993. It is about slavery in the American South shortly before the time of the American Civil War. It was later made into a movie of the same name. Plot summary. The novel is set on the Waller plantation in the Southern United States in the early 1850s. The narrator and protagonist of the story is a young female African-American slave named Sarny. Sarny first sees Nightjohn when he is brought to the plantation with a rope around his neck, his body covered in scars. He had escaped north to freedom, but knowing that the penalty for reading is dismemberment, John still returned to slavery to teach others how to read. Twelve-year-old Sarny is willing to learn. So, at night and whenever he has the chance, John begins teaching Sarny the letters of the alphabet. After teaching her 8 letters (A to H), Waller catches Sarny writing in the dirt and punishes John for teaching her by cutting off the toes from each of his feet. But then after three days of recuperating, John runs, and makes it to freedom. He later returns to fetch Sarny and take her to "pit school" in the night, where she sees and learns what a catalog is, learns the rest of the letters, and has acquired great knowledge- something no one can take away from her. Since John comes at night, he is called Nightjohn. This book was followed by a sequel called "Sarny, a Life Remembered" in 1998 Film adaptation. The novel was adapted as a TV film which aired on the Disney Channel starring Carl Lumbly as John, Beau Bridges as the slaveholder, and introducing Allison Jones as Sarny. It was directed by Charles Burnett.

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The Book of Negroes (novel) The Book of Negroes is a 2007 award-winning novel from Canadian writer Lawrence Hill. In the United States, Australia and New Zealand, the novel was published under the title Someone Knows My Name. Title. The author has written about the title: "I used "The Book of Negroes" as the title for my novel, in Canada, because it derives from a historical document of the same name kept by British naval officers at the tail end of the American Revolutionary War. It documents the 3,000 blacks who had served the King in the war and were fleeing Manhattan for Canada in 1783. Unless you were in "The Book of Negroes", you couldn't escape to Canada. My character, an African woman named Aminata Diallo whose story is based on this history, has to get into the book before she gets out. In my country, few people have complained to me about the title, and nobody continues to do so after I explain its historical origins. I think it's partly because the word 'Negro' resonates differently in Canada. If you use it in Toronto or Montreal, you are probably just indicating publicly that you are out of touch with how people speak these days. But if you use it in Brooklyn or Boston, you are speaking in a deeply offensive manner if you were to use such words. When I began touring with the novel in some of the major US cities, literary African-Americans kept approaching me and telling me it was a good thing indeed that the title had changed, because they would never have touched the book with its Canadian title." Synopsis. Aminata Diallo, the daughter of a jeweller and a midwife, is kidnapped at the age of 11 from her village Bayo, Niger in West Africa and forced to walk for three months to the sea in a coffle, a line of prisoners chained together, with hundreds of strangers and a handful of people from her village. Even before she is placed on the ship, she vows that one day, she will return. A boy her age, Chekura, has been forced to assist the slave traders, but is later sent abroad just like the rest. He becomes Aminata's unlikely friend. After several horrific months of voyage across the Atlantic Ocean, including a slave revolt, she arrives in South Carolina where she begins a new life as a slave. Her name is anglicized to Meena Dee. She is taken under the wing of a fellow slave named Georgia, who helps her learn English. Seeing her intelligence and potential, a fellow Muslim slave named Mamed secretly teaches her to read and write. As a teenager Aminata manages to reunite with Chekura, and they sneak off to meet once a month. The plantation owner, Appleby, learns of the meetings and punishes Aminata by brutally raping her. Despite her owner's jealousy, the two slaves marry and conceive a baby boy, whom she named Mamadu after her father. Appleby arranges for Aminata and her child to be sold to separately and so her son Mamadu is stolen from her. Aminata is handed over to a Jewish man named Solomon Lindo who moves her to Charles Town, unaware of where her child may be. Aminata grows close to Lindo and his wife, who allow her to read and write openly. However Solomon also requires her to pay him a part of any money that she earns through midwifery. After a few years, a smallpox outbreak kills Lindo's wife and son. Shortly after, Aminata is once again reunited with Chekura, who has found out that Lindo helped arrange the selling of their son Mamadu who he has been told died. This ruins the relationship Aminata has had with Lindo. Attempting to win her over, Lindo takes Aminata to New York. During the rioting at the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War, Aminata is able to escape from Lindo. During this time Aminata works as a midwife and teacher, helping other black people to learn how to read. Proving that she served the British during the war, her name is entered in the "Book of Negroes", a real document created to list the freed African American slaves who requested permission to leave the newly created United States of America. Because of her ability to read and write as well as her fluency in two African languages, Aminata is also hired to help record names in the book. While doing this work she is reunited for a few months with Chekura, who also served the British; they plan to resettle in Nova Scotia together and she becomes pregnant with their second child. However, just as they are boarding the ship, the two are separated and Aminata is arrested, as Appleby has put out a warrant for her as a run-away slave. The matter is resolved when Lindo appears in court, explaining the situation and simultaneously setting Aminata free. Aminata, once again trying to find her husband, finds another ship to Nova Scotia. Aminata arrives in Shelburne and begins to work in the black community of Birchtown, where she meets Jason, a young fellow whom she listed in the "Book of Negroes", and Daddy Moses (the "Preacher"). Soon after arriving, she gives birth to a second child, her daughter May. Aminata finds work for white people in town, but after a few years relations between the black community and white community break down. During these difficult times, her daughter is stolen from her by a white couple. She tries to locate her husband many times and learns that the ship carrying him to Nova Scotia had swept away to Bermuda and sank, and her husband Chekura is presumed dead. A young British naval officer named Captain John Clarkson comes to the black Birchtown communities, promising a better land reserved for them in Sierra Leone. Aminata helps Clarkson to gather people from the community, and eventually they all leave for a better future. On her way to Africa, Aminata observes ships carrying thousands of slaves bound for America. In Sierra Leone, the black communities attempt to establish Freetown despite the strict rules of the British. History is repeating itself - despite Clarkson's efforts, Freetown is not the safe haven it was meant to be. It is located just a few miles from a slave trading centre, the very same one from which Aminata was sent for America. Clarkson offers to take her to London, where a group of abolitionists need a spokesperson against slavery. However, longing to return to her village in the interior of Africa, Aminata negotiates with a slave trader to take her there. It takes many years before he agrees. It is a difficult journey, especially since Aminata is no longer young. She is slowing the group down, and overhears the traders talking about how they will sell her back into slavery to get rid of her. After escaping to a nearby village and telling them her story, Aminata finally realizes what is more important than returning to her home village of Bayo is helping to free other enslaved people. She takes Clarkson up on his offer. As an old woman, she finds herself taking a voyage one more time to England to present the account of her life, so it may help abolish the slave trade. She publishes her life story, speaks at schools and churches, and even meets the King and Queen. She is eventually reunited with her daughter May, and May cares for Aminata until her dying day. Awards and recognition. "The Book of Negroes" won the 2007 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and the 2008 Commonwealth Writers' Prize. It was the winning selection for CBC Radio's "Canada Reads" 2009, in which journalist Avi Lewis championed the novel. Its French translation, titled "Aminata", was championed by Thomas Hellman in the 2013 edition of "Le Combat des livres", and won that competition as well, becoming the only title to date to have won both the English and French editions of the competition. Miniseries adaptation. In 2007, Canadian production company Conquering Lion Pictures announced it had acquired the film rights to the novel. In mid-2013 it was announced that the novel would be adapted into a miniseries of the same name, rather than the feature film originally planned. Clement Virgo and Hill collaborated on writing the miniseries, with Virgo also directing. It premiered on CBC Television in Canada in January 2015 and aired on BET in the United States in February 2015. The mini-series stars Aunjanue Ellis as Aminata, Lyriq Bent as Chekura, Cuba Gooding Jr, Louis Gossett Jr., Ben Chaplin, Allan Hawco, and Jane Alexander. The international co-production began shooting in February 2014 in Cape Town, South Africa. Filming also took place in various locations around Nova Scotia.

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The African (Courlander novel) The African is a 1967 novel by Harold Courlander. Plot. A young African boy, Hwesuhunu, is kidnapped from his homeland by French slave traders, and endures the terrors of the Middle Passage and being sold into slavery. Hwesuhunu is brought to the island of Saint Lucia, and is later sold to a Georgia plantation for US$100. Controversy. The novel became the subject of controversy when it was revealed that author Alex Haley had plagiarized sections of "The African" for his 1976 novel "" which later was made into a 1977 television miniseries, a , and a 2016 television miniseries remake. In 1978, Haley paid Harold Courlander and his publisher $650,000 to drop a plagiarism lawsuit.

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March (novel) March (2005) is a novel by Geraldine Brooks. It is a novel that retells Louisa May Alcott's novel "Little Women" from the point of view of Alcott's protagonists' absent father. Brooks has inserted the novel into the classic tale, revealing the events surrounding March's absence during the American Civil War in 1862. The novel won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Plot summary. In 1862, Mr. March, an abolitionist and chaplain in the Union Army, is driven by his conscience to leave his home and family in Concord, Massachusetts, to participate in the war. During this time, March writes letters to his family, but he withholds the true extent of the brutality and injustices he witnesses on and off the battlefields. He suffers from a prolonged illness stemming from poor conditions on a cotton farm in Virginia. While in hospital, he has an unexpected meeting with Grace, an intelligent and literate black nurse whom he first met as a young woman staying in a large house where she was a slave. The recovering March, despite his guilt and grief over his survival when others have perished, returns home to his wife and Little Women, but he has been scarred by the events he has gone through. The novel accurately reflects Bronson Alcott's principles, notably his belief that boys and girls of all races had a right to education and his wish to follow a vegetarian diet. It presents the young Mrs March as a fiery character with strong verbal and physical expressions of anger. Sources. The character of March is based in part on Alcott's father, Amos Bronson Alcott, who was a teacher and abolitionist. Brooks used as source materials Mr. Alcott's letters and journals, and the writings of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, who were friends of the Alcott family. Thoreau and Emerson also appear in the novel as secondary characters and friends of the Marches. Commentary. Teresa Nielsen Hayden has compared the novel to fan fiction, saying that the only difference is that Brooks, Alcott, and publisher Viking Press are "dreadfully respectable." Nielsen Hayden believes that creating fan fiction is "a basic impulse." In an NPR interview by Melissa Block, Brooks reveals that a more physical connection to the Civil War was her inspiration for the novel. "The author lives near the site of the battle where, on Oct. 21, 1861, on a steep bluff overlooking the Potomac River, Union forces were flanked and routed by Confederate troops. The discovery of a Union soldier's belt buckle in the Civil War-era courtyard of Brooks' home provided the germ of the novel."

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Cloudsplitter Cloudsplitter is a 1998 historical novel by Russell Banks relating the story of abolitionist John Brown. The novel is narrated as a retrospective by John Brown's son, Owen Brown, from his hermitage in the San Gabriel Mountains of California. His reminiscences are triggered by the reception of an invitation from a Miss Mayo, assistant to Oswald Garrison Villard, then researching his book "John Brown: A Biography Fifty Years After" (Boston, 1910). Major themes. Banks raises a number of thematic questions during the lengthy portrayal of his subject matter. Notable among them are: The narrative style employed by Banks is introspective and apologetic where each character's moral compass is seen as through the microscope of Owen Brown's telling; detailed and larger than life. Bank's prose uses language that registers on the psyche: evoking the conviction that redemption can be gained by an Augustinian confession. And yet the reader is goaded into sympathy with these characters by their sheer persistence in the face of seemingly insurmountable daily travails - evoking the innocence of a new-born country. Literary license. Banks takes great license with some of the historical figures in his narrative and very clearly states in his preface that his book is a work of fiction and not to be substituted for a work of biography or history. Perhaps most significant is the later life of Owen Brown; the historical Owen Brown died in 1889 at the age of 64 while his literary counterpart lives for decades longer. Reception. The novel was reviewed positively in a number of places: In 2011, "The Guardian's" Tom Cox selected "Cloudsplitter" as one of his "overlooked classics of American literature". Adaptations. In 2002, it was reported that Martin Scorsese was to produce a film adaptation of "Cloudsplitter", to be directed by Raoul Peck, for the film production company HBO.

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Clotel Clotel; or, The President's Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States is an 1853 novel by United States author and playwright William Wells Brown about Clotel and her sister, fictional slave daughters of Thomas Jefferson. Brown, who escaped from slavery in 1834 at the age of 20, published the book in London. He was staying after a lecture tour to evade possible recapture due to the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. Set in the early nineteenth century, it is considered the first novel published by an African American and is set in the United States. Three additional versions were published through 1867. The novel explores slavery's destructive effects on African-American families, the difficult lives of American mulattoes or mixed-race people, and the "degraded and immoral condition of the relation of master and slave in the United States of America." Featuring an enslaved mixed-race woman named Currer and her daughters Althesa and Clotel, fathered by Thomas Jefferson, it is considered a tragic mulatto story. The women's relatively comfortable lives end after Jefferson's death. They confront many hardships, with the women taking heroic action to preserve their families. Background. The novel played with known 19th-century reports that Thomas Jefferson had an intimate relationship with his slave Sally Hemings and fathered several children with her. Of mixed race and described as nearly white, she was believed to be the half sister of Jefferson's wife, Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson, the youngest of six children by her father John Wayles with his slave Betty Hemings. Members of the large Hemings family were among more than 100 slaves inherited by Martha and Thomas Jefferson after her father's death. Martha died when Jefferson was 40 and he never remarried. Although Jefferson never responded to the rumors, some historians believe that his freeing of the four Hemings children as they came of age is significant: he may have let Beverly (a male) and certainly let his sister Harriet Hemings "escape" in 1822 from Monticello, and freed two by his will in 1826, although he was heavily in debt. His daughter gave Hemings "her time"(meaning that she freed her), so she may have been able to live freely in Charlottesville with her two youngest sons, Madison and Eston Hemings, for the rest of her life. Except for three other Hemings men whom Jefferson freed in his will, the rest of his 130 slaves were sold in 1827. A 1998 DNA study confirmed a match between the Jefferson male line and Eston Hemings' direct male descendant. Based on this and the body of historic evidence, most Jeffersonian scholars have come to accept that Jefferson did father Hemings's children over an extended period of time. As an escaped slave, due to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, William Wells Brown was at risk in the United States. While in England on a lecture tour in 1849, he decided to stay there with his two daughters after the Fugitive Slave Act was passed in 1850, as he was at risk of being taken by slave catchers. He published "Clotel" in 1853 in London; it was the first novel published by an African American. In 1854 a British couple purchased freedom for Brown, and he returned with his daughters to the US. Plot summary. The narrative of "Clotel" plays with history by relating the "perilous antebellum adventures" of a young mixed-race slave Currer and her two light-skinned daughters fathered by Thomas Jefferson. Because the mother is a slave, according to partus sequitur ventrem, which Virginia adopted into law in 1662, her daughters are born into slavery. The book includes "several sub-plots" related to other slaves, religion and anti-slavery. Currer, described as "a bright mulatto" (meaning light-skinned) gives birth to two "near white" daughters: Clotel and Althesa. After the death of Jefferson, Currer and her daughters are sold as slaves. Horatio Green, a white man, purchases Clotel and takes her as a common-law wife. They cannot legally marry under state laws against miscegenation. Her mother Currer and sister Althesa remain "in a slave gang." Currer is eventually purchased by Mr. Peck, a preacher. She is enslaved until she dies from yellow fever, shortly before Peck's daughter was preparing to emancipate her. Althesa marries her white master, Henry Morton, a Northerner, by passing as a white woman. They have daughters Jane and Ellen, who are educated. Although supporting abolition, Morton fails to manumit Althesa and their daughters. After Althesa and Morton both die, their daughters are enslaved. Ellen commits suicide to escape sexual enslavement, and Jane dies in slavery from heartbreak. Green and Clotel have a daughter Mary, also mixed race of course, and majority white. When Green becomes ambitious and involved in local politics, he abandons his relationship with Clotel and Mary. He marries "a white woman who forces him to sell Clotel and enslave his child." Clotel is sold to a planter in Vicksburg, Mississippi. There she meets William, another slave, and they plan a bold escape. Dressing as a white man, Clotel is accompanied by William acting as her slave; they travel and gain freedom by reaching the free state of Ohio. (This is based on the tactics of the 1849 escape by Ellen Craft and William Craft). William continues his flight to Canada (an estimated 30,000 fugitive slaves reached there by 1852). Clotel returns to Virginia to try to free her daughter Mary. After being captured in Richmond, Clotel is taken to Washington, DC for sale at its slave market. She escapes and is pursued through the city by slave catchers. Surrounded by them on the Long Bridge, she commits suicide by jumping to her death in the Potomac River. Mary is forced to work as a domestic slave for her father Horatio Green and his white wife. She arranges to trade places in prison with her lover, the slave George. He escapes to Canada. Sold to a slave trader, Mary is purchased by a French man who takes her to Europe. Ten years later, after the Frenchman's death, George and Mary reunite by chance in Dunkirk, France. The novel ends with their marriage. Critical reception. The novel has been extensively studied in the late 20th and early 21st century. Kirkpatrick writes that "Clotel" demonstrates the "pervasive, recurring victimization of black women under slavery. Even individuals of mixed-race status who attempt to pass as white nevertheless suffer horrifically." It exposes "the insidious intersection of economic gain and political ambition—represented by founding fathers such as Jefferson and Horatio Green." It is a "scathing, sarcastic, comprehensive critique of slavery in the American South, race prejudice in the American North, and religious hypocrisy in the American notion as a whole." The novel and the title "walk a precarious line between oral history, written history, and artistic license." Mitchell said that Brown emphasized romantic conventions, dramatic incident and a political view in his novel. Recent scholars have also analyzed "Clotel" for its representations of gender and race. Sherrard-Johnson notes that Brown portrayed both the "tragic central characters " and the "heroic figures" as mulattoes with Angloid features, similar to his own appearance. She thinks he uses the cases of "nearly white" slaves to gain sympathy for his characters. She notes that he borrowed elements from the abolitionist Lydia Maria Child's plot in her short story, "The Quadroons" (1842). He also incorporated notable elements of recent events, such as the escape of the Crafts, and the freedom suit court case of Salome, an enslaved woman in Louisiana who claimed to be an immigrant born in Germany. Martha Cutter notes that Brown portrayed his women characters generally as passive victims of slavery and as representations of True Women and the cult of domesticity, which were emphasized at the time for women. They are not portrayed as wanting or seeking freedom, but as existing through love and suffering. Cutter asks, if Mary could free George, why did she not free herself? Although Brown published three later versions of "Clotel", he did not seriously change this characterization of the African-American women. Slave women such as Ellen Craft were known to have escaped slavery, but Brown did not portray such women fully achieving freedom. Mitchell, in contrast, believes that Brown portrays his women as acting heroically: she notes that Clotel escapes and goes back to Virginia to rescue her daughter, and more than one escape is described. She thinks he emphasizes adventure for the sake of character development. Even after heroic action, Brown's women are subject to the suffering of slavery. He emphasizes its evil of illegitimacy, and the arbitrary breakup of families. Influence. In addition to being the first novel published by an African American, "Clotel" became a model that influenced many other nineteenth-century African-American writers. It is the first instance of an African-American writer "to dramatize the underlying hypocrisy of democratic principles in the face of African American slavery." Through "Clotel", Brown introduces into African-American literature the "tragic mulatto" character. Such characters, representing the historical reality of hundreds of thousands of mixed-race people, many of them slaves, were further developed by "Webb, Wilson, Chesnutt, Johnson, and other novelists", writing primarily after the American Civil War. Adaptations. Brown published three variations of "Clotel" in the 1860s, but did not markedly change his portrayal of the African-American women characters. Style. According to Brown in its preface, he wrote "Clotel" as a polemic narrative against slavery, written for a British audience: It is also considered a propagandistic narrative, in that Brown leveraged "sentimentality, melodrama, contrived plots, [and] newspaper articles" as devices "to damage the 'peculiar institution' of slavery." Chapters predominantly open "with an epigraph underscoring the romance’s urgent message: 'chattel slavery in America undermines the entire social condition of man.'" "Clotel" is told through the use of a "third-person limited omniscient narrator." The narrator is "morally didactic and consistently ironic." The narrative is fragmented, in that it "combines fact, fiction, and external literary sources." It presents the reader with a structure that is episodic and is informed by "legends, myths, music, and concrete eye-witness accounts of the fugitive slaves themselves." It also "draws on antislavery lectures and techniques," such as "abolitionist verse and fiction, newspaper stories and ads, legislative reports, public addresses, private letters, and personal anecdotes."

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Jubilee (novel) Jubilee (1966) is a historical novel written by Margaret Walker, which focuses on the story of a biracial slave during the American Civil War. It is set in Georgia and later in various parts of Alabama in the mid-19th century before, during, and after the Civil War. Plot summary. "Jubilee" is the semi-fictional story of Vyry Brown, based on the life of author Margaret Walker's great-grandmother, Margaret Duggans Ware Brown. Vyry Brown is a mixed-race slave—the unacknowledged daughter of her master—who is born on the Dutton plantation in Georgia. The novel follows her experiences from early childhood to adult life. The story of Vyry's life in the novel spans three major periods of American history: Slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. Setting (location). The historic novel is set in parts of Georgia and Alabama, such as: Setting (time). 1835–1870 Historical events (chronological order). Before the Civil War the Bible was quoted to justify slavery as a natural and righteous state. Slaves meanwhile identified with the Old Testament Hebrew slaves who were liberated by Moses. Jubilee follows the course of the Civil War and Reconstruction, where violence by the Ku Klux Klan was unfortunately common. Specific events from this historical novel (in chronological order) include: Court case. In 1978, Margaret Walker sued Alex Haley, claiming that his 1976 novel "" had violated "Jubilee"'s copyright by borrowing from her novel. The case was dismissed. Adaptation. "Jubilee" was adapted into a three-act opera by Ulysses Kay, to a libretto by Donald Dorr; it was commissioned by Opera/South and premiered in 1976.

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The Water Dancer The Water Dancer is the debut novel by Ta-Nehisi Coates, published on September 24, 2019, by One World, an imprint of Random House. It is a surrealist story set in the pre–Civil War South, concerning a superhuman protagonist named Hiram Walker who possesses photographic memory, but who cannot remember his mother, and is able to transport people over long distances by using a power known as "conduction" which can fold the Earth like fabric and allows him to travel across large areas via waterways. The novel debuted at number one on "The New York Times" fiction best-seller list and was selected for the revival of Oprah's Book Club. Background. Coates began writing the novel around 2008 and 2009. He had recently finished his first memoir, "The Beautiful Struggle", and was encouraged by his agent to write fiction. At the time, Coates was extensively researching slavery and the Civil War. He was influenced by author E. L. Doctorow and "how he almost reinvented history; he made history his in a certain kind of way". Coates cited Doctorow's novels "Ragtime" (1975) and "Billy Bathgate" (1989) as early influences and recalled later reading "The Waterworks". He was also influenced by his childhood love of comic books and, in general, the concept of heroes. While researching the Civil War, he was frustrated with how "a lot of the people who were held up as heroic were in fact straight-up white supremacists." Coates worked on the novel for a decade in "various degrees". Plot. Hiram Walker was born into slavery during the Antebellum South on a declining tobacco plantation in Virginia named Lockless. He is the mixed-race son of a white plantation owner and a black mother who was sold away by his father when Hiram was young. The local community consists of the enslaved ("the Tasked"); the landowners ("the Quality"); and the low-class whites. Hiram has an extraordinary photographic memory but is unable to remember his mother. However, in one instance when Hiram is driving across a bridge he suddenly has a vision of his mother dancing. When the vision ends, his carriage has fallen into the water. His (white) half brother drowns, but Hiram is transported out of the water. He learns that his miracle survival was a result of a superhuman ability he has called conduction, which transports himself and others across impossible distances. This conduction is triggered by powerful memories: those of his mother. He eventually becomes involved with the Underground Railroad. Hiram escapes to Philadelphia, where he encounters Box Brown and Jarm Logue. He eventually comes to meet a famous member of the Underground named Moses, who also has the power of Conduction. Moses is later revealed to be Harriet Tubman. Release. On October 13, 2019, the novel debuted at number one on "The New York Times" Hardcover Fiction best-sellers list and at number one on the Combined Print & E-Book Fiction best-sellers list. The novel was selected by Oprah Winfrey as the first book for the revival of her Oprah's Book Club on Apple TV+. She called it "one of the best books I have ever read in my entire life. Right up there in the Top 5." Reception. At the review aggregator website Book Marks, which assigns individual ratings to book reviews from mainstream literary critics, the novel received a cumulative "Positive" rating based on 41 reviews: 13 "Rave" reviews, 23 "Positive" reviews, 3 "Mixed" reviews, and 2 "Pan" reviews. "Publishers Weekly" gave the novel a rave review, writing, "In prose that sings and imagination that soars, Coates further cements himself as one of this generation's most important writers, tackling one of America's oldest and darkest periods with grace and inventiveness. This is bold, dazzling, and not to be missed." "Kirkus Reviews" gave the novel a favorable review, but felt it was "less intensely realized" than Colson Whitehead's "The Underground Railroad" (2015). Dwight Garner of "The New York Times" gave the novel a positive review, calling it "a jeroboam of a book, a crowd-pleasing exercise in breakneck and often occult storytelling that tonally resembles the work of Stephen King as much as it does the work of Toni Morrison, Colson Whitehead and the touchstone African-American science-fiction writer Octavia Butler." David Fear of "Rolling Stone" gave the novel a rave review, saying it exceeded expectations for a debut novel and writing, "What's most powerful is the way Coates enlists his notions of the fantastic, as well as his fluid prose, to probe a wound that never seems to heal. [...] There’s an urgency to his remembrance of things past that brims with authenticity, testifying to centuries of bone-deep pain. It makes "The Water Dancer" feel timeless and instantly canon-worthy." Constance Grady of "Vox" praised the "clarity of Coates's ideas and the poetry of his language" but largely panned the novel as a "mess" with monotonous characters and lacking a strong plot development to make up for it. She criticized the movement between the plot-driven and allegorical storytelling modes as "whiplash-inducing".

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Blackout (young adult novel) Blackout is a young adult novel written by Dhonielle Clayton, Tiffany D. Jackson, Nic Stone, Angie Thomas, Ashley Woodfolk, and Nicola Yoon. The book follows six interlinked stories about Black teen love during a power outage in New York City. The book is set to be released on June 22, 2021. Development and publication. Dhonielle Clayton is credited with the initial idea for the book. The authors expressed their desire to write a book about Black love and joy rather than about police brutality. The book was announced via Twitter in November 2020. Clayton described the novel as "our love letter to love, to New York City, and to Black teens. Our reminder to them that their stories, their joy, their love are valid and worthy of being spotlighted." Thomas also described the novel as a love letter to Black teens. The North American rights to the book were secured by HarperCollins after a twelve-way auction. The novel was also acquired by Egmont in the U.K. for six figures. Plot. "Blackout" follows thirteen teenagers in six interlinked stories which celebrate Black love. After a summer heatwave causes a citywide power outage in New York City, Black teens explore love, friendships, and hidden truths over the course of a single day. Among the characters are exes who have to bury their rivalry to walk from Manhattan to Brooklyn for a block party, two boys who get trapped on the subway, and best friends who get stuck in the library.

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Interior Chinatown Interior Chinatown is a 2020 novel by Charles Yu. It is his second novel and was published by Pantheon Books on January 28, 2020. It won the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction. The novel was also longlisted for the 2021 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction and was shortlisted for the Prix Médicis étranger. Summary. The novel uses the narrative structure of the screenplay format to tell the tale of Willis Wu, the "Generic Asian Man" who is stuck playing "Background Oriental Male" and occasionally "Delivery Guy" in the fictional police procedural "Black and White" but who longs to be "Kung Fu Guy" on screens worldwide. Publication and promotion. "Interior Chinatown" was published in hardcover, e-book and audibook format by Pantheon Books on January 28, 2020. The audiobook was narrated by actor Joel de la Fuente. On January 27, 2020, Yu appeared on "The Daily Show with Trevor Noah" to discuss the book, as well as the lack of on-screen representation for Asian Americans and the model minority stereotype of Asian Americans. Yu also discussed the novel in an interview with Scott Simon on NPR's "Weekend Edition Saturday" on January 25, 2020, and in an appearance on "Los Angeles Review of Books" (LARB) Radio Hour with Medaya Ocher and Kate Wolf on February 3, 2020. In an interview with Timothy Tau for "Hyphen", Yu remarked that his influences for the novel included Paul Beatty's Man Booker Prize-winning novel "The Sellout" as well as the "cyclical structure" of the film "Groundhog Day". Reception. At the review aggregator website Book Marks, which assigns individual ratings to book reviews from mainstream literary critics, the novel received a cumulative "Rave" rating based on 11 reviews: 6 "Rave" reviews and 5 "Positive" reviews. "Kirkus Reviews" called the novel an "acid indictment of Asian stereotypes and a parable for outcasts feeling invisible in this fast-moving world." Carolyn Kellogg of "The Washington Post" gave the novel a rave review, writing, "It's mind-bending storytelling, not easy to pull off. Yu does it with panache." The novel was also reviewed in "The New York Times Book Review", "The New York Times", the "Los Angeles Review of Books", the "San Francisco Chronicle", "Booklist", the "Asian Review of Books", the "New York Journal of Books", "Shelf Awareness", the "Washington Independent Review of Books", "The Washington Times", "The Harvard Crimson", the "Chicago Review of Books", and Bookreporter.com.

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Holes (novel) Holes is a 1998 young adult novel written by Louis Sachar and first published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The book centers on an unlucky teenage boy named Stanley Yelnats, who is sent to Camp Green Lake, a juvenile detention center in a desert in Texas, after being falsely accused of theft. The plot explores the history of the area and how the actions of several characters in the past have affected Stanley's life in the present. These interconnecting stories touch on themes such as racism, homelessness, illiteracy, and arranged marriage. The book was both a critical and commercial success. Much of the praise for the book has centered around its complex plot, interesting characters, and representation of people of color and incarcerated youth. It won the 1998 U.S. National Book Award for Young People's Literature and the 1999 Newbery Medal for the year's "most distinguished contribution to American literature for children". In 2012 it was ranked number six among all-time children's novels in a survey published by "School Library Journal". "Holes" was adapted by Walt Disney Pictures as a feature film of the same name released in 2003. The film received generally positive reviews from critics, grossing $71 million, and was released in conjunction with the book companion "Stanley Yelnats's Survival Guide to Camp Green Lake". A sequel to "Holes" entitled "Small Steps" was published in 2006 and centers on one of the secondary characters in the novel, Armpit. Plot. Stanley Yelnats IV is a 14-year-old boy from a hard-working but poor family that is allegedly cursed, for which they blame Stanley's "no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing great-great-grandfather". Stanley's latest stroke of misfortune occurs when he is wrongfully convicted of stealing a pair of athletic shoes that belonged to the famous baseball player Clyde "Sweet Feet" Livingston, who donated the shoes for a charity auction. He is sent to Camp Green Lake, a juvenile corrections facility which is located in the middle of a desert; the lake dried up decades ago and is crawling with highly venomous yellow-spotted lizards, whose bites are always lethal. The inmates are assigned to dig one cylindrical hole each day, five feet wide and five feet deep, which the Warden claims "builds their character". The novel alternates this story with two set in the past, with interrelated but distinct plot lines. Elya Yelnats. Stanley's Latvian great-great-grandfather, Elya Yelnats, is in love with Myra, the most beautiful girl in the village. However, he faces competition from the local pig farmer Igor Barkov, who is offering Myra's father Morris his fattest pig in exchange for her hand in marriage. Elya goes to his friend Madame Zeroni, an old Egyptian fortune teller with a missing foot, for help. Despite not approving of Myra as a partner for Elya due to her lack of intelligence, Zeroni takes pity on Elya and gives him a tiny piglet, instructing him to carry it up a mountain every day and let it drink from a stream while singing a special song to it. Each time, the pig will grow bigger. Zeroni says that in return, Elya must then carry her up the mountain and sing to her. She warns him that if he does not do this, his family will be cursed. Elya follows her directions and the pig grows to be just as large as Igor's. However, after realizing Madame Zeroni was right about Myra's lack of intelligence when she's unable to choose between him or Igor, Elya leaves in disgust and decides to move to America, but forgets his promise to Zeroni. Though he falls in love with and marries the kind and intelligent Sarah Miller, he becomes beset by bad luck. Elya tells Sarah about the curse and tells her to leave him. Sarah refuses to leave Elya and the song that he sang to the pig becomes a lullaby that is passed down among his descendants, hoping that it will one day break the curse. Kissin' Kate Barlow. In the year 1888, the town of Green Lake is a flourishing lakeside community. Katherine Barlow, the white local schoolteacher, falls in love with Sam, an African-American onion farmer, while rejecting advances from the wealthy Charles "Trout" Walker. There is an uproar in the town after Katherine and Sam are seen kissing. Seeing a dangerous mob gather, Katherine finds Sam and they attempt to escape across the lake in Sam's rowboat, but Walker and the mob intercept them with Walker's motorboat. Sam is shot dead, while Katherine is "rescued" against her wishes. From then on, rain stops falling upon Green Lake. Three days later, Katherine kills the town sheriff as revenge for his refusal to help. She then becomes a prominent outlaw called "Kissin' Kate Barlow", nicknamed so for her calling card of leaving a red lipstick kiss on the cheeks of the men she kills. For the next twenty years, she robs multiple banks across the state of Texas. Among her victims is Stanley's great-grandfather, who she leaves stranded in the desert; he survives after finding refuge on "God's thumb". She returns to the ruins of Green Lake and is found by a now-destitute Trout Walker and his wife Linda, one of Katherine's former students who married Trout for his money. They try to force her to reveal where she buried the money she'd stolen, but she refuses, telling them they and their descendants can spend the rest of their lives digging in the desert and never find her loot. She is then bitten by a yellow-spotted lizard. As she succumbs to its venom, Katherine laughs and tells them to start digging, for it will take a lifetime or more for them to ever find the money. Camp Green Lake. The Warden allows the inmates the rest of their day off if they find anything "interesting". Stanley begins to suspect the Warden is looking for something. During one dig, he finds one of Barlow's lipstick tubes. He gives it to X-Ray, the ringleader of his group, who pretends to find it the next day. The Warden is excited by the discovery and orders them to enlarge X-Ray's hole. Stanley later befriends Zero, a camper who quietly keeps to himself, and teaches Zero to read in return for Zero digging part of Stanley's holes. This leads to an argument with the other inmates, and then the staff. Zero then flees. The camp staff decide to erase their records of Zero, whose full name is Hector Zeroni, and let him die in the desert. A few days later, Stanley escapes the camp to look for Hector and finds him taking refuge under the remains of Sam's boat, subsisting on preserved jars of Kate Barlow's spiced peaches, which he calls "Sploosh". Hector refuses to go back to the camp. Stanley then notices a mountain in the distance that resembles a thumbs up sign, and recalls his great-grandfather claimed to find "refuge on God's thumb" after being stranded in the desert by Kate Barlow. They journey across the desert and up the mountain, where they discover a field of onions that was once Sam's. The boys eat the onions and find water by digging in the ground, and Stanley sings Madame Zeroni's song to Hector, breaking the family curse. Hector then reveals that he was the one who stole Clyde Livingston's shoes. Wondering if their meeting was destiny, Stanley asks Hector if he wants to help him dig one last hole. They return to camp and dig in the hole where Stanley first found the lipstick tube, unearthing a suitcase and venomous lizards. The Warden and the staff appear and demand they hand it over, but retreat because of the lizards, which are passive to Stanley and Hector due to the onions they consumed. The Warden is revealed to be Trout Walker's granddaughter and she's been using the camp and the inmates to find Kate Barlow's stolen treasure. Stanley's attorney appears at the camp, explaining that Stanley has been exonerated. Hector reveals the suitcase belongs to the Yelnats family, stopping the Warden from taking it. Fearing that the Warden will kill Hector if they leave him behind, Stanley refuses to leave unless Hector can come along. The attorney asks for Hector's file, but the camp staff are naturally unable to find it, so Hector is also released. Stanley and Hector then say goodbye to the other campers, and as they drive away, the drought in Green Lake comes to an end. The suitcase contains financial documents that are worth close to two million dollars, which is split evenly between Stanley and Hector. Stanley's family buys a new house and Hector hires a team of investigators to find his missing mother. Stanley's father also makes further money by inventing an antidote to foot odor, made from peaches and onions, and named "Sploosh", which is endorsed by Clyde Livingston. Meanwhile, Camp Green Lake is closed and sold to become a newly remodeled Girl Scouts' camp. Setting. Camp Green Lake is located on a dried-up lake in the U.S. state of Texas. The name is a false description, as the area is a parched, barren desert. The only weather is the scorching sun. No rain has fallen since the day Sam was murdered. The only plants mentioned are two oak trees in front of the Warden's cabin; the book notes that "the Warden owns the shade." The abandoned town of Green Lake is located by the side of the lakebed. Camp Green Lake is a juvenile detention center, where inmates spend most of their time digging holes. The majority of the book alternates between the present day story of Stanley Yelnats, the story of Elya Yelnats in Latvia (mid-1800s) and the story of Katherine Barlow in the town of Green Lake (about a generation later). Later chapters focus less on the past stories. Themes. Fairy tales. The themes typical of a folk or fairy tale are present throughout the novel, notable in both Stanley and Elya's narratives. Elya must go on an adventure to win his love's approval and prove his own worth and he is eventually placed under a witch's curse. Stanley's bad luck is blamed on the curse left on his great-great-grandfather and the Yelnats family easily believes in the power of this curse. Both Stanley and Elya are similar to fairy tale characters and are morally good, heroic protagonists who must overcome the challenges predestined for them. Both story lines are accompanied by a magic that is seen in the mountain stream, Madame Zeroni's song, and the healing power of the onions. Each of these elements in "Holes" mirror elements frequently found in fairy tales. Names. Throughout the novel, names act as a theme that allows the characters to disassociate their lives at Camp Green Lake from their lives back in the real world. Names also demonstrate irony—Camp Green Lake is not actually a camp, it's located in a desert, and there is no lake. The "campers" all label themselves differently and identify with names such as Armpit and X-Ray and the guards are referred to as counselors. One of the counselors is referred to by the boys as "Mom", representing the absent parents at Camp Green Lake. Only the woman in charge is referred to in a prison-like way and is called "Warden". The different names allow the boys to bond and form a team based in their hatred for their work and the counselors. Many of the characters also have names that connect them to their family history, like the passing down of "Stanley Yelnats" and Zero's last name of Zeroni, and remind them how the actions of their ancestors affect their modern-day lives. Stanley is the fourth "Stanley Yelnats" in his family, a name that is passed down due to its palindromic nature and adds to the connection to family history. Labor. Labor is seen throughout the novel as the children are forced to dig holes while at Camp Green Lake. This theme is unusual in children's literature as many authors portray children as carefree and without responsibility. If they do engage in work, it is synonymous with play. Critic Maria Nikolajeva contends that "Holes" is set apart through the not just manual, but forced labor Stanley and the other campers do daily. This is first referenced at the beginning of the book when the purpose of the camp is stated: "If you take a bad boy and make him dig a hole every day in the hot sun, it will turn him into a good boy". Reception. "Holes" has received many accolades: Over two decades after its original publication, "Holes" continues to be well received by critics and was ranked number 6 among all-time children's novels by "School Library Journal" in 2012. Betsy Hearne of "The New York Times" applauded the novel's integration of mystery and humor that manages to keep "Holes" light and fresh, and she characterizes it as a "family read-aloud." Roger Sutton of "The Horn Book Magazine" called Sachar's declarative style effective, and argues that it helped make the novel more poignant. Sutton appreciated the positive ending and the suspense that leads the reader to it. Film adaptation. In 2003, Walt Disney Pictures released a film version of "Holes", which was directed by Andrew Davis and written by Louis Sachar. Sequels. Two companion novels have followed "Holes": "Stanley Yelnats' Survival Guide to Camp Green Lake" (2003) and "Small Steps" (2006). "Stanley Yelnats's Survival Guide to Camp Green Lake". As Louis Sachar states: "Should you ever find yourself at Camp Green Lake—or somewhere similar—this is the guide for you." Written from Stanley's point of view, the book offers advice on everything from scorpions, rattlesnakes, yellow-spotted lizards, etc. "Small Steps". In this sequel to "Holes", former inmate Armpit is now 17 and struggling with the challenges facing an African American teenager with a criminal history. A new friendship with Ginny, who has cerebral palsy, a reunion with former friend X-Ray, a ticket-scalping scheme, a beautiful pop singer, and a frame-up all test Armpit’s resolve to "Just take small steps and keep moving forward".

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Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils is a wuxia novel by Jin Yong (Louis Cha). It was first serialised concurrently from 3 September 1963 to 27 May 1966 in the newspapers "Ming Pao" in Hong Kong and "Nanyang Siang Pau" in Singapore. It has since spawned adaptations in film and television in Hong Kong, mainland China and Taiwan. The novel's title has been a challenge for translators for years. An alternative English title is "Eight Books of the Heavenly Dragon". The major characters are based on eight races of demi-gods and semi-devils described in Buddhist cosmology. In Buddhism, these demi-gods and semi-devils are markedly different from the human race but are still bound to Saṃsāra by their own desires. Jin originally modelled each major character after one of the races but, as he continued writing, the complexity of the story made it impossible for such a simplistic mapping. Background. The main thematic element of the novel concerns the complex, troubled relationships between the great multitude of characters from various empires and martial arts sects, and the inherent bond that underlies the struggles of each. The novel examines the cause and effect that forms and breaks these bonds on five uniquely corresponding levels: self, family, society, ethnic group, and country (dominion). The novel is primarily set in the Northern Song dynasty (960–1127) of China, but its setting also covers the non-Han empires of Liao, Dali, Western Xia and Tibet. Plot. The plot is made up of separate yet intertwining story lines revolving around three protagonists – Qiao Feng, Duan Yu and Xuzhu – who become sworn brothers in chapter 41. The complex narrative switches from the initial perspective of Duan Yu to those of the other main characters and back. Duan Yu's story. Duan Yu is a young and naïve prince of the Dali Kingdom. His reverence for Buddhist teachings and disdain for bloodshed prompt him to defy his family's tradition of practising martial arts. When his father, Duan Zhengchun, tries to force him to learn martial arts, he runs away from home. Ironically, for the sake of survival, he ends up mastering three powerful skills and becomes a formidable martial artist. In addition, he acquires immunity to poison after accidentally consuming the Zhuha, a venomous toad. During his adventures, he encounters five young maidens – Zhong Ling, Mu Wanqing, Wang Yuyan, Azhu and Azi – and becomes romantically involved with the first three. However, at different points in the novel, each of them is revealed to be actually his half-sister due to Duan Zhengchun's secret affairs with other women in the past. Of these maidens, he is extremely obsessed with Wang Yuyan, who resembles a statue of a fairy-like lady he chanced upon before. He relentlessly tries to win her heart but she does not reciprocate because she has a crush on her cousin, Murong Fu. Towards the end of the novel, in a tragic twist of events, Duan Yu finds out that he is actually not Duan Zhengchun's biological son, which allows him to marry all the three maidens. In the original ending, his love life ends on a happy note when Wang Yuyan finally realises that he truly loves her and decides to marry him. However, after the book was published, many readers disliked this ending as it relegated Mu Wanqing to a minor role in the story. In the latest revision of the novel, Duan Yu and Wang Yuyan's romance is marred by a series of incidents which eventually cause them to be separated and Duan Yu ends up with Mu Wanqing and Zhong Ling. Qiao Feng's story. Qiao Feng is the charismatic chief of the Beggars' Sect who possesses strong leadership qualities and exceptional prowess in martial arts. He falls from grace after he is revealed to be a Khitan, and after he is wrongly accused of murdering some fellow martial artists. He becomes an outcast of the "wulin" (martial artists' community) of the Han Chinese-dominated Song Empire, which is at war with the Khitan-led Liao Empire. Qiao Feng's relations with the Han Chinese martial artists worsen due to the Song–Liao conflict, and also because he is now seen as a murderer and a threat to the "wulin". He is forced to sever ties with them and engage them in a one-against-several battle, during which he single-handedly kills many opponents, including some of his old friends and acquaintances. Qiao Feng leaves to verify the claims that he is a Khitan and investigate the murders. He is accompanied by Azhu, who loves him and stands by him when the "wulin" turns against him. After a long journey in disguise, he concludes that he is indeed a Khitan and assumes his ancestral name "Xiao Feng". In tracking down a mysterious "Leading Big Brother", whom he believes is responsible for the murders and his parents' deaths, he mistakenly thinks that Duan Zhengchun is the "Leading Big Brother", and challenges him to a one-on-one fight. However, the event turns into a tragedy when Azhu finds out she is one of Duan Zhengchun’s daughters and she disguises herself as him to allow Xiao Feng to kill her. It is too late when Xiao Feng realises his mistake. Before dying, Azhu tells Xiao Feng that Duan Zhengchun is actually her father, and she hopes that her sacrifice would satisfy his thirst for vengeance. Feeling regret and sorrow, Xiao Feng leaves Song territory with Azi, Azhu's younger sister, whom he has promised to take care of. Azi has a strong crush on him but he does not reciprocate due to his undying love for her sister. They wander far into northeast China and settle down among the Jurchen tribes. By chance, Xiao Feng encounters the Liao emperor, Yelü Hongji, becomes sworn brothers with him, and helps him suppress a rebellion. In return, Yelü Hongji makes Xiao Feng a powerful noble and gives him a large princely estate. Xiao Feng returns to the Song Empire later to attend a "wulin" gathering at Shaolin Monastery, where he combines forces with Duan Yu and Xuzhu to overcome their foes. At Shaolin, the truths behind all the murders are revealed and the guilty parties receive their just deserts; Xiao Feng also successfully proves his innocence and reconciles with the "wulin" before returning to Liao. Towards the end of the novel, Yelü Hongji plans to invade the Song Empire and wants Xiao Feng to support him, but the latter refuses and attempts to dissuade him to prevent bloodshed. The Liao emperor imprisons Xiao Feng and decides to proceed with the campaign. In the meantime, Azi escapes from Liao and seeks help from Duan Yu, Xuzhu and their allies. Impressed by Xiao Feng's righteousness, they manage to rally martial artists from throughout the "wulin" to join them in rescuing Xiao Feng. Even though the mission is successful, they are ultimately outnumbered and trapped by Liao forces at Yanmen Pass. Xiao Feng takes Yelü Hongji hostage and forces him to promise that there will be no war between Song and Liao for as long as he lives. He then commits suicide while Azi follows suit. Xuzhu's story. Xuzhu is a monk from the Shaolin Sect who is described to have a kind-hearted and submissive personality. He strongly believes in following the Buddhist code of conduct and refuses to break it even when he faces life-threatening situations. He follows his elders to a meeting, which marks the start of his adventures. By coincidence and sheer luck, he breaks a weiqi formation and inherits the powers of Wuyazi, the leader of the Carefree Sect. Later, he encounters Tianshan Tonglao, learns martial arts from her, and eventually succeeds her as the ruler of Lingjiu Palace, which commands allegiance from several smaller martial arts sects. Feeling overwhelmed by the sudden influx of heavy responsibilities and a major leap in martial prowess, Xuzhu desires to detach himself from these duties and return to his former monastic life. However, he is unable to wrench himself free from the various tribulations and dangers that lie ahead. He is no longer regarded as a Shaolin monk and has no choice but to accept his fate. He also has a pitiful parentage: he is actually the illegitimate son of Xuanci, the abbot of Shaolin, and Ye Erniang, one of the "Four Evils". His reunion with his parents is fated to be the first and also the last. Later, by chance again, he becomes the prince consort of Western Xia due to his previous affair with Princess Yinchuan, to whom he is deeply in love and happily married.

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Feathers (novel) Feathers is a children's historical novel by Jacqueline Woodson that was first published in 2007. The story is about a sixth-grade girl named Frannie growing up in the '70s. One day an unexpected new student causes much chaos to the class because he is the only white boy in the whole school. "Feathers" grapples with concepts such as religion, race, hope, and understanding. The book examines what it was like to grow up right after segregation had been outlawed, how all people are equal, and that hope is everywhere. The book was a Newbery Honor winner in 2008. Summary. Taking place in the 1970s, in an urban all African American school, this book highlights the hard topics of racism, faith, hope, and disabilities. A white boy comes to the school and is soon dubbed "Jesus Boy". His entrance as the only white student causes tension and misunderstandings. Some of the students believe that he is Jesus and others simply hope he is. He is very quiet and doesn't let Trevor, the class bully, hurt him. He just calmly talks to Trevor and never retaliates. Jesus Boy knows sign language which intrigues Frannie since she has known sign language her whole life. Frannie has grown up with a deaf older brother, and is very sensitive to how people treat and perceive him. She is hesitant about being friends with Jesus Boy because she does not understand him and wonders why he would cross over "the bridge" to their side. She is torn because she knows how difficult it can be to be the new kid, but she does not want to stand out. Frannie's best friend Samantha believes that Jesus Boy truly is Jesus Christ and that he has come in this time of chaos and because of the war. During all that is going on Frannie constantly thinks of the poem she read in class that said "Hope is the thing with feathers". Jesus Boy is subject to a lot of bullying by Trevor. Trevor picks on Jesus Boy because he is the only one who is lighter skinned than himself. Trevor has a white father who left his mother before Trevor was born. One day Trevor is swinging and decides to try to jump off and land on a fence because he wants to feel like he is flying. He falls short and breaks his arm. When he comes back to school he is even angrier at Jesus Boy and starts a fight with him with one arm. Trevor swings at Jesus Boy and misses which causes him to fall. The class realizes that Trevor is just a boy and that they shouldn't be afraid of him anymore. Jesus Boy and Frannie immediately go and help Trevor up out of the snow. Later Samantha asks Frannie why she helped Trevor, and Frannie doesn't know. Samantha then admits that she was wrong about Jesus Boy and says she doesn't know what to believe in anymore. Frannie tries to comfort Samantha and says "Maybe there's a little bit of Jesus inside of all of us. Maybe Jesus is just that something good or something sad or something ... something that makes us do stuff like help Trevor up even when he is cursing us out. Or maybe ... maybe Jesus is just that thing you had when the Jesus Boy got here, Samantha. Maybe Jesus is the hope that you were feeling" (p. 109). At the end of the book Frannie reflects on all that has been happening in her life. She thinks of her mother's baby, her brother, Samantha's loss of faith, and, especially, Jesus Boy. She remembers the poem she read in class and decides "Each moment, I am thinking, is a thing with feathers" Major themes. Hope. The title of the book, Feathers, is a metaphor that the book revolves around. Woodson introduces it through a poem that Frannie reads in class. After reading this, Frannie spends the rest of the book trying to understand hope. How does it have feathers? Understanding. The effort to understand one another was the focus of the sixth grade class as soon as Jesus Boy entered their classroom. Through Jesus Boy they realize that even the bully, Trevor, is a normal kid. After the fight Frannie realizes "Even though he was mean all the time, the sun still stopped and colored him and warmed him─like it did to everybody else" (p. 21) Jesus Boy helped the class to stop beating up each other so much and Trevor got scared by him. Disabilities. Frannie's older brother is deaf and this is a source of tension throughout the story. Frannie feels compelled to protect her brother in a world of people who do not understand him. One difficulty Sean encounters is girls being attracted to him until they find out he is deaf. Woodson stated in an interview with NPR that she made Sean deaf in order to humanize the deaf. One scene in the book that does this well is when Frannie asks Sean what a guitar sounds like, a game they play with one another. His sign back is 'Like rain. Coming down real soft when it's warm out and you only get a little wet but not cold. That kind of rain.' Reception. "Feathers" was well received by critics and the public alike. The book was a Newbery Honor book in 2008. Robin Smith, of Book Page, said that the book filled him with "joy and hope." Norah Piehl, of Kids Reads, reviewed the book saying, "Set against the music, politics and conflicts of the early 1970s, Jacqueline Woodson's exceptional new novel grounds universal ideas in a particular time and place." Matt Berman, of Common Sense Media stated the book is beautifully written, lyrical, thoughtful, at times even wise and that it will also be loved by adults. One reviewer raved about the book but said "While the subject matter isn't as controversial as some of Woodson's others it might lead a child living in today's society to have questions about race, segregation and religion". Overall, the book gets mostly high praise, and Jacqueline Woodson is hailed for her beautiful style of writing. One fan says Woodson writes "pages of poetry" and "without any heavy-handedness or manipulation". Other books by Woodson. Jaqueline Woodson has written 29 books spanning from picture books to young adult fiction. Her books have received numerous awards such as the Caldecott Honor, Newbery Honor, and the Coretta Scott King Award. "Feathers" most resembles her novel "Locomotion" in which she "tackled grief, trauma, death survival, and hope". all in a very short book. "Feathers" is also short but addresses big concepts of "hope, healing, faith, and understanding". Both of the books are around 115 pages and adequately handle their difficult topics.

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Strange Fruit (novel) Strange Fruit is a 1944 bestselling novel debut by American author Lillian Smith that deals with the then-forbidden and controversial theme of interracial romance. Originally using the working title "Jordan is so Chilly", Smith later changed the title to "Strange Fruit" prior to its publication. In her 1956 autobiography, singer Billie Holiday wrote that Smith chose to name the book after her 1939 song "Strange Fruit", which was about the lynching and racism against African Americans. Smith maintained the book's title referred to the "damaged, twisted people (both black and white) who are the products or results of our racist culture." After the book's release, the book was banned in Boston and Detroit for "lewdness" and crude language. "Strange Fruit" was also banned from being mailed through the U.S. Postal Service until President Franklin D. Roosevelt interceded at his wife Eleanor's request. Plot. "Strange Fruit" takes place in a Georgia town in the 1920s and focuses on the relationship between Tracy Deen, son of some prominent white townspeople, and Nonnie, a beautiful and intelligent young black woman whom he once rescued from attacking white boys. The two hold a secret affair, and Nonnie becomes pregnant with Tracy's child. Tracy secretly plans for her to marry "Big Henry", a man she despises, while he marries another white townsperson. He changes his mind after a conversation with a local preacher and intends to make his relationship with Nonnie public. Instead, he tells Nonnie of his original intent to have her wed to Big Henry, having paid him money to do so. Nonnie's brother learns of Big Henry's payments from Tracy and the reason behind Big Henry's impending wedding to Nonnie. This prompts Nonnie's brother to kill Tracy. When Tracy's body is discovered by Big Henry, Big Henry is accused of murder and is lynched. Publication history. "Strange Fruit" was first published on February 29, 1944, by Reynal and Hitchcock and sold approximately one million hardback copies. It went through two printings as an Armed Services Edition. It was subsequently republished through Penguin's Signet Books imprint (1948, several reprints), and several other publishers such as UGA Press (1985, with a foreword by Fred Hobson), Mariner Books (1992), and Harcourt Brace Jovanovich through their Harvest imprint (1992). The book has been published in multiple languages such as French (2006, Phébus), Swedish (1980, with foreword by Anders Österling), and Hebrew (אור עם). Bannings. "Strange Fruit" was banned in Boston and Detroit for charges of lewdness and language on March 20, 1944, making the book the first "#1 Bestseller" to be banned in Boston. Cambridge Police Chief Timothy J. O'Leary and the Boston Bookseller's Association both endorsed the book's banning, also asking for Smith to censor her work, removing "three lines of 'sexual phraseology.'" A letter in "The Harvard Crimson" criticized the Boston ban and the allegations of obscenity, saying that the usage of "an objectionable word" in "Strange Fruit" occurred during a scene when Nonnie is overcome by the "cruelty of her situation" and the memories of the "brutalities she has ever known", causing the book to be "the reverse of obscene". The United States Postal System temporarily banned interstate shipping of the novel in May 1944. The ban only lasted three days, as publisher Curtice Hitchcock successfully appealed to then-First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to urge her husband to lift the ban. The ban in Detroit was overturned after the United Auto Workers and Detroit Public Library worked together to appeal it. An attempt was made to overturn the ban in Boston by the Massachusetts Civil Liberties Union and Bernard DeVoto. DeVoto made a public purchase of "Strange Fruit" in the Harvard Law Book Exchange, which resulted in charges being laid against the Book Exchange. The store owner was found guilty of selling the book, which was seen as obscene material, and was fined $200. The judge presiding over the trial, District Court Judge Arthur P. Stone, remarked that the book was "obscene, tending to corrupt the morals of youth". The case was unsuccessfully appealed to the Superior Court, leaving the book "technically" banned in Boston as of 1990. Of the book's banning, Smith commented: "These people fear a book like "Strange Fruit" with a profound dread; and will seize on any pretext, however silly, to keep others and themselves, from having access to it." Adaptations. Stage play. In 1945 Smith adapted "Strange Fruit" into a stage play, directed by José Ferrer with Jane White starring as Nonnie and Mel Ferrer as Tracy. The play was José Ferrer's first production, with him choosing to have Smith adapt the play as he "didn't quite see how another playwright could capture so authentic and so personal a flavor as she already had". Smith wrote the majority of the play over the course of 1945, presenting a second draft to Ferrer in June of that year. A Baptist minister in Philadelphia initially sought to have the play banned in the city, claiming that the play would contribute towards a "depraved society". For its run in Boston, the city required that the play have several parts omitted before it was allowed to open there. The stage play was to be a large production, with multiple large set changes, 12 scenes, and a large cast of more than 30 actors and 35 stagehands. The play premiered in Montreal on October 13, 1945, moving to New York later that winter. Reception for the play was predominantly negative, with "The New York Times" remarking that although Smith had the "best of intentions", her inexperience with playwriting kept "Strange Fruit" from being satisfactory. The "Baltimore Afro-American" wrote that the veteran actors kept the play from "falling apart" but that the overall drama was "sprawling, cluttered and clumsy". Paul Robeson voiced his support for the play, saying that he wished "every American could see 'Strange Fruit'". After the play completed its tour, Smith decided against allowing any further productions to be performed, calling it a "bitter and terrible fiasco". Smith's sister, Esther, has stated that the version of the stage play that was performed was not the original version that Smith preferred and that this version had been destroyed in a house fire in 1955. Short film. In 1978, a short film adaptation of "Strange Fruit" was filmed as a thesis film for the Center for Advanced Film Studies, with the movie being produced and directed by Seth Pinsker and the screenplay being written by Stephen Katz. The short was released in 1979 and was nominated for an Academy Award at the 51st Academy Awards for Best Live Action Short, but lost to Taylor Hackford's "Teenage Father". The film is very loosely adapted from Smith's book and the Holiday song, with the focus of the story changing from an interracial romance to center on Henry, who has been made into an African-American painter. The film's time period is shifted to 1948 and portrays Henry as he is reluctantly persuaded to participate in an upcoming election. As a result, Henry is lynched, prompting his community into action. "Strange Fruit" was shot on 16 mm film. Themes. Themes in "Strange Fruit" include racism, interracial romance, and how racism affected the people and community around it. Of the book, Ellen Goldner (2001) wrote that "In Smith's hands, then, "strange fruit" refers not to black bodies swaying in the summer breeze ... but to the damaged, "split", primarily "white" people raised in a culture of deep racial, sexual, and class-based taboos and conflict. For Smith, racism worked as an ambient, often disembodied, but vicious and relentless pressure on a culture, both white and black, all too frequently too weak to fight it". Gary Richards (2007) wrote that there were hints of same-sex attraction between Tracy's sister Laura and their mother Alma, with one of the goals of the book being to "facilitate both racial and sexual tolerance". Grace Elizabeth Hale (2009) argued that the book targeted positive images of the "gallant South", comparing regional politics to "contemporary global and national movements". The book also deals with the issue of the sexual exploitation of African-American females. Cheryl Johnson, in 2001, remarked that in one scene Smith depicts an attack on a six-year-old Nonnie by several white boys, who only stop once Tracy intervenes. They're initially confused by his actions, but eventually assume that Tracy stopped them because she "belongs" to him, as they did not see the molestation of an African-American girl as being wrong or anything to be punished for. Reception. Initially, the book was met with controversy over its depiction of interracial romance and sex, with the book being banned from several locations including the United States Postal Service. The book sold well and within a few months of its initial publication in February, topped the bestseller list of the "New York Times Book Review". A Georgia newspaper complained that the relationship in the book made "courtship between Negroes and whites appear attractive" and Smith worried that the focus on the romance in the book would detract from its political message. A reviewer for the "Milwaukee Journal" called the book a "great opera" and "indicts the thing called 'white supremacy'". A 1944 review from "The Rotarian" praised the novel, calling it "absorbingly dramatic" and citing its realism as a highlight. Johnson remarks that Smith refrained from portraying Nonnie in any of the then typical "racist stereotypes of black women as either mammies or Jezebels", making her "closer to images of the 'ideal' white woman: beautiful, kind, compassionate, and loving. For Smith, Nonnie simply happens to be black". Johnson further wrote that Nonnie was not written to be ashamed of her blackness, nor written to be an "honorary white woman". In popular culture. The Cambridge, Massachusetts restaurant "The Friendly Toast" included a drink called "Strange Fruit" on a menu of cocktails named after banned books. In 2015 this generated controversy, as a patron took the name as a reference to the song of the same name and found it inappropriate. The drink was later removed from the menu.

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Southland (novel) Southland is a "Los Angeles Times" best-selling novel and "Best book of 2003" by Nina Revoyr. It focuses on quest for the past and present of racial justice in Los Angeles. The novel is also a Book Sense 76 pick, an Edgar Award finalist, and the winner of the Ferro-Grumley Award and the Lambda Literary Award. Publishers Weekly called it "Compelling... never lacking in detail and authentic atmosphere, the novel cements Revoyr's reputation as one of the freshest young chroniclers of life in L.A.

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The Great Gilly Hopkins The Great Gilly Hopkins is a realistic children's novel by Katherine Paterson. It was published by Crowell in 1978 and it won the U.S. National Book Award next year. In 2012 it was ranked number 63 among all-time children's novels in a survey published by "School Library Journal" – the third of three books by Paterson in the top 100. A film adaptation starring Sophie Nélisse as Gilly Hopkins and Kathy Bates as Trotter was released in 2015. The novel has been translated into Catalan, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, and Swedish, and Árpád Göncz’s Hungarian translation has been adapted into a radio play. Plot summary. Galadriel "Gilly" Hopkins is a mean, brash 11-year-old girl who is headed for yet another foster home. She hates living with different people all the time and just wants to settle in with her birth mother, Courtney Rutherford Hopkins, whose photograph Gilly secretly treasures. Gilly doesn't like the look of her new foster mom, Mrs. Trotter, a "fat hippo", and decides she is going to hate her whole life. Gilly hatches a plan to escape from Trotter and steals the money she needs for it to work. She knows that her mother lives in San Francisco, California so she writes a letter to Courtney saying that her beloved Galadriel will be with her soon. When Gilly escapes the first time, she gets caught by police and Trotter immediately comes down to the station to retrieve her. Gilly's grandmother, Nonnie, comes to Trotter's house and tells her that she will take Gilly home. Nonnie was previously unaware that she had a granddaughter. By this time Gilly realizes that she really wants to be with Trotter. However, the law says that Gilly must go with Nonnie, so she goes to Nonnie's house. Then Gilly gets good news: her mother is coming. But when she goes to the airport, Courtney is not the woman in Gilly's photograph: she has stringy hair and a lot of other traits Gilly didn't expect, like being selfish. Gilly also finds out that her mother only came because Nonnie paid her, not because she wanted to come. She realizes for the first time how foolish she has been and that she loves Trotter. The story ends with Gilly on the phone, crying to Trotter to take her back. Trotter, in turn, gently convinces her that her home is with Nonnie. Awards and nominations. "Gilly Hopkins" has won several major accolades, including the 1979 National Book Award in category Children's Literature, a 1979 Christopher Award, the 1979 Jane Addams Award and a 1979 Newbery Honor. It has also won several U.S. state awards including the 1981 Georgia Children's Books: 1966–1978. Film adaptation. On February 8, 2013, it was announced that Stephen Herek would direct a film adaptation of the book, with Kathy Bates as Trotter and Danny Glover in major roles. On February 6, 2014, Sophie Nélisse as Gilly Hopkins, Glenn Close and Octavia Spencer joined the cast of the film. On May 9, 2014, Julia Stiles and Bill Cobbs joined the cast of the film. Principal photography began on April 9, 2014, and ended on June 15, 2014. The film premiered at the SCHLINGEL International Film Festival October 6, 2015, and was released by Lionsgate Premiere on October 7, 2016. Stage adaptation. The novel was adapted as a children's stage musical in 1996 and is available for licensing through Samuel French. Television adaptation. The novel was adapted as a made-for-TV movie produced by Hanna-Barbera Productions was televised January 19, 1981, directed by Jeffrey Hayden and teleplay by Charles Pratt Jr. during "CBS Afternoon Playhouse".

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On the Come Up On the Come Up, published on February 5, 2019 by Balzer + Bray, is a young adult novel by Angie Thomas . It tells the story of Bri, a sixteen-year old rapper hoping to fill the shoes of her father and 'make it' as an underground hip-hop legend. Overnight, Bri becomes an internet sensation after posting a rap hit which sparks controversy. As Bri defeats the odds to 'make it' she battles controversy to achieve her dreams. It is set in the same universe (Garden Heights) as Thomas' first book "The Hate U Give". Reception. The book was well reviewed by The New York Times, Vox, and The Washington Post. The American Library Association named the book one of the best released for young adults in 2020. Awards. "On the Come Up" received several accollades: Film adaptation. On February 4, 2019, Fox 2000 Pictures acquired the rights to adapt the novel with George Tillman Jr. directing and producing with Robert Teitel, and Jay Marcus from State Street Pictures, alongside Thomas Marty Bowen, Isaac Klausner and John Fischer of Temple Hill Entertainment. On December 11, 2019, after Disney acquisition of 21st Century Fox and closing of Fox 2000, Paramount Players acquired the film adaptation with Kay Oyegun hired to write the script and Tillman Jr. still attached to direct. On October 19, 2020, Wanuri Kahiu replaced Tillman Jr. as director of the film.

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Racists (novel) Racists is a 2006 novel by Kunal Basu about a scientific experiment in the mid-19th century in which a white girl and a black boy are raised together as savages on a small uninhabited island off the coast of Africa. The long-term experiment is devised by the "racists" of the title, two rival scientists—one British, one French—to once and for all settle the question of racial superiority. Plot. Two scientists decide to settle the question of racial superiority by leaving two children—a white girl and black boy—alone on an island to be raised without speaking by only a nurse, Norah. The British scientist Samuel Bates believes that the girl will emerge as the leader, while the French scientist Jean-Louis Belavoix believes that the two races can not live in peace and the children will ultimately murder each other. The experiment begins to run into problems when Bates and Belavoix argue about the validity of cranial measurements. Meanwhile, Bates's long suffering assistant Nicholas Quartley falls in love with Norah and decides to rescue her from the island.

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Mississippi Trial, 1955 Mississippi Trial, 1955 is a historical fiction young adult novel by American author Chris Crowe, published in 2002. Set in Mississippi in 1955, the novel tells the true story of the abduction and murder of African-American teenaged boy Emmett Till as well as the trial of his murderers through the point of view of Till's fictionalized white friend Hiram Hillburn. The novel received mixed, but mostly positive reviews and won the International Reading Association Children's Book Award for Young Adult Fiction in 2003. Plot. In 1955, Hiram Hillburn, a eight-year-old white male, lives in Arizona with his father. He resents his father for moving the family from Greenwood, Mississippi when he was nine, away from his beloved Southern grandfather. Despite his father's concerns about letting him go due to the racial tensions in the city, Hiram is given permission to spend the summer visiting his grandfather in Mississippi. At the train station he meets his grandfather's housekeeper Ruthanne and her visiting cousin Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old African American boy from Chicago. After reuniting with his grandfather, he begins to notice his grandfather's culturally ingrained racism. He meets Emmett again whom he rescues from drowning in a river. They begin talking and realize they have a lot in common. Hiram runs into his old friend R.C. Rydell with whom he joins on a fishing trip where R.C. harasses and assaults Emmett. While Hiram does not participate, he does not help Emmett either and feels guilty. A few days later, R.C. tells Hiram that he is going with some white men to talk to a young African-American man who offended a white woman at a grocery store. Concerned for this young man, Hiram calls the police. However, the police are unhelpful to Hiram; they refuse to act, stating the boy from Chicago has to learn some manners. At this point, Hiram realizes they are talking about Emmett. Emmett is reported missing shortly after and his corpse is found in the river a few days later with a cotton gin pulley around his neck. Two white men are arrested for kidnapping and go on trial for the murder of Emmett. Hiram delays his trip home to serve as a witness for the trial due to the information he had told the police. His grandfather wants him to stay out of the trial to avoid the drama, but Hiram wants to help find justice for Emmett causing contention between the two. Hiram stays for the entire trial, despite not being called as a witness and the suspects are acquitted of murder at the relief of Hiram's grandfather. Hiram becomes suspicious after seeing his grandfather sell his blue truck but his grandfather becomes angry when Hillburn confronts him about it. After running into his neighbors, Hiram learns that his grandfather was spotted with the suspects on the night of Emmett's disappearance. Hiram, again, confronts his grandfather about this information upon which his grandfather unapologetically admits to being involved. Having been absent since the night Emmett went missing, Hiram runs in R.C. who tells him that he considered participating in Emmett's abduction but decided instead to escape his abusive living situation and move to Jackson, Mississippi where he had been living ever since. When Hiram prepares to return to Arizona, he expects an apology from his grandfather but is disappointed to never receive one. He meets his father at the railway station whom he begins to tell everything, repairing their previously broken relationship. Publication. Author Chris Crowe was unfamiliar with the Emmett Till case before researching for his book "Presenting Mildred D. Taylor". In one of Taylor's essays, she described how she was affected by the Till murder as a child. After researching the case, Crowe determined that, despite its wide coverage at the time, most people were unfamiliar with the case and was excluded from most United States history classes. Crowe wrote "Mississippi Trial, 1955" in order to teach American young adults about the case. He decided to tell the history of the murder and trial through a fiction story as a way to appeal to young adults. It was published in 2002 by Phyllis Fogelman Books/Penguin Putnam. Reception. The novel received mixed, yet mostly positive reviews. "Kirkus Reviews" said of the novel that, "Teen readers will find themselves caught up in Hiram's very real struggle to do the right thing." "Publishers Weekly" called the novel a "promising debut" and that although "the conclusion feels a little hasty, Crowe's otherwise measured treatment will get readers thinking." Awards. The novel won the International Reading Association Children's Book Award for Young Adult Fiction in 2003. It was also awarded the Jefferson Cup Award for best U.S. historical fiction. In 2003, the book was honored on the American Library Association's list of Best Books for Young Adults. Additionally it was added on the 2003 list of Notable Social Studies Trade Books for Young People by the National Council for Social Studies.

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Out of Shadows Out of Shadows is a 2010 children's historical novel by Jason Wallace, published by Andersen Press on 28 January 2010. Set in 1980s Zimbabwe, the story follows white teenager Robert Jacklin at a prestigious boarding school as he confronts bullying, anti-black racism, his own morality as well as the political instability of the time. His debut novel, it is partly inspired by Wallace's own experiences attending a boarding school in Zimbabwe after the civil war. The novel was rejected by publishers one hundred times before being published by Andersen Press. The novel received favourable reviews and won the 2010 Costa Book Award for Children's Book, the 2011 Branford Boase Award and the 2011 UKLA Book Award. It was also shortlisted for the 2010 Booktrust Teenage Prize and the 2011 Carnegie Medal. Background. "Out of Shadows" took one year and six months to complete. Wallace himself attended a boarding school in Zimbabwe not too long after the Rhodesian Bush War/Zimbabwean War of Liberation ended. While a student there, he wanted to write a story of what he had seen and experienced. The political atmosphere in Zimbabwe was declining and unstable, and inspired Wallace to begin writing fictional stories of his encounters. Though the characters in "Out of Shadows" are not real, they served to demonstrate the attitudes or personalities "a very few people" were portraying. Wallace notes that he "came up with the idea of "What if...?" and took it from there" when he was writing the novel. There may be many similar aspects of the novel's story may share with Wallace's real life but they are general details and are not very specific. Synopsis. In 1983, thirteen-year-old Robert Jacklin arrives from England at Haven School, an elite boys' boarding school in Zimbabwe. He is the son of a British intellectual attached to the British Embassy. Robert befriends Nelson Ndube, one of the few black pupils at the school, but eventually turns to the white elite of the school instead in an effort to find safety and acceptances. Many of the white students, particularly Ivan Hascott, are racist bullies who are still angered that the country's white minority lost power to the its black majority after the recent civil war. Robert wrestles with his conscience while becoming drawn into their ideology and practices. Ivan's family has suffered during Robert Mugabe's rise to power, and Ivan pressures Robert into joining his quest for revenge on black Africans. Robert becomes disturbed by Ivan's increasingly violent behavior. Publication. "Out of Shadows" was rejected by one hundred literary agents and publishers before being picked up by Andersen Press. "Out of Shadows" was first published in paperback format in the United Kingdom by Andersen Press on 28 January 2010. Reception. In a starred review, "Kirkus Reviews" called the novel a "first-rate, surprisingly believable thriller" and praised Wallace's "mastery" in portraying race relations in post-war Zimbabwe. "Publishers Weekly" gave the novel a favourable review, writing, "Racial conflict, corruption, and the cycle of abuse are conveyed with authenticity in this uncomfortable, unvarnished story." In her review for "The Times", writer Amanda Craig praised the novel as "something that schools should study and readers read." In his review for "The Guardian", author Patrick Ness criticized the novel for its "often unsubtle and occasionally unconvincing" plot as well as the "full psychology" of Robert's journey into and out of Ivan's racist crusade for not being "as nuanced as it really needs to be". Ness, however, nonetheless called the novel "a powerful, devastating read". Writing in the "Independent on Sunday", Nicholas Tucker called it an "excellent" novel. Booktrust called it an "expert and disturbing examination of the meaning of morality and of the comprehensive and complex legacy of conflict and injustice." Emma Lee-Potter of the "Daily Express" compared it to "Lord of the Flies" and wrote that it "could well become a children's classic."

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To Kill a Mockingbird To Kill a Mockingbird is a novel by the American author Harper Lee. It was published in 1960 and was instantly successful. In the United States, it is widely read in high schools and middle schools. "To Kill a Mockingbird" has become a classic of modern American literature, winning the Pulitzer Prize. The plot and characters are loosely based on Lee's observations of her family, her neighbors and an event that occurred near her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, in 1936, when she was ten. Despite dealing with the serious issues of rape and racial inequality, the novel is renowned for its warmth and humor. Atticus Finch, the narrator's father, has served as a moral hero for many readers and as a model of integrity for lawyers. The historian Joseph Crespino explains, "In the twentieth century, "To Kill a Mockingbird" is probably the most widely read book dealing with race in America, and its main character, Atticus Finch, the most enduring fictional image of racial heroism." As a Southern Gothic and "Bildungsroman" novel, the primary themes of "To Kill a Mockingbird" involve racial injustice and the destruction of innocence. Scholars have noted that Lee also addresses issues of class, courage, compassion, and gender roles in the Deep South. The book is widely taught in schools in the United States with lessons that emphasize tolerance and decry prejudice. Despite its themes, "To Kill a Mockingbird" has been subject to campaigns for removal from public classrooms, often challenged for its use of racial epithets. In 2006, British librarians ranked the book ahead of the Bible as one "every adult should read before they die". Reaction to the novel varied widely upon publication. Despite the number of copies sold and its widespread use in education, literary analysis of it is sparse. Author Mary McDonough Murphy, who collected individual impressions of "To Kill a Mockingbird" by several authors and public figures, calls the book "an astonishing phenomenon". It was adapted into an Academy Award-winning film in 1962 by director Robert Mulligan, with a screenplay by Horton Foote. Since 1990, a play based on the novel has been performed annually in Harper Lee's hometown. "To Kill a Mockingbird" was Lee's only published book until "Go Set a Watchman", an earlier draft of "To Kill a Mockingbird", was published on July 14, 2015. Lee continued to respond to her work's impact until her death in February 2016, although she had refused any personal publicity for herself or the novel since 1964. Biographical background and publication. Born in 1926, Harper Lee grew up in the Southern town of Monroeville, Alabama, where she became close friends with soon-to-be-famous writer Truman Capote. She attended Huntingdon College in Montgomery (1944–45), and then studied law at the University of Alabama (1945–49). While attending college, she wrote for campus literary magazines: "Huntress" at Huntingdon and the humor magazine "Rammer Jammer" at the University of Alabama. At both colleges, she wrote short stories and other works about racial injustice, a rarely mentioned topic on such campuses at the time. In 1950, Lee moved to New York City, where she worked as a reservation clerk for British Overseas Airways Corporation; there, she began writing a collection of essays and short stories about people in Monroeville. Hoping to be published, Lee presented her writing in 1957 to a literary agent recommended by Capote. An editor at J. B. Lippincott, who bought the manuscript, advised her to quit the airline and concentrate on writing. Donations from friends allowed her to write uninterruptedly for a year. After finishing the first draft and returning it to Lippincott, the manuscript, at that point titled "Go Set a Watchman", fell into the hands of Therese von Hohoff Torrey, known professionally as Tay Hohoff. Hohoff was impressed, "[T]he spark of the true writer flashed in every line," she would later recount in a corporate history of Lippincott, but as Hohoff saw it, the manuscript was by no means fit for publication. It was, as she described it, "more a series of anecdotes than a fully conceived novel." During the following two and a half years, she led Lee from one draft to the next until the book finally achieved its finished form. After the "Watchman" title was rejected, it was re-titled "Atticus" but Lee renamed it "To Kill a Mockingbird" to reflect that the story went beyond a character portrait. The book was published on July 11, 1960. The editorial team at Lippincott warned Lee that she would probably sell only several thousand copies. In 1964, Lee recalled her hopes for the book when she said, I never expected any sort of success with 'Mockingbird.' ... I was hoping for a quick and merciful death at the hands of the reviewers but, at the same time, I sort of hoped someone would like it enough to give me encouragement. Public encouragement. I hoped for a little, as I said, but I got rather a whole lot, and in some ways this was just about as frightening as the quick, merciful death I'd expected. Instead of a "quick and merciful death", "Reader's Digest Condensed Books" chose the book for reprinting in part, which gave it a wide readership immediately. Since the original publication, the book has never been out of print. Plot summary. The story, told by the six-year-old Jean Louise Finch, takes place during three years (1933–35) of the Great Depression in the fictional town of Maycomb, Alabama, the seat of Maycomb County. Nicknamed Scout, she lives with her older brother Jeremy, nicknamed Jem, and their widowed father Atticus, a middle-aged lawyer. Jem and Scout befriend a boy named Dill, who visits Maycomb to stay with his aunt each summer. The three children are terrified, yet fascinated by their neighbor, the reclusive Arthur "Boo" Radley. The adults of Maycomb are hesitant to talk about Boo, and few of them have seen him for many years. The children feed one another's imagination with rumors about his appearance and reasons for remaining hidden, and they fantasize about how to get him out of his house. After two summers of friendship with Dill, Scout and Jem find that someone is leaving them small gifts in a tree outside the Radley place. Several times the mysterious Boo makes gestures of affection to the children, but, to their disappointment, he never appears in person. Judge Taylor appoints Atticus to defend Tom Robinson, a black man who has been accused of raping a young white woman, Mayella Ewell. Although many of Maycomb's citizens disapprove, Atticus agrees to defend Tom to the best of his ability. Other children taunt Jem and Scout for Atticus's actions, calling him a "nigger-lover". Scout is tempted to stand up for her father's honor by fighting, even though he has told her not to. One night, Atticus faces a group of men intent on lynching Tom. This crisis is averted in an unexpected manner: Scout, Jem, and Dill show up, and Scout inadvertently breaks the mob mentality by recognizing and talking to a classmate's father, and the would-be lynchers disperse. Atticus does not want Jem and Scout to be present at Tom Robinson's trial. No seat is available on the main floor, but the Rev. Sykes invites Jem, Scout, and Dill to watch from the colored balcony. Atticus establishes that Mayella and Bob Ewell are lying. It is revealed that Mayella made sexual advances toward Tom, subsequently resulting in her being beaten by her father. The townspeople refer to the Ewells as "white trash" who are not to be trusted, but the jury convicts Tom regardless. Jem's faith in justice is badly shaken. Atticus is hopeful that he can get the verdict overturned, but Tom is shot and killed while trying to escape from prison. Despite Tom's conviction, Bob Ewell is humiliated by the events of the trial, Atticus explaining that he "destroyed [Ewell's] last shred of credibility at that trial." Ewell vows revenge, spitting in Atticus' face, trying to break into the judge's house and menacing Tom Robinson's widow. Finally, he attacks Jem and Scout while they are walking home on a dark night after the school Halloween pageant. Jem suffers a broken arm in the struggle, but amid the confusion, someone comes to the children's rescue. The mysterious man carries Jem home, where Scout realizes that he is Boo Radley. Sheriff Tate arrives and discovers Ewell dead from a knife wound. Atticus believes that Jem was responsible, but Tate is certain it was Boo. The sheriff decides that, to protect Boo's privacy, he will report that Ewell simply fell on his own knife during the attack. Boo asks Scout to walk him home. After she says goodbye to him at his front door, he disappears, never to be seen again by Scout. While standing on the Radley porch, Scout imagines life from Boo's perspective. Autobiographical elements. Lee said that "To Kill a Mockingbird" is not an autobiography, but rather an example of how an author "should write about what he knows and write truthfully". Nevertheless, several people and events from Lee's childhood parallel those of the fictional Scout. Amasa Coleman Lee, Lee's father, was an attorney similar to Atticus Finch. In 1919, he defended two black men accused of murder. After they were convicted, hanged and mutilated, he never took another criminal case. Lee's father was also the editor and publisher of the Monroeville newspaper. Although more of a proponent of racial segregation than Atticus, he gradually became more liberal in his later years. Though Scout's mother died when she was a baby, Lee was 25 when her mother, Frances Cunningham Finch, died. Lee's mother was prone to a nervous condition that rendered her mentally and emotionally absent. Lee's older brother Edwin was the inspiration for Jem. Lee modeled the character of Dill on Truman Capote, her childhood friend known then as Truman Persons. Just as Dill lived next door to Scout during the summer, Capote lived next door to Lee with his aunts while his mother visited New York City. Like Dill, Capote had an impressive imagination and a gift for fascinating stories. Both Lee and Capote loved to read, and were atypical children in some ways: Lee was a scrappy tomboy who was quick to fight, and Capote was ridiculed for his advanced vocabulary and lisp. She and Capote made up and acted out stories they wrote on an old Underwood typewriter that Lee's father gave them. They became good friends when both felt alienated from their peers; Capote called the two of them "apart people". In 1960, Capote and Lee traveled to Kansas together to investigate the multiple murders that were the basis for Capote's nonfiction novel "In Cold Blood". Down the street from the Lees lived a family whose house was always boarded up; they served as the models for the fictional Radleys. The son of the family got into some legal trouble and the father kept him at home for 24 years out of shame. He was hidden until virtually forgotten; he died in 1952. The origin of Tom Robinson is less clear, although many have speculated that his character was inspired by several models. When Lee was 10 years old, a white woman near Monroeville accused a black man named Walter Lett of raping her. The story and the trial were covered by her father's newspaper, which reported that Lett was convicted and sentenced to death. After a series of letters appeared claiming Lett had been falsely accused, his sentence was commuted to life in prison. He died there of tuberculosis in 1937. Scholars believe that Robinson's difficulties reflect the notorious case of the Scottsboro Boys, in which nine black men were convicted of raping two white women on negligible evidence. However, in 2005, Lee stated that she had in mind something less sensational, although the Scottsboro case served "the same purpose" to display Southern prejudices. Emmett Till, a black teenager who was murdered for allegedly flirting with a white woman in Mississippi in 1955, and whose death is credited as a catalyst for the Civil Rights Movement, is also considered a model for Tom. Style. The strongest element of style noted by critics and reviewers is Lee's talent for narration, which in an early review in "Time" was called "tactile brilliance". Writing a decade later, another scholar noted, "Harper Lee has a remarkable gift of story-telling. Her art is visual, and with cinematographic fluidity and subtlety we see a scene melting into another scene without jolts of transition." Lee combines the narrator's voice of a child observing her surroundings with a grown woman's reflecting on her childhood, using the ambiguity of this voice combined with the narrative technique of flashback to play intricately with perspectives. This narrative method allows Lee to tell a "delightfully deceptive" story that mixes the simplicity of childhood observation with adult situations complicated by hidden motivations and unquestioned tradition. However, at times the blending causes reviewers to question Scout's preternatural vocabulary and depth of understanding. Both Harding LeMay and the novelist and literary critic Granville Hicks expressed doubt that children, as sheltered as Scout and Jem, could understand the complexities and horrors involved in the trial for Tom Robinson's life. Writing about Lee's style and use of humor in a tragic story, scholar Jacqueline Tavernier-Courbin states: "Laughter ... [exposes] the gangrene under the beautiful surface but also by demeaning it; one can hardly ... be controlled by what one is able to laugh at." Scout's precocious observations about her neighbors and behavior inspired National Endowment of the Arts director David Kipen to call her "hysterically funny". To address complex issues, however, Tavernier-Courbin notes that Lee uses parody, satire, and irony effectively by using a child's perspective. After Dill promises to marry her, then spends too much time with Jem, Scout reasons the best way to get him to pay attention to her is to beat him up, which she does several times. Scout's first day in school is a satirical treatment of education; her teacher says she must undo the damage Atticus has wrought in teaching her to read and write, and forbids Atticus from teaching her further. Lee treats the most unfunny situations with irony, however, as Jem and Scout try to understand how Maycomb embraces racism and still tries sincerely to remain a decent society. Satire and irony are used to such an extent that Tavernier-Courbin suggests one interpretation for the book's title: Lee is doing the mocking—of education, the justice system, and her own society—by using them as subjects of her humorous disapproval. Critics also note the entertaining methods used to drive the plot. When Atticus is out of town, Jem locks a Sunday school classmate in the church basement with the furnace during a game of Shadrach. This prompts their black housekeeper Calpurnia to escort Scout and Jem to her church, which allows the children a glimpse into her personal life, as well as Tom Robinson's. Scout falls asleep during the Halloween pageant and makes a tardy entrance onstage, causing the audience to laugh uproariously. She is so distracted and embarrassed that she prefers to go home in her ham costume, which saves her life. Genres. Scholars have characterized "To Kill a Mockingbird" as both a Southern Gothic and a "Bildungsroman". The grotesque and near-supernatural qualities of Boo Radley and his house, and the element of racial injustice involving Tom Robinson, contribute to the aura of the Gothic in the novel. Lee used the term "Gothic" to describe the architecture of Maycomb's courthouse and in regard to Dill's exaggeratedly morbid performances as Boo Radley. Outsiders are also an important element of Southern Gothic texts and Scout and Jem's questions about the hierarchy in the town cause scholars to compare the novel to "Catcher in the Rye" and "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn". Despite challenging the town's systems, Scout reveres Atticus as an authority above all others, because he believes that following one's conscience is the highest priority, even when the result is social ostracism. However, scholars debate about the Southern Gothic classification, noting that Boo Radley is, in fact, human, protective, and benevolent. Furthermore, in addressing themes such as alcoholism, incest, rape, and racial violence, Lee wrote about her small town realistically rather than melodramatically. She portrays the problems of individual characters as universal underlying issues in every society. As children coming of age, Scout and Jem face hard realities and learn from them. Lee seems to examine Jem's sense of loss about how his neighbors have disappointed him more than Scout's. Jem says to their neighbor Miss Maudie the day after the trial, "It's like bein' a caterpillar wrapped in a cocoon ... I always thought Maycomb folks were the best folks in the world, least that's what they seemed like". This leads him to struggle with understanding the separations of race and class. Just as the novel is an illustration of the changes Jem faces, it is also an exploration of the realities Scout must face as an atypical girl on the verge of womanhood. As one scholar writes, ""To Kill a Mockingbird" can be read as a feminist Bildungsroman, for Scout emerges from her childhood experiences with a clear sense of her place in her community and an awareness of her potential power as the woman she will one day be." Themes. Despite the novel's immense popularity upon publication, it has not received the close critical attention paid to other modern American classics. Don Noble, the editor of a book of essays about the novel, estimates that the ratio of sales to analytical essays may be a million to one. Christopher Metress writes that the book is "an icon whose emotive sway remains strangely powerful because it also remains unexamined". Noble suggests it does not receive academic attention because of its consistent status as a best-seller ("If that many people like it, it can't be any good.") and that general readers seem to feel they do not require analytical interpretation. Harper Lee had remained famously detached from interpreting the novel since the mid-1960s. However, she gave some insight into her themes when, in a rare letter to the editor, she wrote in response to the passionate reaction her book caused:Surely it is plain to the simplest intelligence that "To Kill a Mockingbird" spells out in words of seldom more than two syllables a code of honor and conduct, Christian in its ethic, that is the heritage of all Southerners." Southern life and racial injustice. When the book was released, reviewers noted that it was divided into two parts, and opinion was mixed about Lee's ability to connect them. The first part of the novel concerns the children's fascination with Boo Radley and their feelings of safety and comfort in the neighborhood. Reviewers were generally charmed by Scout and Jem's observations of their quirky neighbors. One writer was so impressed by Lee's detailed explanations of the people of Maycomb that he categorized the book as Southern romantic regionalism. This sentimentalism can be seen in Lee's representation of the Southern caste system to explain almost every character's behavior in the novel. Scout's Aunt Alexandra attributes Maycomb's inhabitants' faults and advantages to genealogy (families that have gambling streaks and drinking streaks), and the narrator sets the action and characters amid a finely detailed background of the Finch family history and the history of Maycomb. This regionalist theme is further reflected in Mayella Ewell's apparent powerlessness to admit her advances toward Tom Robinson, and Scout's definition of "fine folks" being people with good sense who do the best they can with what they have. The South itself, with its traditions and taboos, seems to drive the plot more than the characters. The second part of the novel deals with what book reviewer Harding LeMay termed "the spirit-corroding shame of the civilized white Southerner in the treatment of the Negro". In the years following its release, many reviewers considered "To Kill a Mockingbird" a novel primarily concerned with race relations. Claudia Durst Johnson considers it "reasonable to believe" that the novel was shaped by two events involving racial issues in Alabama: Rosa Parks' refusal to yield her seat on a city bus to a white person, which sparked the Montgomery bus boycott, and the 1956 riots at the University of Alabama after Autherine Lucy and Polly Myers were admitted (Myers eventually withdrew her application and Lucy was expelled, but reinstated in 1980). In writing about the historical context of the novel's construction, two other literary scholars remark: ""To Kill a Mockingbird" was written and published amidst the most significant and conflict-ridden social change in the South since the Civil War and Reconstruction. Inevitably, despite its mid-1930s setting, the story told from the perspective of the 1950s voices the conflicts, tensions, and fears induced by this transition." Scholar Patrick Chura, who suggests Emmett Till was a model for Tom Robinson, enumerates the injustices endured by the fictional Tom that Till also faced. Chura notes the icon of the black rapist causing harm to the representation of the "mythologized vulnerable and sacred Southern womanhood". Any transgressions by black males that merely hinted at sexual contact with white females during the time the novel was set often resulted in a punishment of death for the accused. Tom Robinson's trial was juried by poor white farmers who convicted him despite overwhelming evidence of his innocence, as more educated and moderate white townspeople supported the jury's decision. Furthermore, the victim of racial injustice in "To Kill a Mockingbird" was physically impaired, which made him unable to commit the act he was accused of, but also crippled him in other ways. Roslyn Siegel includes Tom Robinson as an example of the recurring motif among white Southern writers of the black man as "stupid, pathetic, defenseless, and dependent upon the fair dealing of the whites, rather than his own intelligence to save him". Although Tom is spared from being lynched, he is killed with excessive violence during an attempted escape from prison, being shot seventeen times. The theme of racial injustice appears symbolically in the novel as well. For example, Atticus must shoot a rabid dog, even though it is not his job to do so. Carolyn Jones argues that the dog represents prejudice within the town of Maycomb, and Atticus, who waits on a deserted street to shoot the dog, must fight against the town's racism without help from other white citizens. He is also alone when he faces a group intending to lynch Tom Robinson and once more in the courthouse during Tom's trial. Lee even uses dreamlike imagery from the mad dog incident to describe some of the courtroom scenes. Jones writes, "[t]he real mad dog in Maycomb is the racism that denies the humanity of Tom Robinson ... When Atticus makes his summation to the jury, he literally bares himself to the jury's and the town's anger." Class. In a 1964 interview, Lee remarked that her aspiration was "to be ... the Jane Austen of South Alabama." Both Austen and Lee challenged the social status quo and valued individual worth over social standing. When Scout embarrasses her poorer classmate, Walter Cunningham, at the Finch home one day, Calpurnia, their black cook, chastises and punishes her for doing so. Atticus respects Calpurnia's judgment, and later in the book even stands up to his sister, the formidable Aunt Alexandra, when she strongly suggests they fire Calpurnia. One writer notes that Scout, "in Austenian fashion", satirizes women with whom she does not wish to identify. Literary critic Jean Blackall lists the priorities shared by the two authors: "affirmation of order in society, obedience, courtesy, and respect for the individual without regard for status". Scholars argue that Lee's approach to class and race was more complex "than ascribing racial prejudice primarily to 'poor white trash' ... Lee demonstrates how issues of gender and class intensify prejudice, silence the voices that might challenge the existing order, and greatly complicate many Americans' conception of the causes of racism and segregation." Lee's use of the middle-class narrative voice is a literary device that allows an intimacy with the reader, regardless of class or cultural background, and fosters a sense of nostalgia. Sharing Scout and Jem's perspective, the reader is allowed to engage in relationships with the conservative antebellum Mrs. Dubose; the lower-class Ewells, and the Cunninghams who are equally poor but behave in vastly different ways; the wealthy but ostracized Mr. Dolphus Raymond; and Calpurnia and other members of the black community. The children internalize Atticus' admonition not to judge someone until they have walked around in that person's skin, gaining a greater understanding of people's motives and behavior. Courage and compassion. The novel has been noted for its poignant exploration of different forms of courage. Scout's impulsive inclination to fight students who insult Atticus reflects her attempt to stand up for him and defend him. Atticus is the moral center of the novel, however, and he teaches Jem one of the most significant lessons of courage. In a statement that both foreshadows Atticus' motivation for defending Tom Robinson and describes Mrs. Dubose, who is determined to break herself of a morphine addiction, Atticus tells Jem that courage is "when you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what". Charles J. Shields, who wrote the first book-length biography of Harper Lee, offers the reason for the novel's enduring popularity and impact is that "its lessons of human dignity and respect for others remain fundamental and universal". Atticus' lesson to Scout that "you never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view—until you climb around in his skin and walk around in it" exemplifies his compassion. She ponders the comment when listening to Mayella Ewell's testimony. When Mayella reacts with confusion to Atticus' question if she has any friends, Scout offers that she must be lonelier than Boo Radley. Having walked Boo home after he saves their lives, Scout stands on the Radley porch and considers the events of the previous three years from Boo's perspective. One writer remarks, "... [w]hile the novel concerns tragedy and injustice, heartache and loss, it also carries with it a strong sense [of] courage, compassion, and an awareness of history to be better human beings." Gender roles. Just as Lee explores Jem's development in coming to grips with a racist and unjust society, Scout realizes what being female means, and several female characters influence her development. Scout's primary identification with her father and older brother allows her to describe the variety and depth of female characters in the novel both as one of them and as an outsider. Scout's primary female models are Calpurnia and her neighbor Miss Maudie, both of whom are strong-willed, independent, and protective. Mayella Ewell also has an influence; Scout watches her destroy an innocent man in order to hide her desire for him. The female characters who comment the most on Scout's lack of willingness to adhere to a more feminine role are also those who promote the most racist and classist points of view. For example, Mrs. Dubose chastises Scout for not wearing a dress and camisole, and indicates she is ruining the family name by not doing so, in addition to insulting Atticus' intentions to defend Tom Robinson. By balancing the masculine influences of Atticus and Jem with the feminine influences of Calpurnia and Miss Maudie, one scholar writes, "Lee gradually demonstrates that Scout is becoming a feminist in the South, for with the use of first-person narration, she indicates that Scout/ Jean Louise still maintains the ambivalence about being a Southern lady she possessed as a child." Absent mothers and abusive fathers are another theme in the novel. Scout and Jem's mother died before Scout could remember her, Mayella's mother is dead, and Mrs. Radley is silent about Boo's confinement to the house. Apart from Atticus, the fathers described are abusers. Bob Ewell, it is hinted, molested his daughter, and Mr. Radley imprisons his son in his house to the extent that Boo is remembered only as a phantom. Bob Ewell and Mr. Radley represent a form of masculinity that Atticus does not, and the novel suggests that such men, as well as the traditionally feminine hypocrites at the Missionary Society, can lead society astray. Atticus stands apart as a unique model of masculinity; as one scholar explains: "It is the job of real men who embody the traditional masculine qualities of heroic individualism, bravery, and an unshrinking knowledge of and dedication to social justice and morality, to set the society straight." Laws, written and unwritten. Allusions to legal issues in "To Kill a Mockingbird", particularly in scenes outside of the courtroom, have drawn the attention of legal scholars. Claudia Durst Johnson writes that "a greater volume of critical readings has been amassed by two legal scholars in law journals than by all the literary scholars in literary journals". The opening quote by the 19th-century essayist Charles Lamb reads: "Lawyers, I suppose, were children once." Johnson notes that even in Scout and Jem's childhood world, compromises and treaties are struck with each other by spitting on one's palm, and laws are discussed by Atticus and his children: is it right that Bob Ewell hunts and traps out of season? Many social codes are broken by people in symbolic courtrooms: Mr. Dolphus Raymond has been exiled by society for taking a black woman as his common-law wife and having interracial children; Mayella Ewell is beaten by her father in punishment for kissing Tom Robinson; by being turned into a non-person, Boo Radley receives a punishment far greater than any court could have given him. Scout repeatedly breaks codes and laws and reacts to her punishment for them. For example, she refuses to wear frilly clothes, saying that Aunt Alexandra's "fanatical" attempts to place her in them made her feel "a pink cotton penitentiary closing in on [her]". Johnson states, "[t]he novel is a study of how Jem and Scout begin to perceive the complexity of social codes and how the configuration of relationships dictated by or set off by those codes fails or nurtures the inhabitants of (their) small worlds." Loss of innocence. Songbirds and their associated symbolism appear throughout the novel. Their family name Finch is also Lee's mother's maiden name. The titular mockingbird is a key motif of this theme, which first appears when Atticus, having given his children air-rifles for Christmas, allows their Uncle Jack to teach them to shoot. Atticus warns them that, although they can "shoot all the bluejays they want", they must remember that "it's a sin to kill a mockingbird". Confused, Scout approaches her neighbor Miss Maudie, who explains that mockingbirds never harm other living creatures. She points out that mockingbirds simply provide pleasure with their songs, saying, "They don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us." Writer Edwin Bruell summarized the symbolism when he wrote in 1964, "'To kill a mockingbird' is to kill that which is innocent and harmless—like Tom Robinson." Scholars have noted that Lee often returns to the mockingbird theme when trying to make a moral point. Tom Robinson is the chief example, among several in the novel, of innocents being carelessly or deliberately destroyed. However, scholar Christopher Metress connects the mockingbird to Boo Radley: "Instead of wanting to exploit Boo for her own fun (as she does in the beginning of the novel by putting on gothic plays about his history), Scout comes to see him as a 'mockingbird'—that is, as someone with an inner goodness that must be cherished." The last pages of the book illustrate this as Scout relates the moral of a story Atticus has been reading to her, and, in allusions to both Boo Radley and Tom Robinson, states about a character who was misunderstood, "when they finally saw him, why he hadn't done any of those things ... Atticus, he was real nice," to which he responds, "Most people are, Scout, when you finally see them." The novel exposes the loss of innocence so frequently that reviewer R. A. Dave claims that because every character has to face, or even suffer defeat, the book takes on elements of a classical tragedy. In exploring how each character deals with his or her own personal defeat, Lee builds a framework to judge whether the characters are heroes or fools. She guides the reader in such judgments, alternating between unabashed adoration and biting irony. Scout's experience with the Missionary Society is an ironic juxtaposition of women who mock her, gossip, and "reflect a smug, colonialist attitude toward other races" while giving the "appearance of gentility, piety, and morality". Conversely, when Atticus loses Tom's case, he is last to leave the courtroom, except for his children and the black spectators in the colored balcony, who rise silently as he walks underneath them, to honor his efforts. Reception. Despite her editors' warnings that the book might not sell well, it quickly became a sensation, bringing acclaim to Lee in literary circles, in her hometown of Monroeville, and throughout Alabama. The book went through numerous subsequent printings and became widely available through its inclusion in the Book of the Month Club and editions released by "Reader's Digest Condensed Books". Initial reactions to the novel were varied. "The New Yorker" declared Lee "a skilled, unpretentious, and totally ingenuous writer", and "The Atlantic Monthly"'s reviewer rated the book "pleasant, undemanding reading", but found the narrative voice—"a six-year-old girl with the prose style of a well-educated adult"—to be implausible. "Time" magazine's 1960 review of the book states that it "teaches the reader an astonishing number of useful truths about little girls and about Southern life" and calls Scout Finch "the most appealing child since Carson McCullers' Frankie got left behind at the wedding". The "Chicago Sunday Tribune" noted the even-handed approach to the narration of the novel's events, writing: "This is in no way a sociological novel. It underlines no cause ... "To Kill a Mockingbird" is a novel of strong contemporary national significance." Not all reviewers were enthusiastic. Some lamented the use of poor white Southerners, and one-dimensional black victims, and Granville Hicks labeled the book "melodramatic and contrived". When the book was first released, Southern writer Flannery O'Connor commented, "I think for a child's book it does all right. It's interesting that all the folks that are buying it don't know they're reading a child's book. Somebody ought to say what it is." Carson McCullers apparently agreed with the "Time" magazine review, writing to a cousin: "Well, honey, one thing we know is that she's been poaching on my literary preserves." One year after its publication "To Kill a Mockingbird" had been translated into ten languages. In the years since, it has sold more than 30 million copies and been translated into more than 40 languages. The novel has never been out of print in hardcover or paperback, and has become part of the standard literature curriculum. A 2008 survey of secondary books read by students between grades 9–12 in the U.S. indicates the novel is the most widely read book in these grades. A 1991 survey by the Book of the Month Club and the Library of Congress Center for the Book found that "To Kill a Mockingbird" was fourth in a list of books that are "most often cited as making a difference". It is considered by some to be the "Great American Novel". The 50th anniversary of the novel's release was met with celebrations and reflections on its impact. Eric Zorn of the "Chicago Tribune" praises Lee's "rich use of language" but writes that the central lesson is that "courage isn't always flashy, isn't always enough, but is always in style". Jane Sullivan in the "Sydney Morning Herald" agrees, stating that the book "still rouses fresh and horrified indignation" as it examines morality, a topic that has recently become unfashionable. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie writing in "The Guardian" states that Lee, rare among American novelists, writes with "a fiercely progressive ink, in which there is nothing inevitable about racism and its very foundation is open to question", comparing her to William Faulkner, who wrote about racism as an inevitability. Literary critic Rosemary Goring in Scotland's "The Herald" notes the connections between Lee and Jane Austen, stating the book's central theme, that "one's moral convictions are worth fighting for, even at the risk of being reviled" is eloquently discussed. Native Alabamian sports writer Allen Barra sharply criticized Lee and the novel in "The Wall Street Journal" calling Atticus a "repository of cracker-barrel epigrams" and the novel represents a "sugar-coated myth" of Alabama history. Barra writes, "It's time to stop pretending that "To Kill a Mockingbird" is some kind of timeless classic that ranks with the great works of American literature. Its bloodless liberal humanism is sadly dated". Thomas Mallon in "The New Yorker" criticizes Atticus' stiff and self-righteous demeanor, and calls Scout "a kind of highly constructed doll" whose speech and actions are improbable. Although acknowledging that the novel works, Mallon blasts Lee's "wildly unstable" narrative voice for developing a story about a content neighborhood until it begins to impart morals in the courtroom drama, following with his observation that "the book has begun to cherish its own goodness" by the time the case is over. Defending the book, Akin Ajayi writes that justice "is often complicated, but must always be founded upon the notion of equality and fairness for all." Ajayi states that the book forces readers to question issues about race, class, and society, but that it was not written to resolve them. Many writers compare their perceptions of "To Kill a Mockingbird" as adults with when they first read it as children. Mary McDonagh Murphy interviewed celebrities including Oprah Winfrey, Rosanne Cash, Tom Brokaw, and Harper's sister Alice Lee, who read the novel and compiled their impressions of it as children and adults into a book titled "Scout, Atticus, and Boo". Atticus Finch and the legal profession. One of the most significant impacts "To Kill a Mockingbird" has had is Atticus Finch's model of integrity for the legal profession. As scholar Alice Petry explains, "Atticus has become something of a folk hero in legal circles and is treated almost as if he were an actual person." Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center cites Atticus Finch as the reason he became a lawyer, and Richard Matsch, the federal judge who presided over the Timothy McVeigh trial, counts Atticus as a major judicial influence. One law professor at the University of Notre Dame stated that the most influential textbook he taught from was "To Kill a Mockingbird", and an article in the "Michigan Law Review" claims, "No real-life lawyer has done more for the self-image or public perception of the legal profession," before questioning whether "Atticus Finch is a paragon of honor or an especially slick hired gun". In 1992, an Alabama editorial called for the death of Atticus, saying that as liberal as Atticus was, he still worked within a system of institutionalized racism and sexism and should not be revered. The editorial sparked a flurry of responses from attorneys who entered the profession because of him and esteemed him as a hero. Critics of Atticus maintain he is morally ambiguous and does not use his legal skills to challenge the racist status quo in Maycomb. However, in 1997, the Alabama State Bar erected a monument to Atticus in Monroeville, marking his existence as the "first commemorative milestone in the state's judicial history". In 2008, Lee herself received an honorary special membership to the Alabama State Bar for creating Atticus who "has become the personification of the exemplary lawyer in serving the legal needs of the poor". Social commentary and challenges. "To Kill a Mockingbird" has been a source of significant controversy since its being the subject of classroom study as early as 1963. The book's racial slurs, profanity, and frank discussion of rape have led people to challenge its appropriateness in libraries and classrooms across the United States. The American Library Association reported that "To Kill a Mockingbird" was number 21 of the 100 most frequently challenged books of 2000–2009. Following parental complaints about the racist language it contains, the novel was removed from classrooms in Virginia in 2016 and Biloxi in 2017, where it was described as making people "uncomfortable". In the Mississippi case, the novel was removed from the required reading list but subsequently made available to interested students with parental consent. Such decisions have been criticised: the American Civil Liberties Union noted the importance of engaging with the novel's themes in places where racial injustice persists. Becky Little of The History Channel and representatives of the Mark Twain House pointed out the value of classics lies in their power to "challenge the way we think about things" (Twain's "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" has attracted similar controversy). Arne Duncan, who served as Secretary of Education under President Obama, noted that removal of the book from reading lists was evidence of a nation with "real problems". In 1966, a parent in Hanover, Virginia protested that the use of rape as a plot device was immoral. Johnson cites examples of letters to local newspapers, which ranged from amusement to fury; those letters expressing the most outrage, however, complained about Mayella Ewell's attraction to Tom Robinson over the depictions of rape. Upon learning the school administrators were holding hearings to decide the book's appropriateness for the classroom, Harper Lee sent $10 to "The Richmond News Leader" suggesting it to be used toward the enrollment of "the Hanover County School Board in any first grade of its choice". The National Education Association in 1968 placed the novel second on a list of books receiving the most complaints from private organizations—after "Little Black Sambo". With a shift of attitudes about race in the 1970s, "To Kill a Mockingbird" faced challenges of a different sort: the treatment of racism in Maycomb was not condemned harshly enough. This has led to disparate perceptions that the novel has a generally positive impact on race relations for white readers, but a more ambiguous reception by black readers. In one high-profile case outside the U.S., school districts in the Canadian provinces of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia attempted to have the book removed from standard teaching curricula in the 1990s, stating: Furthermore, despite the novel's thematic focus on racial injustice, its black characters are not fully examined. In its use of racial epithets, stereotyped depictions of superstitious blacks, and Calpurnia, who to some critics is an updated version of the "contented slave" motif and to others simply unexplored, the book is viewed as marginalizing black characters. One writer asserts that the use of Scout's narration serves as a convenient mechanism for readers to be innocent and detached from the racial conflict. Scout's voice "functions as the not-me which allows the rest of us—black and white, male and female—to find our relative position in society". A teaching guide for the novel published by "The English Journal" cautions, "what seems wonderful or powerful to one group of students may seem degrading to another". A Canadian language arts consultant found that the novel resonated well with white students, but that black students found it "demoralizing". With racism told from a white perspective with a focus on white courage and morality, some have labeled the novel as having a "white savior complex", a criticism also leveled at the film adaptation with its white savior narrative. Another criticism, articulated by Michael Lind, is that the novel indulges in classist stereotyping and demonization of poor rural "white trash". The novel is cited as a factor in the success of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, however, in that it "arrived at the right moment to help the South and the nation grapple with the racial tensions (of) the accelerating civil rights movement". Its publication is so closely associated with the Civil Rights Movement that many studies of the book and biographies of Harper Lee include descriptions of important moments in the movement, despite the fact that she had no direct involvement in any of them. Civil Rights leader Andrew Young comments that part of the book's effectiveness is that it "inspires hope in the midst of chaos and confusion" and by using racial epithets portrays the reality of the times in which it was set. Young views the novel as "an act of humanity" in showing the possibility of people rising above their prejudices. Alabama author Mark Childress compares it to the impact of "Uncle Tom's Cabin", a book that is popularly implicated in starting the U.S. Civil War. Childress states the novel gives white Southerners a way to understand the racism that they've been brought up with and to find another way. And most white people in the South were good people. Most white people in the South were not throwing bombs and causing havoc ... I think the book really helped them come to understand what was wrong with the system in the way that any number of treatises could never do, because it was popular art, because it was told from a child's point of view. Diane McWhorter, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of the Birmingham campaign, asserts that "To Kill a Mockingbird" condemns racism instead of racists, and states that every child in the South has moments of racial cognitive dissonance when they are faced with the harsh reality of inequality. This feeling causes them to question the beliefs with which they have been raised, which for many children is what the novel does. McWhorter writes of Lee, "for a white person from the South to write a book like this in the late 1950s is really unusual—by its very existence an act of protest." Author James McBride calls Lee brilliant but stops short of calling her brave: I think by calling Harper Lee brave you kind of absolve yourself of your own racism ... She certainly set the standards in terms of how these issues need to be discussed, but in many ways I feel ... the moral bar's been lowered. And that's really distressing. We need a thousand Atticus Finches. McBride, however, defends the book's sentimentality, and the way Lee approaches the story with "honesty and integrity". Honors. During the years immediately following the novel's publication, Harper Lee enjoyed the attention its popularity garnered her, granting interviews, visiting schools, and attending events honoring the book. In 1961, when "To Kill a Mockingbird" was in its 41st week on the bestseller list, it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, stunning Lee. It also won the Brotherhood Award of the National Conference of Christians and Jews in the same year, and the Paperback of the Year award from "Bestsellers" magazine in 1962. Starting in 1964, Lee began to turn down interviews, complaining that the questions were monotonous, and grew concerned that attention she received bordered on the kind of publicity celebrities sought. Since then, she declined to talk with reporters about the book. She also steadfastly refused to provide an introduction, writing in 1995: "Introductions inhibit pleasure, they kill the joy of anticipation, they frustrate curiosity. The only good thing about Introductions is that in some cases they delay the dose to come. "Mockingbird" still says what it has to say; it has managed to survive the years without preamble." In 2001, Lee was inducted into the Alabama Academy of Honor. In the same year, Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley initiated a reading program throughout the city's libraries, and chose his favorite book, "To Kill a Mockingbird", as the first title of the One City, One Book program. Lee declared that "there is no greater honor the novel could receive". By 2004, the novel had been chosen by 25 communities for variations of the citywide reading program, more than any other novel. David Kipen of the National Endowment of the Arts, who supervised The Big Read, states "people just seem to connect with it. It dredges up things in their own lives, their interactions across racial lines, legal encounters, and childhood. It's just this skeleton key to so many different parts of people's lives, and they cherish it." In 2006, Lee was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Notre Dame. During the ceremony, the students and audience gave Lee a standing ovation, and the entire graduating class held up copies of "To Kill a Mockingbird" to honor her. Lee was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom on November 5, 2007 by President George W. Bush. In his remarks, Bush stated, "One reason "To Kill a Mockingbird" succeeded is the wise and kind heart of the author, which comes through on every page ... "To Kill a Mockingbird" has influenced the character of our country for the better. It's been a gift to the entire world. As a model of good writing and humane sensibility, this book will be read and studied forever." After remaining at number one throughout the entire five-month-long voting period in 2018, the American public, via PBS's "The Great American Read", chose "To Kill A Mockingbird" as America's Favorite Book. In 2003, the novel was listed at No. 6 on the BBC's The Big Read after a year-long survey of the British public. On November 5, 2019, BBC News listed "To Kill a Mockingbird" on its list of the 100 most influential novels. In 2020, the novel was number five on the list of "Top Check Outs OF ALL TIME" by the New York Public Library. "Go Set a Watchman". An earlier draft of "To Kill a Mockingbird", titled "Go Set a Watchman", was controversially released on July 14, 2015. This draft, which was completed in 1957, is set 20 years after the time period depicted in "To Kill a Mockingbird" but is not a continuation of the narrative. This earlier version of the story follows an adult Scout Finch who travels from New York City to visit her father, Atticus Finch, in Maycomb, Alabama, where she is confronted by the intolerance in her community. The "Watchman" manuscript was believed to have been lost until Lee's lawyer Tonja Carter discovered it, but this claim has been widely disputed. "Watchman" contains early versions of many of the characters from "To Kill a Mockingbird". According to Lee's agent Andrew Nurnberg, "Mockingbird" was originally intended to be the first book of a trilogy: "They discussed publishing "Mockingbird" first, "Watchman" last, and a shorter connecting novel between the two." This assertion has been discredited, however, by rare-books expert James S. Jaffe, who reviewed the pages at the request of Lee's attorney and found them to be only another draft of "To Kill a Mockingbird". Nurnberg's statement was also contrary to Jonathan Mahler's description of how "Watchman" was seen as just the first draft of "Mockingbird". Instances where many passages overlap between the two books, in some case word for word, also refute this assertion. Both books were also investigated with the help of forensic linguistics and their comparative study confirmed that Harper Lee was their sole author. 1962 film. The book was made into the well-received 1962 film with the same title, starring Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch. The film's producer, Alan J. Pakula, remembered Universal Pictures executives questioning him about a potential script: "They said, 'What story do you plan to tell for the film?' I said, 'Have you read the book?' They said, 'Yes.' I said, 'That's the story.'" The movie was a hit at the box office, quickly grossing more than $20 million from a $2-million budget. It won three Oscars: Best Actor for Gregory Peck, Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Black-and-White, and Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium for Horton Foote. It was nominated for five more Oscars including Best Actress in a Supporting Role for Mary Badham, the actress who played Scout. Lee was pleased with the film, "In that film the man and the part met ... I've had many, many offers to turn it into musicals, into TV or stage plays, but I've always refused. That film was a work of art". Peck met Lee's father, the model for Atticus, before the filming. Lee's father died before the film's release. Lee was so impressed with Peck's performance that she gave him her father's pocket watch, which he had with him the evening he was awarded the Oscar for Best Actor. Years later, he was reluctant to tell Lee that the watch was stolen out of his luggage in London Heathrow Airport. When Peck eventually did tell Lee, she told him, "Well, it's only a watch". He said, "Harper—she feels deeply, but she's not a sentimental person about things". Lee and Peck shared a friendship long after the movie was made. Peck's grandson was named "Harper" in her honor. In May 2005, Lee made an uncharacteristic appearance at the Los Angeles Public Library at the request of Peck's widow Veronique, who said of Lee: She's like a national treasure. She's someone who has made a difference ... with this book. The book is still as strong as it ever was, and so is the film. All the kids in the United States read this book and see the film in the seventh and eighth grades and write papers and essays. My husband used to get thousands and thousands of letters from teachers who would send them to him. Play. The book has been adapted as a play by Christopher Sergel. It debuted in 1990 in Monroeville, a town that labels itself "The Literary Capital of Alabama". The play runs every May on the county courthouse grounds and townspeople make up the cast. White male audience members are chosen at the intermission to make up the jury. During the courtroom scene, the production moves into the Monroe County Courthouse and the audience is racially segregated. Author Albert Murray said of the relationship of the town to the novel (and the annual performance): "It becomes part of the town ritual, like the religious underpinning of Mardi Gras. With the whole town crowded around the actual courthouse, it's part of a central, civic education—what Monroeville aspires to be." Sergel's play toured in the UK starting at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds in 2006, and again in 2011 starting at the York Theatre Royal, both productions featuring Duncan Preston as Atticus Finch. The play also opened the 2013 season at Regent's Park Open Air Theatre in London where it played to full houses and starred Robert Sean Leonard as Atticus Finch, his first London appearance in 22 years. The production returned to the venue to close the 2014 season, prior to a UK tour. According to a "National Geographic" article, the novel is so revered in Monroeville that people quote lines from it like Scripture; yet Harper Lee herself refused to attend any performances, because "she abhors anything that trades on the book's fame". To underscore this sentiment, Lee demanded that a book of recipes named "Calpurnia's Cookbook" not be published and sold out of the Monroe County Heritage Museum. David Lister in "The Independent" states that Lee's refusal to speak to reporters made them desire to interview her all the more, and her silence "makes Bob Dylan look like a media tart". Despite her discouragement, a rising number of tourists made Monroeville their destination, hoping to see Lee's inspiration for the book, or Lee herself. Local residents call them "Mockingbird groupies", and although Lee was not reclusive, she refused publicity and interviews with an emphatic "Hell, no!"

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It (novel) It is a 1986 horror novel by American author Stephen King. "It" was his 22nd book and his 17th novel written under his own name. The story follows the experiences of seven children as they are terrorized by an evil entity that exploits the fears of its victims to disguise itself while hunting its prey. "It" primarily appears in the form of Pennywise the Dancing Clown to attract its preferred prey of young children. The novel is told through narratives alternating between two periods and is largely told in the third-person omniscient mode. "It" deals with themes that eventually became King staples: the power of memory, childhood trauma and its recurrent echoes in adulthood, the malevolence lurking beneath the idyllic façade of the American small town, and overcoming evil through mutual trust and sacrifice. King has stated that he first conceived the story in 1978, and began writing it in 1981. He finished writing the book in 1985. He also stated that he originally wanted the title character to be a troll like the one in the children's story "Three Billy Goats Gruff", but who inhabited the local sewer system rather than just the area beneath one bridge. He also wanted the story to interweave the stories of children and the adults they later become. The novel won the British Fantasy Award in 1987, and received nominations for the Locus and World Fantasy Awards that same year. "Publishers Weekly" listed "It" as the best-selling hardcover fiction book in the United States in 1986. "It" has been adapted into a 1990 two-part miniseries directed by Tommy Lee Wallace, a Hindi 1998 television series directed by Glen Baretto & Ankush Mohla, and into a film duology directed by Andy Muschietti; "It" was released in September 2017 and "It Chapter Two" was released in September 2019. Plot. 1957–1958. During a rainstorm in Derry, Maine, a six-year-old boy named Georgie Denbrough sails a paper boat along the rainy streets before it washes down into a storm drain. Looking in the drain, Georgie encounters a clown who introduces himself as Pennywise the Dancing Clown. Georgie is enticed by Pennywise to reach into the drain and retrieve his boat, where the clown rips his arm off, leaving him to die. The following June, an overweight eleven-year-old boy named Ben Hanscom is harassed by a bully named Henry Bowers and his gang on the last day of school, escaping into the marshy wasteland known as the Barrens. There, Ben befriends an asthmatic hypochondriac named Eddie Kaspbrak and "Stuttering Bill" Denbrough, Georgie's elder brother. The three boys later befriend fellow misfits Richie Tozier, Stanley "Stan" Uris, and Beverly Marsh, and refer to themselves as "The Losers Club". As the summer draws on, the Losers each encounter Pennywise in terrifying manifestations: a mummy on a frozen canal to Ben, a fountain of blood (that only children can see) from Beverly's sink, a rotting leper to Eddie, drowned corpses to Stan, and a frightening phantom of Georgie to Bill. Meanwhile, an increasingly unhinged and sadistic Bowers begins focusing his attention on his African-American neighbor Mike Hanlon and his father. Bowers kills Mike's dog and chases the terrified boy into the Barrens, where he joins the Losers in driving Bowers' gang off in a rock fight, a humiliated Bowers vowing revenge. Mike becomes a member of the Losers Club after revealing his own encounter with Pennywise in the form of a flesh-eating bird. From Mike's historical scrapbook, the Losers realize that "It" is an ancient monster with a hold on the town. Following further encounters, the Losers construct a makeshift smoke hole that Richie and Mike use to hallucinate It's origins as an ancient alien entity that came to Earth, beginning a cycle of feeding on children for a year followed by a 27-year-long hibernation. Soon, Eddie is hospitalized by Bowers and several of his friends, and Beverly witnesses one of the bullies, Patrick Hocksetter, killed by It in the form of a mass of leeches. The Losers discover a message from It in Patrick's blood, warning them that It will kill them if they interfere. In hopes that silver can wound It, Ben makes two silver slugs out of a silver dollar, and the Losers enter an abandoned house where Eddie, Bill, and Richie had previously encountered It to attempt to kill It. They manage to wound It with the silver while It is in the form of a werewolf. Deeming the Losers a threat, It manipulates Bowers into murdering his abusive father and chasing the Losers into the sewers to kill them, where his fellow bullies are both killed by It, and Bowers becomes lost in the sewers, traumatized. In the sewers, Bill performs the "Ritual of Chüd" in an attempt to face It in the Macroverse, the alternate universe where It is from, where he meets the monster's antithesis Maturin, an ancient turtle that created the universe. Bill learns that It can only be defeated during a battle of wills, and sees It's true form, the "Deadlights", before Bill defeats the monster with Maturin's help. After the battle, not knowing if they killed It or not, the Losers get lost in the sewers until Beverly has sex with each of the boys to bring unity back to the group. The Losers then swear a blood oath to return to Derry should It resurface. Bowers, having lost his sanity by the time he washed out of the sewers into a nearby river, is institutionalized after being blamed for the town's child murders. 1984–1985. In July 1984, three youths brutally attack a young gay man named Adrian Mellon and throw him off a bridge, where both a bully and Adrian's boyfriend see a clown then appear. Adrian is found mutilated, and the teenagers are arrested and charged with his murder. When a string of violent child killings begins in Derry again, an adult Mike Hanlon, now the town's librarian, calls up the six former members of the Losers Club and reminds them of their childhood promise to return should the killings start again. Bill is now a successful horror writer living with his actress wife, Audra; Beverly is a fashion designer, married to an abusive man named Tom Rogan; Eddie runs a limousine rental company and has married a hysterical codependent woman similar to his hypochondriac mother; Richie Tozier is a disc jockey; Ben Hanscom is now thin and a successful but lonely architect; and Stan Uris is a wealthy accountant. Prior to Mike's phone calls, all of the Losers had completely forgotten each other and the trauma of their childhood, burying the horror of their encounters with It. All of the Losers agree to return to Derry, except for Stan, who kills himself in terror of facing It again. The Losers meet for lunch, where Mike reminds them that It awakens once roughly every 27 years for 12–16 months at a time, feeding on children before going into slumber again. The group decides to kill It once and for all. At Mike's suggestion, each person explores different parts of Derry to help restore their memories. While exploring, Eddie, Richie, Beverly, and Ben are faced with manifestations of It (Eddie as Belch Huggins and childhood friends in leper and zombified forms, Richie as a Paul Bunyan statue, Beverly as the witch from Hansel & Gretel in her childhood home, and Ben as Dracula in the Derry Library). Bill finds his childhood bicycle, "Silver," and brings it to Mike's. In the meantime, Audra, who is worried about Bill, travels to Derry; Tom arrives as well, intending to kill Beverly; and Henry Bowers escapes from the mental asylum with help from It. Henry confronts Mike at the library, but Mike escapes alive. It instructs Henry to kill the rest of the Losers, but Henry is killed when attacking Eddie. It then appears to Tom and orders him to capture Audra, bringing Audra to It's lair, where Audra becomes catatonic, and Tom drops dead in shock. Bill, Ben, Beverly, Richie, and Eddie learn that Mike is near death and realize they are being forced into another confrontation with It. They descend into the sewers and use their strength as a group to "send energy" to a hospitalized Mike, who fights off a nurse that is under the control of It. They reach It's lair and find that It has taken the form of a giant spider. Bill and Richie enter It's mind through the Ritual of Chüd, but they get lost in It. Eddie injures It by spraying his asthma medication down It's throat, but It bites off Eddie's arm, killing him. It runs away to tend to its injuries, but Bill, Richie, and Ben chase after and find that It has laid eggs. Ben stays behind to destroy the eggs, while Bill and Richie head toward their final confrontation with It. Bill fights his way inside It's body, locates It's heart, and destroys it. The group meets up to head out of It's lair, and although they try to bring Audra and Eddie's bodies with them, they are forced to leave Eddie behind. They realize that the scars on their hands from their blood pact have disappeared, indicating that their ordeal is finally over. At the same time, the worst storm in Maine's history sweeps through Derry, and the downtown area collapses. Mike concludes that Derry is finally dying. The Losers return home and gradually begin to forget about It, Derry, and each other. Mike's memory of the events of that summer also begins to fade, as well as any of the records he had written down previously, much to his relief, and he considers starting a new life elsewhere. Ben and Beverly leave together and become a couple, and Richie returns to California. Bill is the last to leave Derry. Before he goes, he takes Audra, still catatonic, for a ride on Silver, which awakens her from her catatonia, and they share a kiss. Development. In 1978, King and his family lived in Boulder, Colorado. One evening, King ventured alone to pick up his car from the repair shop and came across an old wooden bridge, "humped and oddly quaint". Walking along the bridge caused King to recall the story of "Three Billy Goats Gruff", and the idea of transplanting the tale's scenario into a real-life context interested him. King was further inspired by a line by Marianne Moore—“imaginary gardens with real toads in them"—which in his mind came out as "real trolls in imaginary gardens." King would return to the concept two years later and gradually accumulated ideas and thoughts, particularly the concept of weaving the narratives of children and the adults they become. King began writing "It" in 1980, and finished the book five years later. King found influence in the mythology and history surrounding the construction of the sewer system in Bangor, Maine. Themes. "It" thematically focuses on the loss of childhood innocence and questions the difference between necessity and free will. Grady Hendrix of Tor.com described the book as being "about the fact that some doors only open one way, and that while there's an exit out of childhood named sex, there’s no door leading the other way that turns adults back into children". Christopher Lehman-Haupt of "The New York Times" noted that "It" "concerns the evil that has haunted America from time to time in the forms of crime, racial and religious bigotry, economic hardship, labor strife and industrial pollution", and that the novel's setting "is a museum filled with the popular culture of the 1950s: brand names, rock 'n' roll songs and stars, the jokes and routines of childhood in that era". James Smythe of "The Guardian" opined that "Pennywise isn't the novel's biggest terror. The most prominent notions of fear in the novel come from the Losers' Club themselves: their home lives, the things that have made them pariahs." Release. On December 13, 2011, Cemetery Dance published a special limited edition of "It" for the 25th anniversary of the novel () in three editions: an unsigned limited gift edition of 2,750, a signed limited edition of 750, and a signed and lettered limited edition of 52. All three editions are oversized hardcovers, housed in a slipcase or traycase, and feature premium binding materials. This anniversary edition features a new dust jacket illustration by Glen Orbik, as well as numerous interior illustrations by Alan M. Clark and Erin Wells. The book also contains a new afterword by Stephen King discussing his reasons for writing the novel. Reception and legacy. "It" received a mixed critical reaction. Lehman-Haupt perceived a lack of justification in Stanley Uris' death and the reunion of the group. Hendrix described the book as "by turns boring and shocking" and "one of King's most frustrating and perplexing books", and described the behavior of the child characters as idealized and unnatural. The book's sexual content aroused controversy. Smythe considered the book's descriptions of childhood sexuality to be "questionable", and was particularly "shocked" by a scene of the Losers Club engaging in an orgy. However, Hendrix identified this moment as "in a sense, the heart of the book" and a thematic demonstration of the crossing from childhood to adulthood, and concluded that it is "a way for King to tell kids that sex, even unplanned sex, even sex that's kind of weird, even sex where a girl loses her virginity in the sewer, can be powerful and beautiful if the people having it truly respect and like each other". The novel has been noted for its exceptional length. Smythe noted that "the book is essentially two novels", and at "fourteen hundred pages long in my printing (the only bigger novel I own is "Infinite Jest"), and famously weighing nigh-on four pounds, it's a challenge to hold, let alone read". "Publishers Weekly" expressed particular indignation: "Overpopulated and under-characterized, bloated by lazy thought-out philosophizing and theologizing there is simply too much of "It"." The character Pennywise has been named by several outlets as one of the scariest clowns in film or pop culture. In 2003, "It" was listed at number 144 on the BBC's The Big Read poll—one of three King novels on the list. Adaptations. In 1990, the novel was adapted into a television miniseries starring Tim Curry as Pennywise the Clown/It, John Ritter as Ben Hanscom, Harry Anderson as Richie Tozier, Richard Masur as Stan Uris, Tim Reid as Mike Hanlon, Annette O'Toole as Beverly Marsh, Richard Thomas as Bill Denbrough, Olivia Hussey as Audra Phillips, Dennis Christopher as Eddie Kaspbrak, and Michael Cole as Henry Bowers. The younger versions of the characters were played by Brandon Crane (Ben), Seth Green (Richie), Ben Heller (Stan), Marlon Taylor (Mike), Emily Perkins (Beverly), Jonathan Brandis (Bill), Adam Faraizl (Eddie), and Jarred Blancard (Henry). The miniseries was directed by Tommy Lee Wallace and scripted by Wallace and Lawrence D. Cohen. In 1998, the novel was adapted into a television series set in India, starring Lilliput as Pennywise the Clown/Vikram/Woh/It, and Ashutosh Gowarikar (Ashutosh), Mamik Singh (Rahul), Anupam Bhattacharya (Sanjeev), Shreyas Talpade (Young Ashutosh), Parzan Dastur (Young Siddhart), Manoj Joshi (Amit), and Daya Shankar Pandey (Chandu), the series' equivalent of the Losers' Club. The series was directed and written by Glen Baretto and Ankush Mohla. The first of a two-part feature film adaptation, "It", was released on September 8, 2017. It is directed by Andy Muschietti, with a screenplay by Chase Palmer, Cary Fukunaga and Gary Dauberman. Instead of a dual narrative, the first film is solely an adaptation of the section that features the characters as children, though the setting has been updated to the late 1980s. It stars Bill Skarsgård as Pennywise and Jaeden Martell as Bill Denbrough. Supporting roles are played by Finn Wolfhard as Richie Tozier, Sophia Lillis as Beverly Marsh, Jack Dylan Grazer as Eddie Kaspbrak, Wyatt Oleff as Stanley Uris, Chosen Jacobs as Mike Hanlon, Jeremy Ray Taylor as Ben Hanscom, Owen Teague as Patrick Hockstetter, Nicholas Hamilton as Henry Bowers, Logan Thompson as Vic Criss and Jake Sim as Belch Huggins. The second film, "It Chapter Two", adapted the "adult" section and updated the setting to the 2010s, specifically 2016. It starred James McAvoy (Bill), Bill Hader (Richie), Jessica Chastain (Beverly), James Ransone (Eddie), Andy Bean (Stan), Isaiah Mustafa (Mike), and Jay Ryan (Ben). Skarsgård reprised the role of Pennywise and the younger actors returned as well. Principal photography wrapped in 2018, and it was released on September 6, 2019.

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Small Great Things Small Great Things (2016) is the twenty-fifth novel by the American author, Jodi Picoult. The book focuses on race in America and revolves around the protagonist, a delivery nurse, named Ruth Jefferson. "Small Great Things" is being adapted into a film starring Viola Davis and Julia Roberts. This is Picoult's first novel with an African American protagonist. Synopsis. The story concentrates on an African-American labor/delivery (L&D) nurse, Ruth Jefferson, in charge of newborns at a Connecticut hospital. Ruth is ordered not to touch or go near the baby of a white supremacist couple. After the baby dies in her care, Ruth is charged with murder, and taken to court. Narrative style. The story is told from the complex multiple racial perspectives of the principal characters, including the nurse, Ruth, Turk Bauer, the white supremacist father of the baby, and Kennedy McQuarrie, Ruth's attorney. Picoult frequently employs an alternating multi-perspective narrative style in her novels, including "My Sister's Keeper, Songs of the Humpback Whale, Sing You Home, Handle With Care, Change of Heart, Lone Wolf," and "The Storyteller." Critical reception. The novel has received positive and mixed reviews. Eleanor Brown of "The Washington Post" wrote that, "'Small Great Things' is the most important novel Jodi Picoult has ever written. Frank, uncomfortably introspective and right on the day’s headlines, it will challenge her readers", although she felt that the book is "overly long, with a meandering middle, a tendency toward melodrama and a rushed ending that feels glib." Whereas, Roxane Gay, writing for the "New York Times" thought Turk, the white supremacist character, was well-written; though also found that the protagonist and African American character, Ruth, to be the least believable: "The more we see of Ruth and her family, the more their characterization feels like black-people bingo — as if Picoult is working through a checklist of issues in an attempt to say everything about race in one book." Gay found it a "flawed novel" but felt "generous" toward the book and gave her "a lot of credit for trying, and for supporting her attempt with rigorous research, good intentions and an awareness of her fallibility". Gay further wrote: "The novel is messy, but so is our racial climate."

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The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940) is the debut novel by the American author Carson McCullers; she was 23 at the time of publication. It is about a deaf man named John Singer and the people he encounters in a 1930s mill town in the US state of Georgia. A. S. Knowles, Jr., author of "Six Bronze Petals and Two Red: Carson McCullers in the Forties," wrote that the book "still seems to capture [the author's total sensibility more completely than her other works." Frederic I. Carpenter wrote in "The English Journal" that the novel "essentially [...] described the struggle of all these lonely people to come to terms with their world, to become members of their society, to find human love—in short, to become mature." Title. The title comes from the poem "The Lonely Hunter" by the Scottish poet William Sharp, who used the pseudonym "Fiona MacLeod". “Deep in the heart of Summer, sweet is life to me still, But my heart is a lonely hunter that hunts on a lonely hill.” Plot. The book begins with a focus on the relationship between two close friends, John Singer and Spiros Antonapoulos, deaf-mutes who have lived together for several years. Antonapoulos becomes mentally ill, misbehaves, and despite attempts at intervention from Singer, is eventually put into an insane asylum away from town. Now alone, Singer moves into a new room. The remainder of the narrative centers on the struggles of four of John Singer's acquaintances: Mick Kelly, a tomboyish girl who loves music and dreams of buying a piano; Jake Blount, an alcoholic labor agitator; Biff Brannon, the observant owner of a diner; and Dr. Benedict Mady Copeland, an idealistic physician. Creation and conception. McCullers sought to create a novel about a character to whom other characters reveal their innermost secrets. Initially her main character was Jewish. Characters. The scholar Nancy B. Rich stated that many of the supporting characters are only concerned about their own causes and never achieve a "clear voice" due to their lack of courtesy to one another. Rich also stated that most of the characters do not stand a chance at making meaningful changes towards the governing system. Background. McCullers had started a politically oriented magazine and voiced a possibility of becoming active in politics. Reception. When published in 1940, the novel created a literary sensation and enjoyed a rapid rise to the top of the bestseller lists; it was the first in a string of works by McCullers that give voice to those who are rejected, forgotten, mistreated or oppressed. Evans wrote that the initial reaction was "a divided reception from the critics, some of whom were inclined to view it, not so much as a novel in its own right, but as a kind of literary phenomenon—as the precocious product" of a young author who may turn out higher quality product when she is older. Alice Hamilton wrote in the "Dalhousie Review" that the presence of so many mutes in the storyline "Taken literally [...] strains the bounds of credulity." Frederic I. Carpenter wrote in "The English Journal" that the ending exhibits "frustration" as Biff Brannon makes comments and as Adolf Hitler makes proclamations over the radio. The Modern Library ranked the novel seventeenth on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. "Time" included it in "TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005". In 2004 the novel was selected for Oprah's Book Club. Adaptations. A film adaptation was made in 1968, starring Alan Arkin, Sondra Locke and Cicely Tyson. A stage adaptation of "The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter" premiered on March 30, 2005, at the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta, Georgia. The show ran until April 24 of that year, then toured. The play was an Alliance Theater presentation done in association with The Acting Company out of New York. The play, adapted by Rebecca Gilman, was directed by Doug Hughes. British artist Joe Simpson made McCullers's book the centerpiece of his 2014 painting, "The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter". The painting shows two characters each reading the book on the London Underground; it is one of his ongoing series of paintings entitled, "London". A radio dramatization was broadcast in two parts by BBC Radio 4 on 15 and 22 March 2020.

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Daniel Half Human Daniel Half Human and the Good Nazi is a 2000 young adult literature novel by German author David Chotjewitz, translated into English by Doris Orgel. The first US edition was published in 2004 by Atheneum Books for Young Readers. The novel is set in Hamburg, Germany in flashback and forward between 1945 at the end of World War II and in the 1930s, during the rise of the Nazi party. It deals with the effects of antisemitism on two friends. It has been cited in 16 award lists, including as a Mildred L. Batchelder Honor Book.

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All American Boys All American Boys, published in 2015 by Atheneum, is a young adult novel written by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely. The book tells the story of two teenage boys, Rashad Butler and Quinn Collins, as they handle racism and police brutality in their communityThe novel has gained attention in recent years due, becoming the third most banned book of 2020, due to its inclusion of anti-police messages, alcohol, drug usage and profanity. Background and publication. Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely met on a Simon & Schuster book tour in 2013. While sharing a room on the book tour, they heard the news that George Zimmerman had been acquitted of the murder of Trayvon Martin. Reynolds and Kiely began to share their feelings and frustrations, developing a friendship. After Michael Brown was shot and killed in Ferguson on August 9, 2014, Reynolds and Kiely began writing All American Boys as a way to address police brutality and racial profiling. The book was published in 2015 by Simon & Schuster. Plot. The book follows two characters, Rashad Butler and Quinn, as they navigate racism. The novel switches between the perspective of a black boy, Rashad, written by Jason Reynolds, and a white boy, Quinn, written by Brendan Kiely.Rashad is a 16-year-old who is assaulted by a white police officer in a convenience store. Quinn is a witness to the incident. Analysis. Educational uses. According to professor Luke Rodesiler’s suggested lesson plan concerning All American Boys, the novel provides educators with many opportunities to discuss current social and political issues including police violence, racism, athletes as activists, and protesting. Rodesiler recommends that educators have their students complete projects such as researching incidents of police violence and studying judicial rulings on student protests and police violence as a way to connect All American Boys to American society. High school teachers Jody Pollock and Tashema Spence-Davis provide a model to incorporate  All American Boys into a curriculum to increase students’ understanding of socio political issues. This novel helped uplift their majority minority and marginalized students by initiating conversations about racial bias and equity. As Rodesiler explains, teachers can frame discussion questions around each issue, prompting students to identify social justice issues throughout the novel, and connect them to current day America. Reception. Awards. "All American Boys" won the inaugural Walter Dean Myers Award from the We Need Diverse Books organization inn 2016 and the Coretta Scott King Award. In 2016, the novel won the Amelia Elizabeth Walden Award for Young Adult Fiction. Reviews. Since its release in 2015, "All American Boys" has been praised by critics for its discussions of police brutality and racism. In a favorable review, "Publishers Weekly" called the novel “painful and all-too-timely." The review went on: “the scenario that Reynolds and Kiely depict has become a recurrent feature of news reports, and a book that lets readers think it through outside of the roiling emotions of a real-life event is both welcome and necessary." In her starred review in "School Library Journal", Ashleigh Williams said that "All American Boys" is able to effectively illustrate the aftermath of police brutality through the conflicting emotions, which affect entire communities. Williams notes that the novel provides many diverse perspectives and emphasizes the tension between these perspectives resulting from racism and privilege. In his starred review, "Booklist" reviewer Michael Cart said that "All American Boys" starts a necessary dialogue surrounding race relations and police brutality. At the same time, Cart says, the novel is “more than a problem novel; it’s a carefully plotted, psychologically acute, character-driven work of fiction that dramatizes an all-too-frequent occurrence." Censorship. In 2020, "All American Boys" landed the third position on the American Library Association's list of the most commonly banned and challenged books in the United States. The book was banned, challenged, and/or restricted "for profanity, drug use, and alcoholism, and because it was thought to promote anti-police views, contain divisive topics, and be 'too much of a sensitive matter right now.'" South Carolina. In South Carolina, police have spoken out against the teaching of All American Boys in a Wando High School English class. The novel was one of eight choices for summer reading for incoming freshmen. Police argued that the novel teaches children to not trust police officers or law enforcement in general. The law enforcement union argued that students reading the novel at Wando are at an age where the majority of them have not had experiences with law enforcement, and are therefore very impressionable on the subject. The school librarian fought for the book to continue being taught, and criticized police in the area for not being open to having difficult discussions with students. The National Coalition Against Censorship wrote to the principal, urging them not to remove the book from Wando High School’s curriculum. In response, Principal Dr. Sherry Eppelsheimer of Wando High School agreed to reconsider the decision on banning All American Boys. Cornelius, North Carolina. Two parents, one of whom a police officer with children at Bailey Middle School in Cornelius, North Carolina, challenged All American Boys. Police officers, faculty members and community members were all involved in the review process, with the school inviting officers to attend classes in which the novel was taught. After the review process, Board members decided in September 2019 to keep the book as a part of the eighth-grade curriculum. Board members and leaders stated that the novel has the ability to open student’s’ minds to social justice issues and contemporary issues they face.

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The City We Became The City We Became is a 2020 urban fantasy novel by N. K. Jemisin. It is the first in her Great Cities series. It was developed from her short story "The City Born Great". It is her first novel since her triple Hugo Award-winning "Broken Earth" series. Setting. "The City We Became" takes place in New York City, in a version of the world in which great cities become sentient through human avatars. Plot. After the avatar of New York falls into a supernatural coma and vanishes, a group of five new avatars representing the five boroughs come together to fight their common Enemy. Reception. "The New York Times" review stated, "In the face of current events, 'The City We Became' takes a broad-shouldered stand on the side of sanctuary, family and love. It’s a joyful shout, a reclamation and a call to arms." NPR wrote that it is, "a love letter, a celebration and an expression of hope and belief that a city and its people can and will stand up to darkness, will stand up to fear, and will, when called to, stand up for each other." A review in "Slate" said, "The city she sings fizzes so joyously through the veins of this novel that anyone mourning the New York before COVID-19 will likely find "The City We Became" equally sustaining and elegiac, a tribute to a city that may never fully return to us."

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Quichotte (novel) Quichotte ( , ) is a 2019 novel by Salman Rushdie. It is his fourteenth novel, published on 29 August 2019 by Jonathan Cape in the United Kingdom and Penguin Books India in India. It was published in the United States on 3 September 2019 by Random House. Inspired by Miguel de Cervantes' classic novel "Don Quixote", "Quichotte" is a metafiction that tells the story of an addled Indian American man who travels across America in pursuit of a celebrity television host with whom he has become obsessed. The novel received favourable reviews and was shortlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize. Plot. The protagonist, Sam DuChamp, is an Indian-born writer living in America and author of a number of unsuccessful spy thrillers. Hoping to write a book "radically unlike any other he had ever attempted", he creates the character of Ismail Smile. Smile, who was born in Bombay, is a travelling pharmaceutical salesman who has suffered a stroke in old age. He begins obsessively watching reality television and becomes infatuated with Salma R, a former Bollywood star who hosts a daytime talk show in New York City. Despite having never met her, he sends her love letters under the pen name "Quichotte". He begins a quest for her across America, driving in his Chevrolet Cruze with his imaginary son Sancho. The two experience contemporary issues of the United States, including racism, the opioid epidemic, familial love, and the impact of popular culture. The lives of the character Quichotte and the writer DuChamp intertwine as the story progresses. Inspiration of "Don Quixote". In 2015, Salman Rushdie was re-reading Miguel de Cervantes' "Don Quixote" to write an introduction to a collection of stories inspired by Cervantes and William Shakespeare and prepare for a speech about the two writers. In an interview with Indian newspaper "Mint", Rushdie described its inspiration: ""Don Quixote" is astonishingly modern, even postmodern—a novel whose characters know they are being written about and have opinions on the writing. I wanted my book to have a parallel storyline about my characters' creator and his life, and then slowly to show how the two stories, the two narrative lines, become one." "Quichotte" features a story within a story, making it, similar to Cervantes' novel, a metafiction. The novel's protagonist writer Sam DuChamp has been compared to Cide Hamete Benengeli, a fictional Arab writer whose manuscripts Cervantes claimed to translate the majority of "Don Quixote" from as a metafictional trick to give a greater credibility to the text. In "Quichotte", Ismail Smile's obsession with Salma R and his subsequent adoption of the pseudonym "Quichotte" parallel that of Alonso Quijano, the fictional hidalgo who renames himself "Don Quixote" after falling into madness. "Quichotte" is the French spelling of "Quixote" and is a reference to French composer Jules Massenet's 1910 opera "Don Quichotte". Further, it is referenced within the novel that the word sounds like "key shot," which is a way to ingest drugs - one of the novel's themes. Quichotte's imaginary son Sancho was named after Sancho Panza, who similarly acts as squire to Don Quixote. Salma R is seen as similar to Don Quixote's Dulcinea del Toboso. Publication. "Quichotte" was published on 29 August 2019 by Jonathan Cape in the United Kingdom and Penguin Books India in India. It was published in the United States on 3 September 2019 by Random House. The novel debuted at number fifteen on "The New York Times" Hardcover Fiction best-sellers list on September 29, 2019. Reception. "Kirkus Reviews" called the novel "humane and humorous," adding that "Rushdie is in top form, serving up a fine piece of literary satire." "Publishers Weekly" called the novel "a brilliant rendition of the cheesy, sleazy, scary pandemonium of life in modern times." Claire Lowdon of "The Sunday Times" gave the novel a rave review, saying, ""Quichotte" is one of the cleverest, most enjoyable metafictional capers this side of postmodernism" and that "we are still watching a master at work." In her review for "The New York Times Book Review", author Jeanette Winterson said, "The lovely, unsentimental, heart-affirming ending of Quichotte, that "sane man," is the aslant answer to the question of what is real and what is unreal. A remembrance of what holds our human lives in some equilibrium — a way of feeling and a way of telling. Love and language." Writing for "Booklist", Donna Seaman said, "Rushdie's dazzling and provocative improvisation on an essential classic has powerful resonance in this time of weaponized lies and denials." Nicholas Mancusi, writing for "Time", praised the novel, saying, "As he weaves the journeys of the two men nearer and nearer, sweeping up a full accounting of all the tragicomic horrors of modern American life in the process, these energies begin to collapse beautifully inward, like a dying star." Writing for "The Times", Robert Douglas-Fairhurst praised the novel, calling it a "welcome return to form. More than just another postmodern box of tricks, this is a novel that feeds the heart while it fills the mind." Jude Cook of "i" called the novel a "wildly entertaining return to form" and said of Rushdie: "Now in his eighth decade, it is clear he still possesses the linguistic energy, resourcefulness and sheer amplitude of a writer half his age." Ron Charles, a book critic at "The Washington Post", gave the novel a mixed review and wrote, "Rushdie's style once unfurled with hypnotic elegance, but here it's become a fire hose of brainy gags and literary allusions — tremendously clever but frequently tedious." Johanna Thomas-Corr, writing for "The Observer", gave the novel a mixed review, finding Rushdie "swollen with the junk culture he intended to critique" but also saying he is "the best of his generation at writing women. Both Salma and Jack are witty, opinionated and complex." Christian Lorentzen wrote a similarly mixed review for the "Financial Times", calling it an "uneven but diverting and occasionally brilliant novel" and saying, "There's a strange contradiction at work when a book whose declared metafictional mission is to combat 'junk culture' is also overloaded with cultural detritus." Sukhdev Sandhu of "The Guardian" agreed as well, writing, "This is not uninteresting territory for a writer to delve into, but "Quichotte" is too restless and in love with itself to be anything other than a symptom of the malaise it laments." Writing for the "New Statesman", lead fiction writer Leo Robson panned the novel, calling it "draining" and saying, "We're simply stuck with an author prone to lapses in tact and taste, and a lack of respect for the reader's time or powers of concentration."

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The Color Purple The Color Purple is a 1982 epistolary novel by American author Alice Walker which won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction. It was later adapted into a film and musical of the same name. The novel has been the frequent target of censors and appears on the American Library Association list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2000–2009 at number seventeen because of the sometimes explicit content, particularly in terms of violence. In 2003, the book was listed on the BBC's The Big Read poll of the UK's "best-loved novels." Plot. Celie is a poor, uneducated 14-year-old girl living in the Southern United States in the early 1900s. She writes letters to God because her father, Alphonso, beats and rapes her. Alphonso has already impregnated Celie once, which resulted in the birth of a boy named Adam, whom Alphonso abducted. Celie thinks Alphonso killed Adam. Celie then has a second child, and Celie's ailing mother dies after cursing Celie on her deathbed. The second child is a girl named Olivia, but Alphonso takes the baby away shortly after birth. Celie and her younger sister, 12-year-old Nettie, learn a man identified only as Mister wants to marry Nettie. Alphonso refuses to let Nettie marry, instead arranging for Mister to marry Celie. Mister, a widower, needing someone to care for his children and keep his house, eventually accepts the offer. Mister physically, sexually, and verbally abuses Celie, and all his children mistreat her as well. Shortly thereafter, Nettie runs away from Alphonso and takes refuge at Celie's house, where Mister makes sexual advances toward her. Celie then advises Nettie to seek assistance from a well-dressed black woman that she saw in the general store a while back; the woman has unknowingly adopted Olivia and is the only black woman Celie has ever seen with money of her own. Nettie is forced to leave after promising to write. Celie, however, never receives any letters and concludes her sister is dead. Time passes, and Harpo, Mister's son, falls in love with an assertive girl named Sofia, who becomes pregnant with Harpo's baby and, despite initial resistance from Mister, marries Harpo. Harpo and Sofia have five more children in short order. Celie is amazed by Sofia's defiant refusal to submit to Harpo's attempts to control her. As Harpo is kinder and gentler than his father, Celie advises him not to dominate Sofia. Harpo temporarily follows Celie's advice but falls back under Mister's sway. Celie, momentarily jealous of Harpo's genuine love of Sofia, then advises Harpo to beat her. Sofia fights back, however, and confronts Celie. A guilty Celie apologizes and confides in Sofia about all the abuse she suffers at Mister's hands. She also begins to consider Sofia's advice about defending herself against further abuse from Mister. Shug Avery, a jazz and blues singer and Mister's long-time mistress falls ill, and Mister takes her into his house. Celie, who has been fascinated by photos of Shug she found in Mister's belongings, is thrilled to have her there. Mister's father expresses disapproval of the arrangement, reminding Mister that Shug has three out-of-wedlock children, though Mister implies to him he is those children's father. Mister's father then leaves in disgust. While Shug is initially rude to Celie, who has taken charge of nursing her, the two women become friends, and Celie soon finds herself infatuated with Shug. Frustrated by Harpo's domineering behavior, Sofia moves out, taking her children with her. Several months later, Harpo opens a juke joint where a fully recovered Shug performs nightly. Shug decides to stay when she learns Mister beats Celie when she is away. Shug and Celie grow closer. Sofia returns for a visit and promptly gets into a fight with Harpo's new girlfriend, Squeak, knocking Squeak's teeth out. In town one day, while Sofia is enjoying a day out with her new boyfriend, a prizefighter, and their respective children, she gets into a physical fight with the mayor after his wife, Miss Millie, insults Sofia and her children. The police arrive and brutally beat Sofia, leaving her with a cracked skull, broken ribs, her face rendered nearly unrecognizable, and blind in one eye. She is subsequently sentenced to 12 years in prison. Squeak, mixed-race and Sheriff Hodges' illegitimate niece, attempts to blackmail the sheriff into releasing Sofia, resulting in her being raped by her uncle. Squeak cares for Sofia's children while she is incarcerated, and the two women develop a friendship. Sofia is eventually released and begins working for Miss Millie, which she detests. Despite being newly married to a man called Grady, Shug instigates a sexual relationship with Celie on her next visit. One night Shug asks Celie about her sister, and Shug helps Celie recover letters from Nettie that Mister has been hiding from her for decades. The letters indicate Nettie befriended a missionary couple, Samuel and Corrine, the well-dressed woman Celie saw in the store. Nettie eventually accompanied them to Africa to do missionary work. Samuel and Corrine have unwittingly adopted both Adam and Olivia. Corrine, noticing her adopted children resemble Nettie, wonders if Samuel fathered the children with her. Increasingly suspicious, Corrine tries to limit Nettie's role in her family. Through her letters, Nettie reveals she has become disillusioned with her missionary work. Corrine became ill with a fever, and Nettie asked Samuel to tell her how he adopted Olivia and Adam. Realizing Adam and Olivia are Celie's children, Nettie then learned Alphonso is actually her and Celie's stepfather. Their actual father was a store owner that white men lynched because they resented his success. She also learned their mother suffered a mental collapse after her husband's death and that Alphonso exploited the situation to control their mother's considerable wealth. Nettie confessed to Samuel and Corrine she is the children's biological aunt. The gravely ill Corrine refused to believe her until Nettie reminds her of her previous encounter with Celie in the store. Later, Corrine died, finally having accepted Nettie's story. Meanwhile, Celie visits Alphonso, who confirms Nettie's story. Celie begins to lose some of her faith in God, which she confides to Shug, who explains to Celie her own unique religious philosophy. Shug helps Celie realize God is not someone who has power over her like the rest of the men in Celie's life. Rather, God is an “it” and not a “who." Having had enough of her husband's abuse, Celie decides to leave Mister along with Shug and Squeak, who is considering a singing career of her own. Celie puts a curse on Mister before leaving him for good, settling in Tennessee and supporting herself as a seamstress. Alphonso dies, Celie inherits his land and moves back into her childhood home. Around this time, Shug falls in love with Germaine, a member of her band, and this news crushes Celie. Shug travels with Germaine, all the while writing postcards to Celie. Celie pledges to love Shug even if Shug does not love her back. Celie learns that Mister, suffering from a considerable decline in fortunes after Celie left him, has changed dramatically, and Celie begins to call him by his first name, Albert. Albert proposes that they marry "in the spirit as well as in the flesh," but Celie declines. Meanwhile, Nettie and Samuel marry and prepare to return to America. Before they leave, Adam marries Tashi, an African girl. Following an African tradition, Tashi undergoes the painful rituals of female circumcision and facial scarring. In solidarity, Adam undergoes the same facial scarring ritual. As Celie realizes that she is content in her life without Shug, Shug returns, having ended her relationship with Germaine. Nettie, Samuel, Olivia, Adam, and Tashi all arrive at Celie's house. Nettie and Celie reunite after 30 years and introduce one another to their respective families. Critical reception. "The Color Purple" won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1983, making Walker the first black woman to win the prize. Walker also won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1983. Mel Watkins of the "New York Times Book Review" wrote that it is a "striking and consummately well-written novel", praising its powerful emotional impact and epistolary structure. Though the novel has garnered critical acclaim, it has also been the subject of controversy. It is 17th on the American Library Association's list of most frequently challenged or banned books. Commonly cited justifications for banning the book include sexual explicitness, explicit language, violence, and homosexuality. The book received greater scrutiny amidst controversy surrounding the release of the film adaptation in 1985. The controversy centered around the depiction of black men, which some critics saw as feeding stereotypical narratives of black male violence, while others found the representation compelling and relatable. On November 5, 2019, the "BBC News" listed "The Color Purple" on its list of the 100 most influential novels. Adaptations. The novel was adapted into a film of the same name in 1985. It was directed by Steven Spielberg and stars Whoopi Goldberg as Celie, Danny Glover as Albert, and Oprah Winfrey as Sofia. Though nominated for eleven Academy Awards, it won none. This perceived snubbing ignited controversy because many critics considered it the best picture that year, including Roger Ebert. On December 1, 2005, a musical adaptation of the novel and film with lyrics and music by Stephen Bray, Brenda Russell and Allee Willis, and book by Marsha Norman opened at The Broadway Theatre in New York City. The show was produced by Scott Sanders, Quincy Jones, Harvey Weinstein, and Oprah Winfrey, who was also an investor. In 2008 BBC Radio 4 broadcast a radio adaptation of the novel in ten 15-minute episodes as a "Woman's Hour" serial, with Nadine Marshall as Celie, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Nina Sosanya and Eamonn Walker. The script was by Patricia Cumper, and in 2009 the production received the Sony Radio Academy Awards Silver Drama Award. Boycotting Israel. As part of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS), the author declined publication of the book in Israel in 2012. This decision was criticized by Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz, who argued that Walker "resorted to bigotry and censorship against Hebrew-speaking readers of her writings". Walker, an ardent pro-Palestinian activist, said in a letter to Yediot Books that Israel practices apartheid and must change its policies before her works can be published there. References. Singh, Sonal, and Sushma Gupta. “Celie’s Emancipation in the Novel The Color Purple.” International Transactions in Humanities and Social Sciences, vol. 2, no. 2, Dec. 2010, pp. 218–221.Humanities International Complete. Tahir, Ary S. “Gender Violence in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple.” Journal of Language and Literature Education, no. 11, 2014, pp. 1–19. Literature Resource Center, doi:10.12973/jlle.11.243.

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The Time of Our Singing The Time of Our Singing (2003) is a novel by American writer Richard Powers. It tells the story of two brothers, Jonah and Joseph Strom, involved in music, dealing heavily with issues of prejudice. Their parents, David Strom and Delia Daley, met at Marian Anderson's concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial after she had been barred from any other legitimate concert venue. The story goes back and forth between the generations, describing the unusual coupling of a German-Jewish physicist (David) who has lost his family in the Holocaust and a black woman from Philadelphia (Delia), both of whom have strong musical backgrounds. They impart their love of music to their family. Their two boys go on to study music and become professional musicians: one a singer, the other a pianist. The parent's third child, their daughter Ruth, becomes a militant black activist. This is a complex epic novel juxtaposing historical events throughout most of the 20th century, depicting racism and the development of civil rights efforts and the author's love and knowledge of music and physics. The book can be read on many levels, but those who have at least some familiarity with music will find a plethora of references to music of all eras and styles. Music referenced in the book. Powers makes many references to specific composers, musicians and singers in the novel. Below are some examples. Critical reception. The novel won the 2004 Ambassador Book Award for fiction, won the 2004 WH Smith Literary Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award the year before.

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Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (or, as it is known in more recent editions, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) is a novel by American author Mark Twain, which was first published in the United Kingdom in December 1884 and in the United States in February 1885. Commonly named among the Great American Novels, the work is among the first in major American literature to be written throughout in vernacular English, characterized by local color regionalism. It is told in the first person by Huckleberry "Huck" Finn, the narrator of two other Twain novels ("Tom Sawyer Abroad" and "Tom Sawyer, Detective") and a friend of Tom Sawyer. It is a direct sequel to "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer". The book is noted for its colorful description of people and places along the Mississippi River. Set in a Southern antebellum society that had ceased to exist over 20 years before the work was published, "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" is an often scathing satire on entrenched attitudes, particularly racism. Perennially popular with readers, "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" has also been the continued object of study by literary critics since its publication. The book was widely criticized upon release because of its extensive use of coarse language. Throughout the 20th century, and despite arguments that the protagonist and the tenor of the book are anti-racist, criticism of the book continued due to both its perceived use of racial stereotypes and its frequent use of the racial slur "nigger". Characters. In order of appearance: Plot summary. In Missouri. The story begins in fictional St. Petersburg, Missouri (based on the actual town of Hannibal, Missouri), on the shore of the Mississippi River "forty to fifty years ago" (the novel having been published in 1884). Huckleberry "Huck" Finn (the protagonist and first-person narrator) and his friend, Thomas "Tom" Sawyer, have each come into a considerable sum of money as a result of their earlier adventures (detailed in "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer"). Huck explains how he is placed under the guardianship of the Widow Douglas, who, together with her stringent sister, Miss Watson, are attempting to "sivilize" him and teach him religion. Huck finds civilized life confining. His spirits are raised when Tom Sawyer helps him to slip past Miss Watson's slave, Jim, so he can meet up with Tom's gang of self-proclaimed "robbers". Just as the gang's activities begin to bore Huck, his shiftless father, "Pap", an abusive alcoholic, suddenly reappears. Huck, who knows his father will spend the money on alcohol, is successful keeping his fortune out of his father's hands. Pap, however, kidnaps Huck and takes him out of town. In Illinois, Jackson's Island and while going Downriver. Pap forcibly moves Huck to his isolated cabin in the woods along the Illinois shoreline. Because of Pap's drunken violence and imprisonment of Huck inside the cabin, Huck, during one of his father's absences, elaborately fakes his own murder by non-existent robbers, steals his father's provisions, escapes from the cabin, and sets off downriver in a 13/14-foot long canoe he finds drifting down. He settles comfortably, on Jackson's Island. Here, Huck reunites with Jim, Miss Watson's slave. Jim has also run away after he overheard Miss Watson planning to sell him "down the river" to presumably more brutal owners. Jim plans to make his way to the town of Cairo in Illinois, a free state, so that he can later buy the rest of his enslaved family's freedom. At first, Huck is conflicted about the sin and crime of supporting a runaway slave, but as the two talk in-depth and bond over their mutually held superstitions, Huck emotionally connects with Jim, who increasingly becomes Huck's close friend and guardian. After heavy flooding on the river, the two find a raft (which they keep) as well as an entire house floating on the river (Chapter 9: "The House of Death Floats By"). Entering the house to seek loot, Jim finds the naked body of a dead man lying on the floor, shot in the back. He prevents Huck from viewing the corpse. To find out the latest news in town, Huck dresses as a girl and enters the house of Judith Loftus, a woman new to the area. Huck learns from her about the news of his own supposed murder; Pap was initially blamed, but since Jim ran away he is also a suspect and a reward of 300 dollars for Jim's capture has initiated a manhunt. Mrs. Loftus becomes increasingly suspicious that Huck is a boy, finally proving it by a series of tests. Huck develops another story on the fly and explains his disguise as the only way to escape from an abusive foster family. Once he is exposed, she nevertheless allows him to leave her home without commotion, not realizing that he is the allegedly murdered boy they have just been discussing. Huck returns to Jim to tell him the news and that a search party is coming to Jackson's Island that very night. The two hastily load up the raft and depart. After a while, Huck and Jim come across a grounded steamer. Searching it, they stumble upon two thieves named Bill and Jake Packard discussing murdering a third named Jim Turner, but they flee before being noticed in the thieves' boat as their raft has drifted away. They find their own raft again and keep the thieves' loot and sink the thieves' boat. Huck tricks a watchman on a steamer into going to rescue the thieves stranded on the wreck to assuage his conscience. They are later separated in a fog, making Jim (on the raft) intensely anxious, and when they reunite, Huck tricks Jim into thinking he dreamed the entire incident. Jim is not deceived for long and is deeply hurt that his friend should have teased him so mercilessly. Huck becomes remorseful and apologizes to Jim, though his conscience troubles him about humbling himself to a Black man. In Kentucky: the Grangerfords and Shepherdsons. Traveling onward, Huck and Jim's raft is struck by a passing steamship, again separating the two. Huck is given shelter on the Kentucky side of the river by the Grangerfords, an "aristocratic" family. He befriends Buck Grangerford, a boy about his age, and learns that the Grangerfords are engaged in a 30-year blood feud against another family, the Shepherdsons. The Grangerfords and Shepherdsons go to the same church, which ironically preaches brotherly love. The vendetta finally comes to a head when Buck's older sister elopes with a member of the Shepherdson clan. In the resulting conflict, all the Grangerford males from this branch of the family are shot and killed, including Buck, whose horrific murder Huck witnesses. He is immensely relieved to be reunited with Jim, who has since recovered and repaired the raft. In Arkansas: the Duke and the King. Near the Arkansas-Missouri-Tennessee border, Jim and Huck take two on-the-run grifters aboard the raft. The younger man, who is about thirty, introduces himself as the long-lost son of an English duke (the Duke of Bridgewater). The older one, about seventy, then trumps this outrageous claim by alleging that he himself is the Lost Dauphin, the son of Louis XVI and rightful King of France. The "duke" and "king" soon become permanent passengers on Jim and Huck's raft, committing a series of confidence schemes upon unsuspecting locals all along their journey. To divert public suspicion from Jim, they pretend he is a runaway slave who has been recaptured, but later paint him blue and call him the "Sick Arab" so that he can move about the raft without bindings. On one occasion, the swindlers advertise a three-night engagement of a play called "The Royal Nonesuch". The play turns out to be only a couple of minutes' worth of an absurd, bawdy sham. On the afternoon of the first performance, a drunk called Boggs is shot dead by a gentleman named Colonel Sherburn; a lynch mob forms to retaliate against Sherburn; and Sherburn, surrounded at his home, disperses the mob by making a defiant speech describing how true lynching should be done. By the third night of "The Royal Nonesuch", the townspeople prepare for their revenge on the duke and king for their money-making scam, but the two cleverly skip town together with Huck and Jim just before the performance begins. In the next town, the two swindlers then impersonate brothers of Peter Wilks, a recently deceased man of property. To match accounts of Wilks's brothers, the king attempts an English accent and the duke pretends to be a deaf-mute while starting to collect Wilks's inheritance. Huck decides that Wilks's three orphaned nieces, who treat Huck with kindness, do not deserve to be cheated thus and so he tries to retrieve for them the stolen inheritance. In a desperate moment, Huck is forced to hide the money in Wilks's coffin, which is abruptly buried the next morning. The arrival of two new men who seem to be the real brothers throws everything into confusion, so that the townspeople decide to dig up the coffin in order to determine which are the true brothers, but, with everyone else distracted, Huck leaves for the raft, hoping to never see the duke and king again. Suddenly, though, the two villains return, much to Huck's despair. When Huck is finally able to get away a second time, he finds to his horror that the swindlers have sold Jim away to a family that intends to return him to his proper owner for the reward. Defying his conscience and accepting the negative religious consequences he expects for his actions—"All right, then, I'll go to hell!"—Huck resolves to free Jim once and for all. On the Phelps' farm. Huck learns that Jim is being held at the plantation of Silas and Sally Phelps. The family's nephew, Tom, is expected for a visit at the same time as Huck's arrival, so Huck is mistaken for Tom and welcomed into their home. He plays along, hoping to find Jim's location and free him; in a surprising plot twist, it is revealed that the expected nephew is, in fact, Tom Sawyer. When Huck intercepts the real Tom Sawyer on the road and tells him everything, Tom decides to join Huck's scheme, pretending to be his own younger half-brother, Sid, while Huck continues pretending to be Tom. In the meantime, Jim has told the family about the two grifters and the new plan for "The Royal Nonesuch", and so the townspeople capture the duke and king, who are then tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail. Rather than simply sneaking Jim out of the shed where he is being held, Tom develops an elaborate plan to free him, involving secret messages, a hidden tunnel, snakes in a shed, a rope ladder sent in Jim's food, and other elements from adventure books he has read, including an anonymous note to the Phelps warning them of the whole scheme. During the actual escape and resulting pursuit, Tom is shot in the leg, while Jim remains by his side, risking recapture rather than completing his escape alone. Although a local doctor admires Jim's decency, he has Jim arrested in his sleep and returned to the Phelps. After this, events quickly resolve themselves. Tom's Aunt Polly arrives and reveals Huck and Tom's true identities to the Phelps family. Jim is revealed to be a free man: Miss Watson died two months earlier and freed Jim in her will, but Tom (who already knew this) chose not to reveal this information to Huck so that he could come up with an artful rescue plan for Jim. Jim tells Huck that Huck's father (Pap Finn) has been dead for some time (he was the dead man they found earlier in the floating house), and so Huck may now return safely to St. Petersburg. Huck declares that he is quite glad to be done writing his story, and despite Sally's plans to adopt and civilize him, he intends to flee west to Indian Territory. Themes. "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" explores themes of race and identity. A complexity exists concerning Jim's character. While some scholars point out that Jim is good-hearted and moral, and he is not unintelligent (in contrast to several of the more negatively depicted white characters), others have criticized the novel as racist, citing the use of the word "nigger" and emphasizing the stereotypically "comic" treatment of Jim's lack of education, superstition and ignorance. Throughout the story, Huck is in moral conflict with the received values of the society in which he lives. Huck is unable consciously to rebut those values even in his thoughts but he makes a moral choice based on his own valuation of Jim's friendship and human worth, a decision in direct opposition to the things he has been taught. Twain, in his lecture notes, proposes that "a sound heart is a surer guide than an ill-trained conscience" and goes on to describe the novel as "...a book of mine where a sound heart and a deformed conscience come into collision and conscience suffers defeat". To highlight the hypocrisy required to condone slavery within an ostensibly moral system, Twain has Huck's father enslave his son, isolate him and beat him. When Huck escapes, he immediately encounters Jim "illegally" doing the same thing. The treatments both of them receive are radically different, especially in an encounter with Mrs. Judith Loftus who takes pity on who she presumes to be a runaway apprentice, Huck, yet boasts about her husband sending the hounds after a runaway slave, Jim. Some scholars discuss Huck's own character, and the novel itself, in the context of its relation to African-American culture as a whole. John Alberti quotes Shelley Fisher Fishkin, who writes in her 1990s book "Was Huck Black?: Mark Twain and African-American Voices", "by limiting their field of inquiry to the periphery," white scholars "have missed the ways in which African-American voices shaped Twain's creative imagination at its core." It is suggested that the character of Huckleberry Finn illustrates the correlation, and even interrelatedness, between white and Black culture in the United States. Illustrations. The original illustrations were done by E.W. Kemble, at the time a young artist working for "Life" magazine. Kemble was hand-picked by Twain, who admired his work. Hearn suggests that Twain and Kemble had a similar skill, writing that: Whatever he may have lacked in technical grace ... Kemble shared with the greatest illustrators the ability to give even the minor individual in a text his own distinct visual personality; just as Twain so deftly defined a full-rounded character in a few phrases, so too did Kemble depict with a few strokes of his pen that same entire personage. As Kemble could afford only one model, most of his illustrations produced for the book were done by guesswork. When the novel was published, the illustrations were praised even as the novel was harshly criticized. E.W. Kemble produced another set of illustrations for Harper's and the American Publishing Company in 1898 and 1899 after Twain lost the copyright. Publication's effect on literary climate. Twain initially conceived of the work as a sequel to "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" that would follow Huckleberry Finn through adulthood. Beginning with a few pages he had removed from the earlier novel, Twain began work on a manuscript he originally titled "Huckleberry Finn's Autobiography." Twain worked on the manuscript off and on for the next several years, ultimately abandoning his original plan of following Huck's development into adulthood. He appeared to have lost interest in the manuscript while it was in progress, and set it aside for several years. After making a trip down the Hudson River, Twain returned to his work on the novel. Upon completion, the novel's title closely paralleled its predecessor's: "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer's Comrade)". Mark Twain composed the story in pen on notepaper between 1876 and 1883. Paul Needham, who supervised the authentication of the manuscript for Sotheby's books and manuscripts department in New York in 1991, stated, "What you see is [Clemens'] attempt to move away from pure literary writing to dialect writing". For example, Twain revised the opening line of "Huck Finn" three times. He initially wrote, "You will not know about me", which he changed to, "You do not know about me", before settling on the final version, "You don't know about me, without you have read a book by the name of 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer'; but that ain't no matter." The revisions also show how Twain reworked his material to strengthen the characters of Huck and Jim, as well as his sensitivity to the then-current debate over literacy and voting. A later version was the first typewritten manuscript delivered to a printer. Demand for the book spread outside of the United States. "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" was eventually published on December 10, 1884, in Canada and the United Kingdom, and on February 18, 1885, in the United States. The illustration on page 283 became a point of issue after an engraver, whose identity was never discovered, made a last-minute addition to the printing plate of Kemble's picture of old Silas Phelps, which drew attention to Phelps' groin. Thirty thousand copies of the book had been printed before the obscenity was discovered. A new plate was made to correct the illustration and repair the existing copies. In 1885, the Buffalo Public Library's curator, James Fraser Gluck, approached Twain to donate the manuscript to the library. Twain did so. Later it was believed that half of the pages had been misplaced by the printer. In 1991, the missing first half turned up in a steamer trunk owned by descendants of Gluck's. The library successfully claimed possession and, in 1994, opened the Mark Twain Room to showcase the treasure. In relation to the literary climate at the time of the book's publication in 1885, Henry Nash Smith describes the importance of Mark Twain's already established reputation as a "professional humorist", having already published over a dozen other works. Smith suggests that while the "dismantling of the decadent Romanticism of the later nineteenth century was a necessary operation," "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" illustrated "previously inaccessible resources of imaginative power, but also made vernacular language, with its new sources of pleasure and new energy, available for American prose and poetry in the twentieth century." Critical reception and banning. While it is clear that "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" was controversial from the outset, Norman Mailer, writing in "The New York Times" in 1984, concluded that Twain's novel was not initially "too unpleasantly regarded." In fact, Mailer writes: "the critical climate could hardly anticipate T. S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway's encomiums 50 years later," reviews that would remain longstanding in the American consciousness. Alberti suggests that the academic establishment responded to the book's challenges both dismissively and with confusion. During Twain's time, and today, defenders of "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" "lump all nonacademic critics of the book together as extremists and ‘censors' thus equating the complaints about the book's ‘coarseness' from the genteel bourgeois trustees of the Concord Public Library in the 1880s with more recent objections based on race and civil rights." Upon issue of the American edition in 1885 several libraries banned it from their shelves. The early criticism focused on what was perceived as the book's crudeness. One incident was recounted in the newspaper the "Boston Transcript": The Concord (Mass.) Public Library committee has decided to exclude Mark Twain's latest book from the library. One member of the committee says that, while he does not wish to call it immoral, he thinks it contains but little humor, and that of a very coarse type. He regards it as the veriest trash. The library and the other members of the committee entertain similar views, characterizing it as rough, coarse, and inelegant, dealing with a series of experiences not elevating, the whole book being more suited to the slums than to intelligent, respectable people. Writer Louisa May Alcott criticized the book's publication as well, saying that if Twain "[could not] think of something better to tell our pure-minded lads and lasses he had best stop writing for them". Twain later remarked to his editor, "Apparently, the Concord library has condemned Huck as 'trash and only suitable for the slums.' This will sell us another twenty-five thousand copies for sure!" In 1905, New York's Brooklyn Public Library also banned the book due to "bad word choice" and Huck's having "not only itched but scratched" within the novel, which was considered obscene. When asked by a Brooklyn librarian about the situation, Twain sardonically replied: I am greatly troubled by what you say. I wrote 'Tom Sawyer' & 'Huck Finn' for adults exclusively, & it always distressed me when I find that boys and girls have been allowed access to them. The mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean. I know this by my own experience, & to this day I cherish an unappeased bitterness against the unfaithful guardians of my young life, who not only permitted but compelled me to read an unexpurgated Bible through before I was 15 years old. None can do that and ever draw a clean sweet breath again on this side of the grave. Many subsequent critics, Ernest Hemingway among them, have deprecated the final chapters, claiming the book "devolves into little more than minstrel-show satire and broad comedy" after Jim is detained. Although Hemingway declared, "All modern American literature comes from" "Huck Finn", and hailed it as "the best book we've had", he cautioned, "If you must read it you must stop where the Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys . That is the real end. The rest is just cheating." However, the noted African-American writer Ralph Ellison argues that "Hemingway missed completely the structural, symbolic and moral necessity for that part of the plot in which the boys rescue Jim. Yet it is precisely this part which gives the novel its significance." Pulitzer Prize winner Ron Powers states in his Twain biography ("Mark Twain: A Life") that "Huckleberry Finn endures as a consensus masterpiece despite these final chapters", in which Tom Sawyer leads Huck through elaborate machinations to rescue Jim. Controversy. In his introduction to "The Annotated Huckleberry Finn", Michael Patrick Hearn writes that Twain "could be uninhibitedly vulgar", and quotes critic William Dean Howells, a Twain contemporary, who wrote that the author's "humor was not for most women". However, Hearn continues by explaining that "the reticent Howells found nothing in the proofs of Huckleberry Finn so offensive that it needed to be struck out". Much of modern scholarship of "Huckleberry Finn" has focused on its treatment of race. Many Twain scholars have argued that the book, by humanizing Jim and exposing the fallacies of the racist assumptions of slavery, is an attack on racism. Others have argued that the book falls short on this score, especially in its depiction of Jim. According to Professor Stephen Railton of the University of Virginia, Twain was unable to fully rise above the stereotypes of Black people that white readers of his era expected and enjoyed, and, therefore, resorted to minstrel show-style comedy to provide humor at Jim's expense, and ended up confirming rather than challenging late-19th century racist stereotypes. In one instance, the controversy caused a drastically altered interpretation of the text: in 1955, CBS tried to avoid controversial material in a televised version of the book, by deleting all mention of slavery and omitting the character of Jim entirely. Because of this controversy over whether "Huckleberry Finn" is racist or anti-racist, and because the word "nigger" is frequently used in the novel (a commonly used word in Twain's time that has since become vulgar and taboo), many have questioned the appropriateness of teaching the book in the U.S. public school system—this questioning of the word "nigger" is illustrated by a school administrator of Virginia in 1982 calling the novel the "most grotesque example of racism I've ever seen in my life". According to the American Library Association, "Huckleberry Finn" was the fifth most frequently challenged book in the United States during the 1990s. There have been several more recent cases involving protests for the banning of the novel. In 2003, high school student Calista Phair and her grandmother, Beatrice Clark, in Renton, Washington, proposed banning the book from classroom learning in the Renton School District, though not from any public libraries, because of the word "nigger". Clark filed a request with the school district in response to the required reading of the book, asking for the novel to be removed from the English curriculum. The two curriculum committees that considered her request eventually decided to keep the novel on the 11th grade curriculum, though they suspended it until a panel had time to review the novel and set a specific teaching procedure for the novel's controversial topics. In 2009, a Washington state high school teacher called for the removal of the novel from a school curriculum. The teacher, John Foley, called for replacing "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" with a more modern novel. In an opinion column that Foley wrote in the "Seattle Post Intelligencer", he states that all "novels that use the ‘N-word' repeatedly need to go." He states that teaching the novel is not only unnecessary, but difficult due to the offensive language within the novel with many students becoming uncomfortable at "just hear[ing] the N-word." He views this change as "common sense," with Obama's election into office as a sign that Americans "are ready for a change," and that by removing these books from the reading lists, they would be following this change. In 2016, "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" was removed from a public school district in Virginia, along with the novel "To Kill a Mockingbird", due to their use of racial slurs. Expurgated editions. Publishers have made their own attempts at easing the controversy by way of releasing editions of the book with the word "nigger" replaced by less controversial words. A 2011 edition of the book, published by NewSouth Books, employed the word "slave" (although the word is not properly applied to a freed man). Mark Twain scholar Alan Gribben said he hoped the edition would be more friendly for use in classrooms, rather than have the work banned outright from classroom reading lists due to its language. According to publisher Suzanne La Rosa, "At NewSouth, we saw the value in an edition that would help the works find new readers. If the publication sparks good debate about how language impacts learning or about the nature of censorship or the way in which racial slurs exercise their baneful influence, then our mission in publishing this new edition of Twain's works will be more emphatically fulfilled." Another scholar, Thomas Wortham, criticized the changes, saying the new edition "doesn't challenge children to ask, 'Why would a child like Huck use such reprehensible language?'"

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The Secret Life of Bees (novel) The Secret Life of Bees is a fiction book by the American author Sue Monk Kidd. Set in 1964, it is a coming-of-age story about loss and betrayal. The book received critical acclaim and was a "New York Times" bestseller. It won the 2004 Book Sense Book of the Year Awards (Paperback), and was nominated for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction. The book was later adapted into a film directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood. Plot. Set in 1964 in the fictitious town of Sylvan, South Carolina, "The Secret Life of Bees" tells the story of a 14-year-old white girl, Lily Melissa Owens, whose life has been shaped around the blurred memory of the afternoon her mother was killed. Lily lives in a house with her abusive father, whom she refers to as T. Ray. They have a no-nonsense maid, Rosaleen, who is a mother figure for Lily. The book opens with Lily's discovery of bees in her bedroom. Then, after Rosaleen is arrested for pouring her bottle of "snuff juice" on three white men, Lily breaks her out of the hospital and they decide to leave town. The two begin hitch-hiking toward Tiburon, South Carolina, a place written on the back of an image of the Virgin Mary as a black woman, which Deborah, Lily's mother, had owned. They spend a night in the woods with little food and little hope before reaching Tiburon. There, they buy lunch at a general store, and Lily recognizes a picture of the same "Black Mary" but on the side of a jar of honey. Rosaleen and Lily receive directions to the origin of the honey, the Boatwright residence. They are introduced to the Boatwright sisters, the makers of the honey: August, May, and June, who are all black. When Lily meets the sisters she makes up a story about being an orphan. Believing Lily's Story, August, June, and May invite Lily and Rosaleen to stay with them. They learn the ways of the Boatwrights, as well as the ways of bee keeping. With a new home and a new family for the time being, Lily learns more about the Black Madonna honey that the sisters make. She begins working as August's bee keeping apprentice to repay her for her kindness, while Rosaleen works around the house. Lily finds out that May had a twin sister, April, who died by suicide with their father's shotgun when they were younger. She watches June's ongoing flirtations with, and refusals of marriage to, her boyfriend Neil. Lily and Rosaleen also get to see the sisters' religious ceremonies. The sisters hold service at their house which they call "The Daughters of Mary." They keep a statue of the "Black Mary", or "our lady of chains", which was actually a figurehead from the bow of an ancient ship, and August tells the story of how a man by the name of Obadiah, who was enslaved, found this figure. The enslaved men and women thought that God had answered their prayers asking for rescue, and "to send them consolation" and "to send them freedom". It gave them hope, and the figure had been passed down for generations. Lily eventually meets Zach, August's godson. They soon develop intimate feelings for each other. They share goals with each other while working the hives. Both Lily and Zach find their goals nearly impossible to meet but still encourage each other to attempt them. Zach wants to be the "ass-busting lawyer", which means he would be the first black attorney in the area. Lily wants to be a short story writer. Lily attempts to tell August the truth but is interrupted by Zach, who takes her for a honey run. They stop at a store to pick up a few things. Zach gets arrested after one of his friends, who they had met at the store, throws a coke bottle at a white man and none of them will tell who did it. Zach and his friends are arrested and put in jail. The Boatwright house decides not to tell May in fear of an unbearable emotional episode. The secret does not stay hidden for long and May becomes catatonic with depression. May leaves the house and goes missing. August, June, Lily and Rosaleen go looking to find her and end up find her lying dead in the river with a rock on her chest. It looks to be a suicide, due to May's depression from Zach being arrested. A vigil is held that lasts four days. In that time, Zach is freed from jail with no charges, and black cloth is draped over the beehives to symbolize the mourning. May's suicide letter is found and in it she says, "It's my time to die, and it's your time to live. Don't mess it up." August interprets this as urging June to marry Neil. May is later buried. Life begins to turn back to normal after a time of grieving, bringing the Boatwright house back together. June, after several rejections, agrees to give her hand in marriage to Neil. Zach vows to Lily that they will be together someday and that they will both achieve their goals. Lily finally finds out the truth about her mother. August was her mother's nanny, and helped raise her. After her marriage to T. Ray began to sour, Deborah left and went to stay with the Boatwrights. She eventually decided to leave him permanently and returned to their house to collect Lily. While Deborah was packing to leave, T. Ray returned home. Their ensuing argument turned into a physical fight during which Deborah got a gun. After a brief struggle, the gun fell to the floor, which Lily picked up and the gun accidentally discharged, killing Deborah. While Lily is coming to terms with this information, T. Ray shows up at the Boatwright residence, also known as the pink house, to take her back home. Lily refuses, and T. Ray flies into an enraged rampage. He has a violent flashback which brings him around. August steps in and offers to let Lily stay with her. T. Ray gives in and agrees. However, right before T. Ray leaves the Boatwright house, Lily asks him what really happened the day her mother died. T. Ray confirms that Lily was the one to, accidentally, kill her mother Deborah. Themes. The novel has many themes, including religion, labour, nature, racism, orphanhood and abandonment, mental health issues and suicide. Lily's search for a mother figure is a part of the greater journey into her own identity. The Bildungsroman showcases Lily's struggle to understand her role in her family and the world and work through her trauma. Another theme is the historical setting and the racism in 1960s southern United States. The novel mentions police mistreatment of Black people, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the controversy of interracial relations. April and May, as well as Lily's mother, are affected by various mental illnesses. Although this is not stated directly, May exhibits symptoms of autism spectrum disorder (hyperempathy, restricted and stereotyped behaviour, speech abnormalities). Symbolism. There are a couple big symbols and motifs in “The Secret Life of Bees." One major symbol is the bees and bee-related objects. Bees are a main symbol and motif in the novel. Bees are a symbol of two main things: Guidance and the power of a female community. This is seen in the theme. A major theme is that Lily is looking for a connection to her mother or some mother figure. In the story, there are many strong women she meets. She not only grows up with Rosalee, who is a surrogate mother to Lily, but she also meets the Boatwright Sister and the Daughters of Mary who enhance this symbol of power in a female community in relation to bees. Bees can also symbolize organization or “living in a civilized community.” This can be connected to the black community and specifically the Boatwright sisters in this novel. Bees are very organized, and every bee needs to do its job. In the novel, there is a quote which says, “when a queen bee is taken from a hive, the other bees notice her absence” and it is very similar with the Boatwright sisters. Once May’s twin, April, died, May was never the same. She was emotionally sensitive after her twin passed. Once May took her own life, the Boatwright sisters, once again, had to learn how to move on and live with a loss and “missing bees.” Honey represents wisdom and knowledge. In the plot, Lily is looking for the black Mary that is on a honey jar, and after finding the source of this honey, The Boatwright Sisters take Lily and Rosaleen in, and begin to share their wisdom and knowledge. Wisdom and knowledge about bees, life, Lily’s dad, T. Ray, and Lily’s mother, Deborah. Reception and adaptations. The reception of the book was generally positive. Although the novel does include the underlying theme of the civil rights movement, "USA Today" felt the novel focused more on Lily's journey towards "self-acceptance, faith and freedom". The novel was originally published in 2001, and has since sold more than six million copies and has been published in 35 countries. It also stayed on the "New York Times" best seller list for two and a half years. In 2004, it was named the "Book Sense Paperback of the Year". It was also one of "Good Morning America"'s "Read-This" Book club picks, and was nominated for the Orange Prize in England. The book was adapted into a film in 2008, directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood and produced by Will Smith, with Jada Pinkett Smith as the executive producer. Queen Latifah played August Boatwright, Dakota Fanning played Lily, Alicia Keys played June Boatwright, Jennifer Hudson played Rosaleen, and Sophie Okonedo played May Boatwright. The book has been adapted as a musical. A workshop was produced by New York Stage and Film & Vassar in 2017. The world premiere musical adaptation of "The Secret Life of Bees" was held at the Off-Broadway Atlantic Theater Company on May 12, 2019 in previews, with the official opening on June 13. The musical's book is written by Lynn Nottage, with music by Duncan Sheik and lyrics by Susan Birkenhead. The musical is directed by Sam Gold and features Saycon Sengbloh as Rosaleen, Elizabeth Teeter as Lily, and LaChanze, Eisa Davis and Anastacia McCleskey as the Boatwight beekeeping sisters.

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Operation Burning Candle Operation Burning Candle is a novel by Blyden Jackson published in 1973. It was his debut novel. It describes a political conspiracy led by a group called the Black Warriors, whose leader is Vietnam War veteran and Harlem native Captain Aaron Rogers. The conspiracy does not appear clear until more than halfway through the novel and refers to a traumatic event to galvanize the black community in the US to take control of their own destiny. The novel culminates with a series of killings at a political convention held at Madison Square Garden in New York City. Title. The title of the book refers to the three part plan initiated by the Black Warriors. No matter where they go, they will be welcomed in to the homes of members of the black community who burn candles in their home as a sign of solidarity and refuge. Plot summary. The novel begins with the death of Harlem native and Vietnam War veteran Captain Aaron Rogers. He has supposedly been killed in Vietnam and his body has been flown back to the US for burial. Suspicion is created when Rogers' sister Sissy (Janice) claims to have seen Aaron in a car in lower Manhattan. She and her brother Tommy go to the funeral parlor where the body of Aaron is in a coffin. They discover that the body is not of their brother at all, but someone else entirely. While Sissy and Tommy are discovering the truth about their brother, Police detective Dan Roberts, former Korean War veteran and current law school student as well as member of the NYPD's Special Operations Unit is investigating a series of seemingly unrelated yet unusual crimes, including a number of bank robberies and a subway malfunction and shutdown. Meanwhile, firebrand governor of Mississippi Josiah Brace is getting ready for the Democratic National Convention scheduled to occur in just a few days in Madison Square Garden. Brace is a divisive figure who is opposed to the Civil Rights reforms of the 1960s as well as school busing. He is ambitious and hopes to be nominated as his party's presidential candidate at the convention. At this point, there are flashbacks to the Vietnam War from Aaron Rogers' point of view. We see the racism prevalent during the war from white officers against black regulars. It was not uncommon for black soldiers to engage in "fracking" against their white superiors. There are additional flashbacks to Rogers' time as a student in graduate school where he studied psychology at New York University. He is the only black student in his class and he feels isolated and ostracized by the rest of the class. He is intrigued by Carl Jung's theory of the collective unconsciousness which he hopes to apply to his study of the black community. He comes to the realization that the only thing that can transform the black community's standing in the United States is a monumental traumatic event that will alter the predominant white community's power dynamic. Ultimately, using well trained black Vietnam War soldiers, Aaron Rogers formulates a plan that will culminate in a monumental event of political violence that will transform American society. Main themes. The novel which was written during the late 1960s and early 1970s reflects many of the themes prevalent in US society during the time period. Written in the aftermath of the civil rights movement, urban riots, the Vietnam War, the political assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, it reflects the political paranoia of the period. At the same time the novel is a call to black unity and cooperation in order to transform the political power structure. Many of the novel's themes were addressed in films of the period including Uptight and The Spook Who Sat By the Door. Its treatment of the black soldier's experience during the Vietnam War is reflected in Spike Lee's Da 5 Bloods.

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We Are Not Alone (novel) We Are Not Alone is a novel by James Hilton, first published in 1937. It is one of his more sombre works, portraying the tragic consequences of anti-foreign hysteria in England just before World War I. It has been compared to "Goodbye, Mr. Chips" in its portrayal of small-town life through the eyes of an everyman protagonist. Synopsis. Dr. Newcome is a beloved doctor in a small English town. His frustrations with his relationships with his wife and son lead to his developing an affair with a German dancer, Leni, whom the family takes on as a governess. When Newcome's wife Jessica is killed under suspicious circumstances, both Dr. Newcome and Leni fall under suspicion. The town's prejudice against Leni as a German leads them to convict her and Dr. Newcome despite only circumstantial evidence. Adaptations. A one-hour radio adaptation by James Hilton and Barbara Burnham was broadcast on the BBC National Programme on 6 April 1938, with a cast that included Emlyn Williams as the doctor, Edgar Norfolk, Gordon McLeod and Nan Marriott-Watson. It was made into a film with the same title, with the screenplay by the author, in 1939.

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The Forged Note Oscar Micheaux's The Forged Note: A Romance Of The Darker Races is a 528-page novel published in 1915. It was republished in 2008 by Kessinger Publishing, LLC. The story pertains to a racially motivated lynching in Atlanta.

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The Friendship The Friendship is a children's novella by Mildred Taylor. Published in 1987, it is set in 1933 in Mississippi and deals with the unfair treatment of African Americans. Summary. Mr. Tom Bee, an elderly black man, twice saved the life of a white storekeeper when he was a boy. The boy, John Wallace, was grateful and even allowed Mr. Bee to always call him by his first name. However, years later, Mr. Wallace does not allow Mr. Bee to call him John, while he and even his son call him Tom, which he can do nothing about. Their friendship is ultimately put to the test, which four black children witness. Later Mr. Tom Bee is shot by John Wallace. Mr. Tom Bee crawls away, cursing John Wallace and refusing to give up calling him John. Reception. In giving "The Friendship", a kirkus star, Kirkus Reviews wrote "From its quiet beginning, the tension grows relentlessly in this brief, carefully designed story." and "Ginsburg's black-and-white drawings are outstanding, his solid figures masterfully staged to convey the taut drama."It is also the subject of study at school.

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The Cay The Cay is a teen novel written by Theodore Taylor. It was published in 1969. Taylor took only three weeks to write "The Cay", having contemplated the story for over a decade after reading about an 11-year-old who was aboard the Dutch ship "Hato", when it was torpedoed in 1942, and who was last seen by other stranded survivors as he drifted away on a liferaft. The novel was published in 1969 and dedicated to Martin Luther King Jr. Plot. When World War II breaks out, 11-year-old Phillip Enright and his mother board the S.S. "Hato" to Virginia because his mother feels it is unsafe to stay in Curaçao with the German submarines surrounding the area. The ship is torpedoed, and Phillip is stranded in the sea with an old black man named Timothy and a cat named Stew Cat. Drifting at sea, Phillip is blinded by a blow to the head during the torpedoing of the ship. They soon find an island in Devil's Mouth and build a hut while keeping track of the days by putting pebbles in a can. With few supplies, they live alone together for two months, fishing and collecting rain water. The cay is only one mile long and half a mile in width. Initially, the pair display significant difficulty in being able to tolerate and work with each other, often because of young white Phillip's racial prejudice against the elderly black Timothy. Phillip learns to overcome his disdain for Timothy and develops a strong bond of friendship by the end of the novel, as Timothy takes care of Phillip and teaches him to survive independently, to the point where Phillip no longer needs him. Airplanes fly over the cay, but they do not see Timothy and Phillip, lengthening their time stranded there. After a hurricane hits the cay and Timothy dies from "being tired", Phillip, devastated, digs a small grave for him. He is left with only Stew Cat. Phillip is then rescued by a navy vessel. One year after he and Timothy find the island, he has many surgeries to get his sight back. In the end, Phillip decides he will become a sea explorer and travel to multiple islands and soon hopes to find the Cay he and Timothy had been stranded on, which he is certain he will be able to recognize by closing his eyes. Characters. Phillip Enright: 11-year-old protagonist and narrator, is marooned on a cay in "The Devil's Mouth" with Timothy. Skeptical of Timothy at first because he is black, he relies on him when he is blinded and comes to appreciate him and creates a strong bond of friendship and trust with Timothy. Timothy: West Indian native of Charlotte Amalie in Saint Thomas, is marooned with Phillip. He cares for Phillip and understands many survival tactics including fishing and shelter-building. Although at times superstitious, he is old, wise, and patient, stern, and helps Phillip learn to be self-sufficient. Stew Cat: Feline companion of Phillip and Timothy on the cay, especially comforting for Phillip. Timothy at one point believes he may be an evil spirit called a Jumbi. Before the S.S. "Hato" was torpedoed, he was the cook's cat. Phillip's Mother, Grace: Accompanies Phillip on the S.S. "Hato" headed for Virginia, is separated from him when it sinks. Notably racist against the black inhabitants of Curaçao. Phillip's Father, Phillip Enright Sr.: Relocates the family to the Dutch West Indies for government-related work. He works in an oil refinery that increases the production of aviation gas. Henrik van Boven: Phillip's Dutch-national friend in Curaçao; he does not understand Phillip's mother's disdain for black people. Racism. Phillip is in the beginning and throughout the early parts of the novel skeptical of black people, which seems partially provoked by his mother, who is described as homesick for Virginia and unused to Curaçao. Phillip mentions that his mother did not like the black people who worked on the bay, asking him and his friend Henrik not to go there and telling him that black people live differently than Phillip. Phillip doesn't understand why she feels this way, especially since Henrik finds it particularly unusual, but nevertheless, initially, it shows that he seems to have the same sentiments when dealing with Timothy. Phillip finds that there are some similarities between himself and Timothy. On page 40, Timothy reveals he's from Charlotte Amalie on St. Thomas, to which Phillip responds that means he's American, citing the American purchase of the Virgin Islands from Denmark as a result of the Treaty of the Danish West Indies. Timothy only laughs and mentions that he never gave it much thought. Phillip seems unsure what to make of Timothy and asks if his parents were African; he notices that Timothy looked "pure African" and says he looked very much like men he'd seen in "jungle pictures", but Timothy says he has only ever known the Caribbean islands. When Phillip ends up blind, he comes to rely upon Timothy to provide for him and teach him. This alters the dynamic of their relationship greatly. Timothy proves to a surprised Phillip that he has a great knowledge of the Caribbean islands and survival tactics, able to make shelter, gather food and water, and survive. He teaches these to Phillip so that he won't be an invalid. In turn, their bond strengthens and Phillip grows to admire and befriend Timothy. He is devastated at Timothy's death, makes a grave for him, and sobs. When he returns to Curaçao, Phillip spends a lot of time with the workers of St. Anna Bay, many of whom knew Timothy and remember him fondly. Phillip notes that he feels close to those people; he no longer has any prejudice. Controversy. Published to both wide acclaim and pointed criticism for its impact as a promoter of racial harmony, "The Cay" received Jane Addams Children's Book Award in 1970. In 1974, when NBC-TV adapted its story for a television drama, the Council on Interracial Books for Children organized a press conference to "urge people to watch the telecast and, if you feel as we do, that an insidiously racist message is contained in the story, please call your local stations." As part of that press conference, the current chair of the Addams Award Committee, who was not the chair at the time the award was given to "The Cay", publicly stated that she thought it was a mistake to have named "The Cay" an Addams Award winner for having a racist theme. In response, Taylor, who saw the work as "a subtle plea for better race relations and more understanding," returned the Award "by choice, not in anger, but with troubling questions." In later years, Taylor reported that the Award had been rescinded. Even though "The Cay" remains on the list of Addams Award winners, Taylor's claim is widely thought to be true and has become a part of reading and discussing the book as required reading in schools in dozens of U.S. states as well as internationally. Censorship and banning incidents. In 2020, the Burbank Unified School District banned the book from the curriculum on the back of complaints from four parents who allege the material in the book could lead to potential harm to the district's Black students.

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Pig (novel) Pig, is the debut novel of English author Andrew Cowan. Published in 1994 it won the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, a Betty Trask Award, the Ruth Hadden Memorial Award, the Authors' Club Best First Novel Award and a Scottish Council Book Award, and was shortlisted for five other awards. Plot introduction. "Pig" is a coming-of-age story set in a bleak post-industrial English new town as told by 15 year-old narrator Danny. The eponymous pig is kept by Danny's grandparents in a run-down cottage, but when his grandmother dies and his grandfather is placed in a nursing home, Danny starts looking after the elderly pig. With his Indian girlfriend Surinder he creates a haven away from his racist neighbours and stifling family. Inspiration. The book took the author six years to write and commemorated his first girlfriend and his own grandfather. Its setting and context were based on the town of Corby where the author grew up. After many rejections from publishers Cowan sent off a manuscript to the Betty Trask Awards and won £7,000. Within days of winning the award Cowan received 12 letters from publishers interested in the book.

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Dark Princess Dark Princess, written by sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois in 1928, is one of his five historical novels. One of Du Bois's favorite works, the novel explores the beauty of people of color around the world. This was part of Du Bois' use of fiction to explore his times in a way not possible in non-fiction history. He expressed fully imagined lives of his characters, using them to explore the richness and beauty of black culture. The novel was not well received when published. It was criticized for its expression of eroticism as well as for what some critics thought was a failed attempt at social realism. Structure. The book is divided into four large chapters: "The Exile," "The Pullman Porter," "The Chicago Politician," and "The Maharaja of Bwodphur". The sections deal with different stages in the protagonist's life, moving from his self-imposed exile in Germany late in life, to his early employment as a porter on the railroads, based in New York, then to his career as a politician in Chicago, and his return to Virginia, the land of his birth. While the sections trace the protagonist's growth as a revolutionary figure, they are not directly connected. Plot. The plot follows a character named Matthew Townes, a college student in his junior year at the University of Manhattan studying to be an obstetrician. Early in the novel, Townes is told that not only is he barred from pursuing his career aspirations, he is not allowed to finish his academic studies. His status as an African American disqualifies him in the early 20th century from completing required courses at a white obstetrics hospital, where he would be caring for white female patients. Townes is devastated and goes to Germany in a kind of exile. There he meets Princess Kautilya of Bwodpur, India, daughter of a maharajah. She reassures Towns of the importance of the history of people of color in the world, and of their presence and impact of their beauty worldwide. The Princess takes him from his dreary American world with its strict binary divide by race. She introduces him to a vibrant world of prominent world leaders of color, while acknowledging some with negative influence on the progress of blacks in the United States. Du Bois is believed to be referring to the leader Marcus Garvey in his character Perigua. The relationship between Townes and the princess develops; she bears his child, who by birthright is the Maharajah of Bwodpur. Townes had not thought it possible that an African American man might have such a connection to royalty. Major themes. Du Bois explores internationalism and international racial solidarity, as well as corruption and violent radicalism within African-American culture. "Dark Princess"’s subtitle, "A Romance", points to the narrative’s double valence. As Michèle Mendelssohn argues, "it is the story of a love affair, as well as the story of an ideological romance that challenges one of the United States’ most cherished ideas about itself, the notion that it is a land of progress and possibility for all. The love lost between the hero and the U. S. is the spur for the novel’s political reorientation." Historical contexts. Some critics believe that the book was inspired by the 1911 First Universal Races Congress in London, which Du Bois had attended. In developing the character of Kautilya, Du Bois has been discussed as possibly drawing inspiration from a few historical figures. Scholars have speculated that these may include an unnamed Indian princess at the Universal Races Congress, the Indian independence activist Bhikaji Cama, and the Pan-African Congress organizer Ida Gibbs Hunt, wife of diplomat William Henry Hunt. Late in life, Du Bois described this as his favorite work.

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The Constant Rabbit The Constant Rabbit is a 2020 science fantasy allegorical novel by Jasper Fforde. It was published by Hodder & Stoughton. Synopsis. In 1965, an "Anthropomorphising Event" transformed 18 ordinary rabbits into 18 intelligent, talking, human-sized rabbits. By 2020, there are over a million of them in Britain, and the United Kingdom Anti-Rabbit Party has taken power. Peter Knox is a small-town "rabbit spotter" whose life is changed when a family of rabbits — one of whom, Constance, was his friend in university — moves in next door. Reception. "The Guardian" noted Fforde's "trademark bizarre whimsy", and described the novel as "a crazed cross between "Watership Down" and "Nineteen Eighty-Four"". "Kirkus Reviews" considered the novel to be "wonderfully absurd" and "astonishingly well-crafted", lauding Fforde's use of a narrator who "thinks himself a well-meaning cog in a regrettably evil machine". "Starburst" similarly approved of Peter as a "likeable but spineless hero", and called his friendship with Constance "a satisfying exploration of the importance of doing what you can", praising the novel's "wit, wisdom, and filmic physicality", but acknowledging that "the initial concept's introduction may be a little heavy-handed".

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The Hoopster The Hoopster (2005) is a novel by American author Alan Lawrence Sitomer. It's the first book in the Hoopster Trilogy. Plot summary. The book is about a black teenager named Andre Anderson, who loves to play basketball with his white best friend Shawn and his cousin Cedric. Andre has a dream of becoming a journalist, so he tries to secure a summer job working at a magazine. Shawn thinks that Andre spends too much time on work and not enough on his social life, so he introduces Andre to a Latino girl named Gwen. Andre's boss at the magazine asks him to write an article on racism. While working on the article, Andre's life seems to be perfect until he is violently attacked by a gang of racists and is sent to hospital. His friends and family are left wondering whether or not he will ever recover from the attack. Characters. Andre Anderson: Protagonist of The Hoopster Pops: Father Shawn: friend Cedric: cousin About the author. In 2003, Sitomer was named teacher of the year by the California Literacy organisation. He also had the honor of meeting former President George W. Bush when he was honored as State Teacher of the Year for California in 2007. The Hoopster is the first in a trilogy of novels by Sitomer. The third novel in the trilogy went on to win the Top Ten Picks for Reluctant Young Adult Readers award from the American Library Association in 2008.

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Absalom, Absalom! Absalom, Absalom! is a novel by the American author William Faulkner, first published in 1936. Taking place before, during, and after the American Civil War, it is a story about three families of the American South, with a focus on the life of Thomas Sutpen. Plot summary. "Absalom, Absalom!" details the rise and fall of Thomas Sutpen, a white man born into poverty in West Virginia who moves to Mississippi with the complementary aims of gaining wealth and becoming a powerful family patriarch. The story is told entirely in flashbacks narrated mostly by Quentin Compson to his roommate at Harvard University, Shreve, who frequently contributes his own suggestions and surmises. The narration of Rosa Coldfield, and Quentin's father and grandfather, are also included and re-interpreted by Shreve and Quentin, with the total events of the story unfolding in nonchronological order and often with differing details. This results in a peeling-back-the-onion revelation of the true story of the Sutpens. Rosa initially narrates the story, with long digressions and a biased memory, to Quentin Compson, whose grandfather was a friend of Sutpen's. Quentin's father then fills in some of the details to Quentin. Finally, Quentin relates the story to his roommate Shreve, and in each retelling, the reader receives more details as the parties flesh out the story by adding layers. The final effect leaves the reader more certain about the attitudes and biases of the characters than about the facts of Sutpen's story. Thomas Sutpen arrives in Jefferson, Mississippi, with some slaves and a French architect who has been somehow forced into working for him. Sutpen obtains one hundred square miles of land from a local Native American tribe and immediately begins building a large plantation called Sutpen's Hundred, including an ostentatious mansion. All he needs to complete his plan is a wife to bear him a few children (particularly a son to be his heir), so he ingratiates himself with a local merchant and marries the man's daughter, Ellen Coldfield. Ellen bears Sutpen two children, a son named Henry and a daughter named Judith, both of whom are destined for tragedy. Henry goes to the University of Mississippi and meets fellow student Charles Bon, who is ten years his senior. Henry brings Charles home for Christmas, and Charles and Judith begin a quiet romance that leads to a presumed engagement. However, Thomas Sutpen realizes that Charles Bon is his son from an earlier marriage and moves to stop the proposed union. Sutpen had worked on a plantation in the French West Indies as overseer and, after subduing a slave uprising, was offered the hand of the plantation owner's daughter, Eulalia Bon. She bore him a son, Charles. Sutpen did not know that Eulalia was of mixed race until after the marriage and birth of Charles, but when he discovered that he had been deceived, he renounced the marriage as void and left his wife and child (though leaving them his fortune as part of his own moral recompense). The reader also later learns of Sutpen's childhood, when young Thomas learned that society could base human worth on material worth. It is this episode that sets into motion Thomas' plan to start a dynasty. When Sutpen tells Henry that Charles is his half-brother and that Judith must not be allowed to marry him, Henry refuses to believe it, repudiates his birthright, and accompanies Charles to his home in New Orleans. They then return to Mississippi to enlist in their University company, joining the Confederate Army to fight in the Civil War. During the war, Henry wrestles with his conscience until he presumably resolves to allow the marriage of half-brother and sister; this resolution changes, however, when Sutpen reveals to Henry that Charles is part black. At the conclusion of the war, Henry enacts his father's interdiction of marriage between Charles and Judith, killing Charles at the gates to the mansion and then fleeing into self-exile. Thomas Sutpen returns from the war and begins to repair his dynasty and his home, whose hundred square miles have been reduced by carpetbaggers and punitive northern action to one square mile. He proposes to Rosa Coldfield, his dead wife's younger sister, and she accepts. However, Sutpen insults Rosa by demanding that she bear him a son before the wedding takes place, prompting her to leave Sutpen's Hundred. Sutpen then begins an affair with Milly, the 15-year-old granddaughter of Wash Jones, a squatter who lives on the Sutpen property. The affair continues until Milly becomes pregnant and gives birth to a daughter. Sutpen is terribly disappointed, because the last hope of repairing his Sutpen dynasty rested on Milly giving birth to a son. Sutpen casts Milly and the child aside, telling them that they are not worthy of sleeping in the stables with his horse, who had just sired a male. An enraged Wash Jones kills Sutpen, his own granddaughter, Sutpen's newborn daughter, and finally himself by resisting arrest. The story of Thomas Sutpen's legacy ends with Quentin taking Rosa back to the seemingly abandoned Sutpen's Hundred plantation, where they find Henry Sutpen and Clytemnestra (Clytie), the daughter of Thomas Sutpen by a slave woman. Henry has returned to the estate to die. Three months later, when Rosa returns with medical help for Henry, Clytie mistakes them for law enforcement and starts a fire that consumes the plantation and kills Henry and herself. The only remaining Sutpen is Jim Bond, Charles Bon's black grandson, a young man with severe mental handicaps, who remains on Sutpen's Hundred. Analysis. Like other Faulkner novels, "Absalom, Absalom!" allegorizes Southern history; the title itself is an allusion to the Biblical story of King David and Absalom, a wayward son fighting the empire his father built. The history of Thomas Sutpen mirrors the rise and fall of Southern plantation culture. Sutpen's failures necessarily reflect the weaknesses of an idealistic South. Rigidly committed to his "design", Sutpen proves unwilling to honor his marriage to a part-black woman, setting in motion his own destruction. Discussing "Absalom, Absalom!", Faulkner stated that the curse under which the South labors is slavery, and that Thomas Sutpen's personal curse, or flaw, was his belief that he was too strong to need to be a part of the human family. "Absalom, Absalom!" juxtaposes ostensible fact, informed guesswork, and outright speculation—with the implication that reconstructions of the past remain irretrievable and therefore imaginative. Faulkner stated that, although none of the narrators got the facts right since "no one individual can look at truth", a truth exists that the reader can ultimately know it. Most critics have tried to reconstruct this truth behind the shifting narratives, or to show that such a reconstruction cannot be done with certainty or even to prove that there are factual and logical inconsistencies that cannot be overcome. But some critics have stated that, fictional truth being an oxymoron, it is best to take the story as a given, and regard it on the level of myth and archetype, a fable that allows us to glimpse the deepest levels of the unconscious and thus better understand the people who accept (and are ruled by) that myth—Southerners in general and Quentin Compson in particular. By using various narrators expressing their interpretations, the novel alludes to the historical cultural zeitgeist of Faulkner's South, where the past is always present and constantly in states of revision by the people who tell and retell the story over time; it thus also explores the process of myth-making and the questioning of truth. The use of Quentin Compson as the primary perspective (if not exactly the focus) of the novel makes it something of a companion piece to Faulkner's earlier work "The Sound and the Fury", which tells the story of the Compson Family, with Quentin as a main character. Although the action of that novel is never explicitly referenced, the Sutpen family's struggle with dynasty, downfall, and potential incest parallel the familial events and obsessions that drive Quentin and Miss Rosa Coldfield to witness the burning of Sutpen's Hundred. Influence and significance. "Absalom, Absalom!", along with "The Sound and the Fury", helped Faulkner win the Nobel Prize in Literature. In 2009, a panel of judges called "Absalom, Absalom!" the best Southern novel of all time. The title refers to the Biblical story of Absalom, a son of David who rebelled against his father (then King of the Kingdom of Israel) and was killed by David's general Joab in violation of David's order to deal gently with his son, thus causing heartbreak to David. The 1983 "Guinness Book of World Records" says the "Longest Sentence in Literature" is a sentence from "Absalom, Absalom!" containing 1,288 words. The sentence can be found in Chapter 6; it begins with the words "Just exactly like father", and ends with "the eye could not see from any point". The passage is entirely italicized and incomplete. The final lyric of "Distant Early Warning", a single released by the Canadian rock band Rush, is the word 'Absalom' repeated three times. Drummer Neil Peart, the band's lyricist, said he "loved the sound of" the title of Faulkner's novel and was inspired to look up the Biblical story of Absalom after reading the novel. "Since one of the main themes of the song was compassion, it occurred to me that the Biblical story was applicable."

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The Bluest Eye "The Bluest Eye," published in 1970, is the first novel written by Toni Morrison. The novel takes place in Lorain, Ohio (Morrison's hometown), and tells the story of a young African-American girl named Pecola who grew up following the Great Depression. Set in 1941, the story tells that she is consistently regarded as "ugly" due to her mannerisms and dark skin. As a result, she develops an inferiority complex, which fuels her desire for the blue eyes she equates with "whiteness". The novel is told from Claudia MacTeer's point of view. She is the daughter of Pecola's foster parents at different stages in her life. In addition, there is an omniscient third-person narrative that includes inset narratives in the first person. The book's controversial topics of racism, incest, and child molestation have led to numerous attempts to ban the novel from schools and libraries. Morrison was an African-American novelist, a Pulitzer, and Nobel Prize winner whose works are praised for addressing the harsh consequences of racism in the United States. Plot summary. In Lorain, Ohio, nine-year-old Claudia MacTeer and her 10-year-old sister Frieda live with their parents, a tenant named Mr. Henry, and Pecola Breedlove, a temporary foster child whose house was burned down by her unstable, alcoholic, and sexually abusive father. Pecola is a quiet, passive young girl who grows up with little money and whose parents are constantly fighting, both verbally and physically. Pecola is continually reminded of what an "ugly" girl she is by members of her neighborhood and school community. In an attempt to beautify herself, Pecola wishes for blue eyes. Additionally, most chapters' titles are extracts from the "Dick and Jane" paragraph in the novel's prologue, presenting a white family that may be contrasted with Pecola's. The chapter titles contain sudden repetition of words or phrases, many cut-off words, and no interword separations. The novel, through flashbacks, explores the younger years of both of Pecola's parents, Cholly and Pauline, and their struggles as African Americans in a largely White Anglo-Saxon Protestant community. Pauline now works as a servant for a wealthier white family. One day in the novel's present time, while Pecola is doing dishes, drunk Cholly rapes her. His motives are largely confusing, seemingly a combination of both love and hate. After raping her a second time, he flees, leaving her pregnant. Claudia and Frieda are the only two in the community that hopes for Pecola's child to survive in the coming months. Consequently, they give up the money they had been saving to buy a bicycle, instead planting marigold seeds with the superstitious belief that if the flowers bloom, Pecola's baby will survive. The marigolds never bloom, and Pecola's child, who is born prematurely, dies. In the aftermath, a dialogue is presented between two sides of Pecola's deluded imagination, in which she indicates conflicting feelings about her rape by her father. In this internal conversation, Pecola speaks as though her wish for blue eyes has been granted, and believes that the changed behavior of those around her is due to her new eyes, rather than the news of her rape or her increasingly strange behavior. Claudia, as narrator a final time, describes the recent phenomenon of Pecola's insanity and suggests that Cholly (who has since died) may have shown Pecola the only love he could by raping her. Claudia laments on her belief that the whole community, herself included, has used Pecola as a scapegoat to make themselves feel prettier and happier. Author's intentions. When asked about her motivations for writing "The Bluest Eye" in an interview, Morrison claimed that she wanted to remind readers "how hurtful racism is" and that people are "apologetic about the fact that their skin [is] so dark." Reminiscing about her own experience, she recalled: "When I was a kid, we called each other names but we didn't think it was serious, that you could take it in." Expanding on this point of self-esteem, Morrison elaborated that she "wanted to speak on behalf of those who didn't catch that [they were beautiful] right away. [She] was deeply concerned about the feelings of ugliness." As seen throughout "The Bluest Eye", this idea of "ugliness" is conveyed through a variety of characters. For example, Pecola, the main character, wishes for blue eyes as a way to escape the oppression that results from her having dark skin. Through Pecola's characterization, Morrison seeks to demonstrate the negative impact racism can have on one's self-confidence and worth. As she concluded in her interview, she "wanted people to understand what it was like to be treated that way." Morrison commented on her motivations to write the novel, saying, "I felt compelled to write this mostly because in the 1960s, black male authors published powerful, aggressive, revolutionary fiction or nonfiction, and they had positive racially uplifting rhetoric with them that were stimulating and I thought they would skip over something and thought no one would remember that it wasn't always beautiful." Symbolism. The Tooth. In an article titled “Decay and Symbolic Impotence in Toni Morrison’s THE BLUEST EYE,” the author examines how several critics have studied the significance of the loss of one of Pauline’s front teeth in The Bluest Eye. Parker argues that Pauline’s missing front tooth symbolizes the “destructive nature” of white beauty standards. Blue Eyes. Blue eyes symbolize the attractiveness and contentment that Pecola associates with the middle class. To Pecola, blue eyes symbolize beauty and associates it with whiteness. Marigolds. The marigold flowers symbolize the overall safety of Pecola’s baby.

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A Gathering of Old Men A Gathering of Old Men is a novel by Ernest J. Gaines published in 1983. Set on a 1970s Louisiana cane farm, the novel addresses racial discrimination and a bond that cannot be usurped. Plot summary. One afternoon, Candy Marshall, a white plantation owner, discovers that a white Cajun farmer, Beau Boutan, has been shot in the yard of a black man named Mathu. She enlists the help of seventeen other old black men by having them come to Mathu's yard, each with a shotgun and one empty number 5 shell. She and the men all claim to be responsible for the murder in an effort to protect the guilty party. Meanwhile, Sheriff Mapes arrives to the scene to arrest the real murderer, most likely Mathu (as he was the only black man who stood up against racism and the Boutans, and is capable of shooting a shotgun). The sheriff also wishes to keep Beau's father, Fix Boutan, from coming to lynch Mathu, who he presumes killed Beau. Meanwhile, Fix's son Gil, who happens to be a standout football player at LSU, arrives at his house to try to convince Fix not to go to Marshall to seek revenge. Film adaptation. In 1987 Volker Schlöndorff, a famous German director, made a film, also titled "A Gathering of Old Men" (aka "Murder on the Bayou"), which adheres closely to the novel. It stars Richard Widmark (as Sheriff Mapes), Louis Gossett Jr. (as Mathu), Holly Hunter (as Candy), Joe Seneca (as Clatoo), and Will Patton (as Lou Dimes).

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The Traitor Baru Cormorant The Traitor Baru Cormorant (published as The Traitor in the United Kingdom) is a 2015 hard fantasy novel by Seth Dickinson, and his debut novel. It is based on a short story Dickinson wrote in 2011 for "Beneath Ceaseless Skies" called "The Traitor Baru Cormorant, Her Field-General, and Their Wounds". The novel follows Baru, a brilliant young woman who, educated in the schools of the imperial power that subjugated her homeland, sets out to gain power to subvert the empire from within. A sequel, "The Monster Baru Cormorant", was released on 30 October 2018. A third novel, "The Tyrant Baru Cormorant", was released on August 11, 2020. Synopsis. As a child, Baru Cormorant's island of Taranoke is annexed by the Imperial Republic of Falcrest, called the Masquerade because of the masks worn by its officials. They kill one of Baru's fathers and institute their own rigid belief system focused on hygiene and puritanical sexual ethics. Baru is educated at a Masquerade school, but vows to work her way upward within the Empire and eventually free her island. At her school, Baru demonstrates extreme mathematical prowess. She is noticed by Cairdine Farrier, a high-ranking Masquerade official. Farrier elevates her to the position of Imperial Accountant of Aurdwynn, a province of thirteen duchies that often rebels against Masquerade rule. Baru uses her financial expertise to manipulate the Masquerade's fiat currency system. This causes rapid inflation and widespread poverty, but crushes an incipient rebellion by Duchess Tain Hu. Eventually, Baru becomes friendly with Tain Hu and other Aurdwynni nobles; she agrees to join them in revolt against the Masquerade. Baru uses her financial powers to grant loans to the commoners, which enriches Aurdwynn and ensures that her rebellion will gain popular support. Baru leads an army against the Masquerade forces and takes Tain Hu as her lover. After a brief victory, the Aurdwynni army is ambushed by the Masquerade navy. The rebellious dukes and duchesses are all killed except for Tain Hu. Baru reveals that she has been an agent of the Masquerade throughout the rebellion; in exchange for crushing the nobility in Aurdwynn, she will be given rule of Taranoke and elevated to the Masquerade's ruling clique. As a final test of loyalty, the Masquerade committee members ask Baru to kill Tain Hu. They then offer to spare her in exchange for Baru's loyalty. Hu signals that she does not wish to be used as a pawn. In obedience to her lover's wishes, Baru allows Tain Hu to be executed. This choice protects Baru from blackmail, leaving her free to pursue revenge against the Empire. Reception. "The Traitor Baru Cormorant" was well received by critics. "Publishers Weekly" appreciated the "seductively complex", ambitious worldbuilding and the "subtle language" of Dickinson's "compelling, utterly surprising narrative". Niall Alexander, writing for "Tor.com", characterized the novel as "one of 2015's very finest fantasies" and as "clever and subversive" in the vein of K. J. Parker's best works, highlighting its "intricately crafted narrative and character". At NPR, Amal El-Mohtar praised the "crucial, necessary" novel for its brutality in looking "unflinchingly into the self-replicating virus of empire", noting in particular the unexpectedly "viscerally riveting" portrayal of economic conflict. Dickinson has blogged about explicitly addressing issues around gender and feminism, race and homosexuality, as well as imperialism in the world of Baru Cormorant.

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The Ballad of Beta-2 The Ballad of Beta-2 is a 1965 science fiction novel by American writer Samuel R. Delany. The book was originally published as Ace Double M-121, together with "Alpha Yes, Terra No!" by Emil Petaja. The first stand alone edition was published in 1971. In 1977 a corrected edition came out, in a hardcover edition published by Gregg Press with an introduction by David G. Hartwell. Plot. The story is about the history of an ill-fated multi-generational interstellar expedition of discovery. Some of the ships were broken and all passengers killed by some unknown force, only their broken shells arriving at the destination. In others the passengers survived, but by the time the spaceships arrived at the destination star system, it has long since been settled through the already developed FTL ships. The descendants were incapable of and uninterested in settling on the system's planets, showed themselves extremely hostile to any outsiders entering their ships, and were left alone – to continue living in the spaceships as an obscure backwater culture isolated from broader human history. The degenerate "Star Folk" and their culture arouse little interest among the flourishing interstellar human culture. Only one researcher had bothered to record their songs, these being dismissed as "derivative" due to their repeated reference to "cities", "desert" and other Earth-bound concepts. However, an Anthropology professor charges a promising student with looking deeper, pointing out that these were the only humans to ever actually cross the depths of space between the stars, since later FTL ships are able to simply bypass these depths. The professor's intuition proves amply right. The student, for his thesis, is charged with investigating the source and antecedents of a ballad which begins On arriving at the spot, the student finds the present day Star Folk in themselves just as much of an uninteresting dead end as had been supposed – but he still makes very startling and important discoveries. First, he encounters a kind of "child" with supernatural powers – teleportation, living in a vacuum, and more. Then he discovers the records left by earlier passengers, from which he pieces out the tragic history of these ships. This forms the bulk of the book, with the student being in effect just the frame story. It turns out that in the early generations, the voyage went well, the fleet of generation ships proceeding as planned. It was at this time that Earth-bound terms got new meanings, "A City" being one of the ships and "The Desert" being the space between them. However. in later generations a fanatic religious ideology arose – its main tenets being that the ships' mission was "To Bring Human Beings to the Stars", that the term "Human Being" was to be defined according to a very strict "Norm" covering both physical characteristics and social behavior – and that anyone not fitting that "Norm" was not a true "Human Being" and had to be weeded out. Fanatic Judges were set up to judge such misfits and almost invariably sentence them to death, with the Judges increasingly usurping the authority of the Captains. Misfits escaped to the weightless areas at the core of the ships, where they could easier avoid capture, and which in effect became a kind of ghetto. Into this already perilous situation came a new dire threat – some kind of mysterious force destroying the ships one by one. The book's main protagonist, the courageous woman Captain of the ship Beta-2, heard a desperate plea for help from another ship and went to help. There she discovered that the destruction was caused by a mysterious being living in deep space, and that its destructive acts were not deliberate malice but miscalculated efforts to communicate with humans, who were completely beyond all its experience. Shouting "Stop!", the Captain managed to establish communications with the deep space being, and make it stop, saving her own ship and most of the others. To her shock and surprise, the deep space being spoke in her mind, saying "I love you" – having learned from her mind what humans understood by "love" and in a way transformed itself into a "he". The ensuing encounter left her pregnant, and eventually giving birth to a Wonder Child – the being which the student would much later encounter. However, a woman being pregnant was a clear violation of the Judges' "Norm", as on the ships new humans were born only artificially, being chosen by prospective parents in the genetic "market" referred to in the ballad. Thus, after giving birth the Captain was judged and executed. And having thus completely overthrown the Captains' authority. the Judges and their followers embarked on a wholesale hunt and extermination of all misfits. Eventually, only those fitting the "Norm" were left – their descendants being completely degenerate at the journey's end. However, the Miracle Child, born of the Deep Space being and the Captain, was there – able and willing to greatly facilitate spaceborne Humanity in making contact with newly discovered alien species and cultures. Religious themes. The book's plot includes a re-enactment of some of the main themes of Christian theology - the Annunciation, Mary becoming miraculously pregnant and her giving birth to the miraculous Jesus Christ. The similarity is made explicit at the end of the book, with the book's Miracle Child stating "I and My Father are One" – repeating words uttered by Jesus. However, in this re-telling of the story it is the Mary-analogue who is crucified and martyred, rather than her son.

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Americanah Americanah is a 2013 novel by the Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, for which Adichie won the 2013 U.S. National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. "Americanah" tells the story of a young Nigerian woman, Ifemelu, who immigrates to the United States to attend university. The novel traces Ifemelu's life in both countries, threaded by her love story with high school classmate Obinze. It was Adichie's third novel, published on May 14, 2013 by Alfred A. Knopf. A television miniseries, starring and produced by Lupita Nyong'o, was in development for HBO Max. Summary. As teenagers in a Lagos secondary school, Ifemelu and Obinze fall in love. Nigeria at the time is under military dictatorship, and people are seeking to leave the country. Ifemelu moves to the United States to study, where she struggles for the first time with racism and the many varieties of racial distinctions: for the first time, Ifemelu discovers what it means to be a "Black Person". Obinze had hoped to join her in the U.S. but he is denied a visa after 9/11. He goes to London, eventually becoming an undocumented immigrant after his visa expires. Years later, Obinze returns to Nigeria and becomes a wealthy man as a property developer in the newly democratic country. Ifemelu gains success in the United States, where she becomes known for her blog about race in America, entitled "Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black". When Ifemelu returns to Nigeria, the two consider reviving a relationship in light of their diverging experiences and identities during their many years apart. Themes. Americanization. Americanization is one of the biggest themes in "Americanah". In the context of the novel, America itself is a symbol of hope, wealth, social and economic mobility, and, ultimately, disappointment, as Ifemelu learns that the American Dream is a lie and that the advantages she enjoys there often come at a great price. Her Americanization is slow but distinct, and she gradually picks up the slang, adapts to her surroundings (for better or worse), and adopts American politics. Her views on gender and race change because of this, and her blog is devoted to exploring the issue of race as a non-American black in America. She's called "Americanah" when she returns to Nigeria, having picked up a blunt, American way of speaking and of addressing problems. She resists this label, but it's obvious to the reader that Ifemelu's years in America have changed her. According to Idowu Faith, “no valid statement can be made on "Americanah" without deconstructing the term “Americanah” which, more or less, reveals the thesis of the narrative as well as the preoccupation of Adichie in the text.” In Nigerian parlance, the term “Americanah” is an identity term that is premised on a person’s previous experience of living in America. In an interview, Adichie defines Americanah as a Nigerian word that can describe any of those who have been to the US and return American affectations; pretend not to understand their mother tongues any longer; refuse to eat Nigerian food or make constant reference to their life in America. From this understanding, it is clear that Ifemelu’s decision to return home without worrying about being identified as an “Americanah”, establishes the fact that Adichie is proposing and charting a path for a new kind of migration story whose quintessence is return migration. Gender. Adichie's explorations of sexual education and the perception of sex among youngsters in Nigeria plays a fundamental role in the bildungsroman journey of Ifemelu exploring her sexuality as an adolescent in a puritan post-colonial society. Migration. While many of the migratory experiences in the novel work within migration theory, Adichie simultaneously transcends the borders of international migration theories by introducing a new factor that both influences migration and projects a new perspective on return migration. According to Dustmann and Weiss (2007:237), lack of economic opportunity and escape from natural disaster/persecution are two main reasons individuals migrate throughout history. While identifying the need to flee “choicelessness” as the main reason for much of the migration in the twenty-first century Nigerian setting of the novel, Adichie uses literary dimensions to shake up the foundations of theory. Consequently, the direction of this type of migration, how it affects the bonds of love, how it changes personalities and cultural views, and how it reinterprets identity become the novelist’s major theoretical engagements. In addition, Adichie is concerned with how migration debases and elevates, how it barters and fulfills and, most significantly, how it reinvents. Reception. Reviews. Critics praised the novel, especially noting its range across different societies and reflection of global tensions. Writing for "The New York Times", Mike Peed said, "'Americanah' examines blackness in America, Nigeria and Britain, but it's also a steady-handed dissection of the universal human experience—a platitude made fresh by the accuracy of Adichie's observations." Peed concluded, "'Americanah' is witheringly trenchant and hugely empathetic, both worldly and geographically precise, a novel that holds the discomfiting realities of our times fearlessly before us. It never feels false." Reviewing the novel for "The Washington Post", Emily Raboteau called Adichie "a hawkeyed observer of manners and distinctions in class," and said Adichie brings a "ruthless honesty about the ugly and beautiful sides of both" the United States and Nigeria. In the "Chicago Tribune", Laura Pearson wrote, "Sprawling, ambitious and gorgeously written, 'Americanah' covers race, identity, relationships, community, politics, privilege, language, hair, ethnocentrism, migration, intimacy, estrangement, blogging, books and Barack Obama. It covers three continents, spans decades, leaps gracefully, from chapter to chapter, to different cities and other lives...[Adichie] weaves them assuredly into a thoughtfully structured epic. The result is a timeless love story steeped in our times." Tshilidzi Marwala links the Americanah to the rise of nationalism. In this regard, he thinks the story of Americanah evokes the image that the 21st century will be defined by the dialectical tension between the globalization, which is brought by technology, and the "othering" which is brought by the alienating characteristic of globalization. Accordingly, Marwala on reviewing Americanah states that "it seems that in the 21st century, the strangeness of othering, of enhancing difference rather than embracing our commonalities and the wedging of deep fissures in society continues unabated." Awards. The book was selected as one of the 10 Best Books of 2013 by the editors of the "New York Times Book Review". It won the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award (Fiction), and was shortlisted for the 2014 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction of the United Kingdom. The "Chicago Tribune" awarded Adichie its 2013 Heartland Award for Fiction, "recogniz[ing "Americanah" as] a novel that engages with important ideas about race, and does so with style, wit and insight." In March 2017, "Americanah" was picked as the winner for the "One Book, One New York" program, part of a community reading initiative encouraging all city residents to read the same book. Sales. "Americanah" spent 78 weeks on NPR's Paperback Best-Seller list. Days after "The New York Times" named "Americanah" to its best books of 2013 list, Beyoncé also signaled her admiration of Adichie, sampling Adichie's TED Talk "We should all be feminists" on the song "***Flawless"; sales of "Americanah" soared and as of December 23, 2013, the book climbed to the number 179 spot on Amazon.com's list of its 10,000 best-selling books. Adaptations. In 2014, it was announced that David Oyelowo and Lupita Nyong'o would star in a film adaptation of the novel, to be produced by Brad Pitt and his production company Plan B. In 2018, Nyong'o told "The Hollywood Reporter" that she was developing a television miniseries based on the book, which she would produce and star in. It was announced on September 13, 2019, that HBO Max would air the miniseries in ten episodes, with actor and playwright Danai Gurira as writer and showrunner. On October 15, 2020, it was reported that the miniseries would not move forward due to scheduling conflicts.

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Black Girl / White Girl Black Girl / White Girl is a novel by Joyce Carol Oates first published in 2006. It takes the form of an untitled 300 page manuscript written in 1990 by Generva Meade, a white historian, who truthfully recounts the events which happened during her first year at a prestigious liberal college in 1974–75, and Meade's own paternal family history which uncomfortably spans the gap between a proud history of progressive thinking and subsequent revolutionary and violent ideas. The action on the stage is played by a Black conservative Christian who reluctantly attends the school on a scholarship and encounters racial discrimination there. Subsequent events and her own disintegrating mental health lead to a personal and institutional tragedy.

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The Help The Help is a historical fiction novel by American author Kathryn Stockett and published by Penguin Books in 2009. The story is about African Americans working in white households in Jackson, Mississippi, during the early 1960s. A "USA Today" article called it one of the "summer sleeper hits." An early review in "The New York Times" notes Stockett's "affection and intimacy buried beneath even the most seemingly impersonal household connections," and says the book is a "button-pushing, soon to be wildly popular novel." The "Atlanta Journal-Constitution" said of the book: "This heartbreaking story is a stunning début from a gifted talent." Stockett began writing the novel — her first — after the September 11th attacks. It took her five years to complete and was rejected by 60 literary agents, over a period of three years, before agent Susan Ramer agreed to represent Stockett. "The Help" has since been published in 35 countries and three languages. As of August 2011, it had sold seven million copies in print and audiobook editions, and spent more than 100 weeks on "The New York Times" Best Seller list. "The Help"'s audiobook version is narrated by Jenna Lamia, Bahni Turpin, Octavia Spencer, and Cassandra Campbell. Spencer was Stockett's original inspiration for the character of Minny, and also plays her in the film adaptation. Plot summary. "The Help" is set in the early 1960s in Jackson, Mississippi, and told primarily from the first-person perspectives of three women: Aibileen Clark, Minny Jackson, and Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan. Aibileen is a maid who takes care of children and cleans. Her own 24-year-old son, Treelore, died from an accident on his job. In the story, she is tending the Leefolt household and caring for their toddler, Mae Mobley. Minny is Aibileen's friend who frequently tells her employers what she thinks of them, resulting in her having been fired from nineteen jobs. Minny's most recent employer was Mrs. Walters, mother of Hilly Holbrook. Skeeter is the daughter of a wealthy white family who owns Longleaf, a cotton farm and formerly a plantation, outside Jackson. Many of the field hands and household help are African Americans. Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from the University of Mississippi and wants to become a writer. Skeeter's mother wants her to get married and thinks her degree is just a pretty piece of paper. Skeeter is curious about the disappearance of Constantine, her maid who brought her up and cared for her. Constantine had written to Skeeter while she was away from home in college saying what a great surprise she had awaiting her when she came home. Skeeter's mother tells her that Constantine quit and went to live with relatives in Chicago. Skeeter does not believe that Constantine would leave her like this; she knows something is wrong and believes that information will eventually come out. Everyone Skeeter asks about the unexpected disappearance of Constantine pretends it never happened and avoids giving her any real answers. The life Constantine led while being the help to the Phelan family leads Skeeter to the realization that her friends' maids are treated very differently from the way the white employees are treated. She decides (with the assistance of a publisher) that she wants to reveal the truth about being a colored maid in Mississippi. Skeeter struggles to communicate with the maids and gain their trust. The dangers of writing a book about African Americans speaking out in the South during the early 1960s hover constantly over the three women. Eventually, Skeeter wins Aibileen's trust through a friendship which develops while Aibileen helps Skeeter write a household tips column for the local newspaper. Skeeter accepted the job to write the column as a stepping stone to becoming a writer/editor, as was suggested by Elaine Stein, editor at Harper & Row, even though she knows nothing about cleaning or taking care of a household, since that is the exclusive domain of 'the help.' The irony of this is not lost on Skeeter, and she eventually offers to pay Aibileen for the time and expertise she received from her. Elaine Stein had also suggested to Skeeter that she find a subject to write to which she can be dedicated and about which she is passionate. Skeeter realizes that she wants to expose to the world in the form of a book the deplorable conditions the maids in the South endure in order to barely survive. Unfortunately, such an exposé is a dangerous proposition, not just for Skeeter, but for any maids who agree to help her. Aibileen finally agrees to tell her story. Minny, despite her distrust of whites, eventually agrees as well, and she and Aibileen are unable to convince others to tell their stories. Skeeter researches several laws governing what blacks still can and cannot do in Mississippi, and her growing opposition to the racial order results in her being shunned by her social circle. Yule May, Hilly's maid, is arrested for stealing one of Hilly's rings to pay her twin sons' college tuition after Hilly refused to lend the money. The other maids decide that they are willing to take a chance with their jobs, and their safety, and join the book project. Thus the thrust of the book is the collaborative project between the white Skeeter and the struggling, exploited "colored" help, who together are writing a book of true stories about their experiences as the 'help' to the white women of Jackson. Not all the stories are negative, and some describe beautiful and generous, loving and kind events; while others are cruel and even brutal. The book, entitled "Help" is finally published, and the final chapters of "The Help" describes the aftermath of the book's success. Film adaptation. A film adaptation of "The Help" was released on August 10, 2011. Stockett's childhood friend Tate Taylor wrote and directed the film. Parts of "The Help" were shot in Jackson, MS, but the film was primarily shot in and around Greenwood, MS, representing Jackson in 1963. At the 84th Academy Awards, Octavia Spencer won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role in this film. The film also received three other Academy Award nominations: Academy Award for Best Picture, Academy Award for Best Actress for Viola Davis, and Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for Jessica Chastain. Lawsuit. Ablene Cooper, a housekeeper who once worked for Stockett's brother, criticized the author for stealing her life story without her knowledge and basing the character Aibileen on her likeness. Cooper sued Stockett for $75,000 in damages. Cooper also criticized her for making the negative comparison of her character's skin color to that of a cockroach, which to many would be interpreted as racist. A Hinds County, Mississippi judge dismissed the case, citing the statute of limitations. Stockett denied her claim of stealing her likeness, stating that she only met her briefly.

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Simisola Simisola is a 1994 novel by British crime writer Ruth Rendell. It features her recurring detective Inspector Wexford, and is the 17th in the series. Though a murder mystery, the book also touches on the themes of racism and welfare dependency. Plot summary. Dr Raymond Akande is Wexford's new GP and one of the few Black British people in Kingsmarkham. When Akande's daughter goes missing, and a body of a young black woman is found, Wexford is confronted by his own prejudices. Critical reception. The Daily Courier wrote about the book: "...some of it gets tedious, especially when characters who do not consider themselves racists search themselves for racist traits". Film, TV or theatrical adaptations. The novel was adapted into a television film in the UK in 1996 and starred George Baker, Christopher Ravenscroft, Jane Lapotaire, and George Harris.

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The War Between the Classes The War Between The Classes is a novel written by Gloria D. Miklowitz. The novel explores how society can overcome the stereotypes taught by media through its teen-aged protagonist. The book focuses on the main character, Amy, as she struggles to keep a good relationship with her boyfriend throughout the story due to the disapproval of their parents. It also focuses on the color armband game, and Amy's feelings as she goes against all the laws of the game. The novel was adapted into a television special, as part of the "CBS Schoolbreak Special" series. The special was the winner of the Emmy Award for "Best Children’s Special" in 1986. Summary. The story begins with Amy and Adam making their way to the school luau after leaving Amy's house, where the story introduces its themes of racism and prejudice. Later, Amy's high-school class plays a game created by their teacher, Mr. Otero. In the game, there are four social classes which are represented by armbands: Blues – highest, richest; Dark Greens – upper-middle class, semi-rich; Light Greens – lower-middle class, semi-poor; Oranges – lowest class, very poor. To further split up the classes, there is the superior sex, Teks(females), and the inferior sex, No-Teks(males). There are also groups of Color Game “policemen" (known as G4's in the color game), which are older students who played the game in previous years. They record the students’ activities, and make note of any good or bad behavior, which can result in demotions or promotions. The Color Game runs like this: Lower classes, or No-Teks, must bow when they meet eyes with a higher class, or Tek. Higher classes can give orders to lower classes. Lower classes may not speak to a higher class unless spoken to, and can only reply in a short answer. You must have your armband and journal with you at all times. The main character in this book is Emiko “Amy” Sumoto. She comes from a Japanese family, and her parents believe she should keep the family tradition going by marrying a Japanese boy. Instead, she is interested in a rich, White youth named Adam. In the Color Game, all the minorities in the class turn out to be high colors, and rich whites end up as lower colors, which is all planned out by their teacher. Although Amy is used to being treated as a lower person in real life, along with the Latinos, she doesn't feel right with the power she has. However, being one of the most powerful people in the class, she decides to try and unite all the colors to an equal rank. She puts up “All Colors Unite” posters all over the school, causing her to be demoted from Blue to Orange along with Juan, who helped her attach the advertisements. Afterward, the oranges make four-colored armbands for all students to wear. Finally she succeeds in doing this, and unites the whole class as one. The Color Game was arranged to show real-life racial, sex, and economic differences between people. Themes. This book explores many themes related to society today. Some of these themes include Family, Racism, Prejudice, Respect, and Discrimination. Family– Although Amy and Adam's families have similar prejudices against other races, their families differ greatly in the values they hold, the way they show respect for authority, and the amount of time the parents spend with their children. Racism– Racism is evident in Adam and Amy's parents, but neither of them holds their parents’ views. Adam says to Amy, “Parents! Sometimes I wonder how either of us could have escaped all their prejudices.” (p. 16) On the other hand, Juan's mother did not show racism, but Juan did. Prejudice– As a result of Mr. Otero's Color Game, students are forced to look at ways they prejudge others. Sometimes in high schools this prejudging does not result in racism, but results in other social cliques based on criteria such as clothing, athletic participation, cheer leading, and grades. Respect– Amy and Adam disagree over the way to handle Amy's father and his strictness with Amy. Discrimination– Most of the characters in the novel are discriminated against in one way or the other, yet each of them show discrimination to others. How could you apply the Golden Rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” to this situation? Subplot. The intense subplot of Hideo and Sue shows that such a relationship like that of Amy and Adam can exist for a long period of time. It may be an outlook of their future life. Moreover, it demonstrates that "whites" are not naturally prejudiced. It also illustrates how old-fashioned the idea is that women should do housework and men should go to work. Instead of this, Sue and Hideo see each other equal, so both are going to work and share the housework between each other. Hideo usually does the chores requiring more physical strength for and Sue does the remaining work. It is in fact a very idealistic view of people, always being fair and unbiased towards others in trying to understand and help them. There are also many other subplots in the story such as Adam and his mother, and Amy and her father.

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Dear Martin Dear Martin, published in 2017 by Crown Publishing Group, is a young adult novel by Nic Stone. It is Stone's debut novel, written as a reaction to the murder of Jordan Davis. The book appeared as #4 on The New York Times Best Seller list. Development and publication. Stone began writing the book after a series of racially-charge events, including the 2012 murder of Jordan Davis, a 17-year-old who was killed by man who shot several rounds into a car of teenagers over a dispute about loud rap music, and the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown. Stone was also inspired to write the book for her sons. Stone sold her book as a proposal, resulting in her writing and researching simultaneously over an eight-week period to develop a draft. Stone described the experience as "excruciating" and stated that she was not interested in repeating it. "Dear Martin" has been published and translated in Germany, Brazil, Indonesia, The Netherlands, UK, Turkey, and Romania. Plot. "Dear Martin" follows Justyce McAllister, a high school student living in Atlanta and attending a predominantly white preparatory high school on a scholarship. Justyce is thrown to the ground and handcuffed by a white police officer. After the incident, Justyce attempts to make sense of life as a black teenager in the current political climate and begins writing letters to the spirit of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, asking himself, "What would Dr. King do if he were alive today?". Reception. The book received a starred review from Booklist. In February 2020, two years after it was first published, "Dear Martin" again hit the New York Times bestseller list, as the #1 Young Adult Paperback. "Dear Martin" received the following accolades: Sequel. Stone wrote a sequel, "Dear Justyce," which was published in October 2020. The book is about an incarcerated teen, Quan, who is on trial for murder charges. Quan first appears in "Dear Martin" as the cousin of Justyce's best friend. Stone was not planning on writing a sequel, but was encouraged by her publisher and decided to write a book about a "black boy that everybody is afraid of."

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The Hate U Give The Hate U Give is a 2017 young adult novel by Angie Thomas. It is Thomas's debut novel, expanded from a short story she wrote in college in reaction to the police shooting of Oscar Grant. The book is narrated by Starr Carter, a 16-year-old black girl from a poor neighborhood who attends an elite private school in a predominantly white, affluent part of the city. Starr becomes entangled in a national news story after she witnesses a white police officer shoot and kill her childhood friend, Khalil. She speaks up about the shooting in increasingly public ways, and social tensions culminate in a riot after a grand jury decides not to indict the police officer for the shooting. "The Hate U Give" was published on February 28, 2017, by HarperCollins imprint Balzer + Bray, which had won a bidding war for the rights to the novel. The book was a commercial success, debuting at number one on "The New York Times" young adult best-seller list, where it remained for 50 weeks. It won several awards and received critical praise for Thomas's writing and timely subject matter. In writing the novel, Thomas attempted to expand readers' understanding of the Black Lives Matter movement as well as difficulties faced by black Americans who employ code switching. These themes, as well as the vulgar language, attracted some controversy and caused the book to be one of the most challenged books of 2017 and 2018 according to the American Library Association. The book was adapted into a film by Fox 2000 in October 2018, which received positive reviews. The novel was also adapted into an audiobook, won several awards and praise for its narrator, Bahni Turpin. Development and publication. Shaken by the 2009 police shooting of Oscar Grant, then-college student Angie Thomas began the project as a short story for her senior project in Belhaven University's creative writing program. While writing the short story, the project quickly expanded, though Thomas put it aside for a few years after graduation. Speaking to her hometown newspaper, Thomas said, "I wanted to make sure I approached it not just in anger, but with love even". The deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and Sandra Bland drew Thomas back to expand the project into a novel, which she titled after Tupac Shakur's "THUG LIFE" concept: "The Hate U Give Little Infants Fucks Everybody". Events surrounding the killings of Alton Sterling, Philando Castile and Michael Brown, and widespread ensuing protests against racism and police brutality, also informed moments in the book. Unsure whether publishers would be interested in the Black Lives Matter-inspired material, Thomas reached out to literary agent Brooks Sherman on Twitter in June 2015 to ask for advice. In February 2016, HarperCollins' imprint Balzer + Bray bought the rights to the novel in an auction, outbidding 13 other publishing houses, and signed a two-book deal with Thomas. Fox 2000 optioned the film rights the following month. The 464-page book was published on February 28, 2017, when the industry was attempting to address a decade-long stagnation in the number of children's books by African-American authors. Since its publication, Thomas has become an example of attempts by publishers to publish more young adult African-American novelists. Plot. Starr Carter is a 16-year-old black girl, who lives in the fictional mostly poor black neighborhood of Garden Heights, but attends an affluent predominantly white private school, Williamson Prep. After a shooting breaks up a party Starr is attending, she is driven home by her childhood best friend and sometimes crush Khalil. They are stopped by a white police officer. The officer instructs Khalil, who is black, to exit the car; while outside the car, Khalil leans into the driver-side window to check in on Starr. The officer then shoots Khalil three times, killing him. Starr agrees to an interview with police about the shooting after being encouraged by her Uncle Carlos, who is also a detective. Carlos was a father figure to Starr when her father, Maverick, spent three years in prison for gang activity. Following his release, Maverick left the gang and became the owner of the Garden Heights grocery store where Starr and her older half-brother Seven work. Maverick was only allowed to leave his gang, the King Lords, because he confessed to a crime to protect gang-leader King. Widely feared in the neighborhood, King now lives with Seven's mother, Seven's half-sister Kenya, who is friends with Starr, and Kenya's little sister, Lyric. Khalil's death becomes a national news story. The media portrays Khalil as a gang banger and drug dealer, while portraying the white officer who killed him more favorably. Starr's identity as the witness is initially kept secret from everyone outside Starr's family, including her younger brother Sekani. Keeping the secret from her white boyfriend Chris and her best friends Hailey Grant and Maya Yang – who all attend Williamson Prep – weighs on Starr, as does her need to keep her Williamson and Garden Heights personalities separate. Starr's struggles with her identity are further complicated after her mother gets a higher-paying job and the family moves out of Garden Heights. After a grand jury fails to indict the white officer, Garden Heights erupts into both peaceful protests and riots. The failure of the criminal justice system to hold the officer accountable pushes Starr to take an increasingly public role, first giving a television interview and then speaking out during the protests, which are met by police in riot gear. Her increasing identification with the people of Garden Heights causes tension with Starr's friends, especially with her boyfriend Chris. But by the end of the novel, Starr and Maya have started standing up to Hailey's racist comments while Chris offers support to Starr. The climax of the novel occurs during the riot following the grand jury decision. Starr, Chris, Seven, and DeVante – whom Maverick helped leave the King Lords – successfully defend Maverick's store from King. The neighborhood stands up to King and as a result of testimony by DeVante, King is arrested and expected to be imprisoned for a lengthy sentence. Starr promises to keep Khalil's memory alive and to continue her advocacy against injustice. Style. Vincent Haddad of Central State University reads "The Hate U Give" as an attempt to build empathy with the Black Lives Matter movement, as "the appeals for empathy figured by Starr's first-person account ultimately serve to discipline those who seek solutions deemed too 'un-realistic' to oppose the 'sustained violence against Black communities. By maintaining realism, and explicitly naming real-world victims of police brutality, Haddad contends that Thomas is able to spur action in her readers. However, he ultimately feels that there are limits to this approach because it is about the individual rather than the collective. By contrast, Vox's Constance Grady argues that this realism is what makes the novel ultimately work to larger purposes: "The specificity and whimsy of ideas like the anger scale of breakup songs is what keeps "The Hate U Give" moving so deftly through its heavy subject matter; it stays warm and focused and grounded in character even when it's dealing with big, amorphous ideas like systemic racism." Themes. Examining race relations is a core theme of the novel. Professor Khalil Muhammad of Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government sees the novel as a way to have discussions among people who might not otherwise discuss Black Lives Matter: "The book – and to some degree the movie – has been read and will be read by students in all-white spaces, where otherwise the urgency of these issues has not affected them personally." At the same time, it could offer solace for black teens who have faced similar challenges to Starr. An example of this is Starr's ability to code switch between her private school and home, which Thomas demonstrates through the slang that Starr uses in each context's dialogue. Also helping Starr is her family who offer a variety of points of view, including her Uncle's thoughts as a police officer and her father teaching Starr and her siblings about the Black Panther Party. The novel also shows Starr's parents' struggles with remaining connected to their community while needing to protect and give opportunity to their children. "The Hate U Give" shows Starr's dual need to respond both to the trauma of witnessing Khalil's death and her need to do so politically. This dual need, combined with Thomas's ability to root these struggles in their historical context, helps give the book its power, according to Jonathan Alexander writing in the "Los Angeles Review of Books". "Los Angeles Times" critic Adriana Ramirez sees Starr as similar to the protagonists of fantasy dystopian novels like "Divergent" and "The Hunger Games" as she seeks to change an entrenched system of power, noting, "it is also a dystopian young adult novel that happens to be set in reality". Nick Smart, a professor at the College of New Rochelle, takes this further, stating, "In "The Hate U Give", there's also a girl – who happens to be a black girl – being sent out against the system, against the world, against an entrenched opposition", while Ramirez notes that Starr's blackness is a core element for some readers. Before its publication, exploring a female perspective on the isolation and need to be a model minority at an elite private school was something which had not been conducted in literature or film with the same frequency as for males. Thomas's ability to capture these feelings stemmed from her own experiences with the reactions of her white classmates following the death of Oscar Grant. The novel does not shy away from the realities of urban life, exemplified by the title's reference to the Tupac Shakur quote. Starr's feelings about Khalil evolve during the novel. The reader is first introduced to him at the party as a friend of Starr's and as a victim of a police shooting. This narrative is then complicated both for Starr and in the novel's world at large when it is learned that Khalil dealt drugs. However, Starr comes to disagree with the way the media is portraying Khalil. As Starr finds her own agency, she is able to challenge this narrative first for herself and then for others, recognizing that Khalil was forced into these circumstances by poverty, hunger, and a desire to care for his drug addict mother. She is able to show her courage speaking to the grand jury, and realizes that she needs to participate in the protests which follow its decision. How and where Khalil and Starr can find justice also drives Starr's decision to join in the protests. Reception. The book debuted at the top of "The New York Times" young adult (YA) best-seller list, and was on it for more than 80 weeks. The book had 100,000 copies in print in the first month, eventually selling more than 850,000 copies . The book was popular with readers, winning Goodreads annual awards vote in the categories of Best Young Adult Fiction and Debut Author. Critics also widely praised the book. In the "Christian Science Monitor", Katie Ward Beim-Esche wrote, "Believe the hype: "The Hate U Give," Angie Thomas's extraordinary and fearless debut, really is that good." Shannon Ozirny of "The Globe and Mail" also felt it would have wide appeal, "Ignore the YA label – this should be the one book everyone reads this year." On "Salon", Erin Keane wrote that the novel is "topical, urgent, necessary, and if that weren't enough, it's also a highly entertaining and engaging read." The book also earned starred reviews from multiple review journals. "Kirkus", which nominated the book for its Kirkus Prize, praised both its writing and timelines: "With smooth but powerful prose ... This story is necessary. This story is important." Young adult literature expert Michael Cart, writing in "Booklist", also praised Thomas's writing as Starr: "Beautifully written in Starr's authentic first-person voice, this is a marvel of verisimilitude." While praising the overall book in a starred review, "School Library Journal"s Mahnaz Dar criticized the writing of several characters as "slightly uneven". The "Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books", "Horn Book Magazine", and "VOYA" also gave the book their equivalents of starred reviews. Awards. "The Hate U Give" has received the following awards and accolades: Challenges. The American Library Association listed the book as one of the ten most-challenged books of 2017 (), 2018 (), and 2020 (10) "because it was considered 'pervasively vulgar,'" contained "drug use, profanity, and offensive language," as well as sexual references, and "was thought to promote an anti-police message." In July 2018, a South Carolina police union raised objections to the inclusion of the book, as well as the similarly themed "All American Boys" by Brendan Kiely and Jason Reynolds, in the summer reading list for ninth-grade students of Wando High School. A representative of the police lodge described the inclusion of the books as "almost indoctrination of distrust of police" and asserted that "we've got to put a stop to that." The books remained on the list and Wando's principal was later recognized by the state school library association for her defense of the challenged books. The book was removed from the school libraries of the Katy Independent School District due to its explicit language. Thomas responded to these challenges by defending the book's message and saying that it is a spur for conversation. Adaptations. Film. Fox 2000 optioned "The Hate U Give" for a film adaption in March 2016, shortly after the book's auction. Director George Tillman Jr. and actress Amandla Stenberg were immediately attached to the project. The movie also features Issa Rae, Regina Hall, Russell Hornsby, Algee Smith, KJ Apa, Lamar Johnson, Anthony Mackie, Common, and Sabrina Carpenter. The film is based on a screenplay by Audrey Wells, who died one day before it was released. Stenberg's casting received some criticism because of her lighter complexion as compared to the girl on the novel's cover. The movie was given a limited release on October 5, 2018, and a wide release on October 19, 2018. The film was favorably received, with a Rotten Tomatoes critics score of 8.2 out of 10, and an A+ CinemaScore. the film had a worldwide box office gross of $34 million against a budget of $23 million. Audiobook. An audiobook was released by Harper Audio on the same day as the novel and featured narration by Bahni Turpin, whom Thomas had selected. Audiobook producer Caitlin Garing spoke of the importance of matching the material with the narrator and spoke of Turpin's skill, "you can trust her to get to the heart of a story and lead the listener there". It was well reviewed and won Audie Awards for best YA and best female narrator. In her acceptance speech, Turpin said it was "an important book for our time". It also won the 2018 Odyssey Award for best children's audiobook. Odyssey committee chair Joan Schroeder Kindig said, "Bahni Turpin's powerful narration of this timely novel will inspire listeners to find their own voices." Turpin downplayed the award saying, "I don't think the public is aware of most of our awards, though – in general, I think those who most appreciate the awards are ... the people in the business of books". "Publishers Weekly", in its starred review of the audiobook, praised Turpin's abilities to convey "the complexity of the 16-year-old protagonist who sounds both youthful and mature for her age, as she relies on code-switching to navigate two different social settings". Maggie Knapp in her starred review for "School Library Journal" and Lynette Pitrak in her starred review for "Booklist" also praised Turpin's ability to capture Starr's voice in her performance.

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The Vanishing Half The Vanishing Half is a historical fiction novel by American author Brit Bennett. It is her second novel and was published by Riverhead Books in 2020. It debuted at number one on "The New York Times" fiction best-seller list. HBO acquired the rights to develop a limited series with Bennett as executive producer. "The Vanishing Half" garnered acclaim from book critics, and was found by Emily Temple of Literary Hub to be the 2020 book most frequently listed among the year's best, making 25 lists. Synopsis. The novel is a multi-generational family saga set between the 1940s to the 1990s and centers on identical twin sisters Desiree and Stella Vignes. The two light-skinned black sisters were raised in Mallard, Louisiana, and witness the lynching of their father in the 1940s. In 1954, at the age of 16, the twins run away to New Orleans. However, Stella disappears shortly thereafter. In 1968, Desiree leaves an abusive marriage in Washington, D.C. and returns to Mallard with her eight-year-old dark-skinned daughter, Jude. Jude grows older and moves to Los Angeles through a track scholarship at University of California, Los Angeles. While working part time as a caterer in Beverly Hills, Jude sees a woman who appears to be her mother's doppelgänger. The woman is actually Stella, who has been passing as white. The novel has a nonlinear narrative structure. Reception. The novel debuted at number one on "The New York Times" fiction best-seller list. As of the week ending February 20, 2021, the novel has spent 38 weeks on the list. At the review aggregator website Book Marks, which assigns individual ratings to book reviews from mainstream literary critics, the novel received a cumulative "Rave" rating based on 38 reviews, with only one "mixed" review. "Publishers Weekly" wrote, "Bennett renders her characters and their struggles with great compassion, and explores the complicated state of mind that Stella finds herself in while passing as white." In its starred review, "Kirkus Reviews" wrote, "The scene in which Stella adopts her white persona is a tour de force of doubling and confusion." "The Washington Post" called "The Vanishing Half" a "fierce examination of contemporary passing and the price so many pay for a new identity". "The New York Times" wrote, "Bennett balances the literary demands of dynamic characterisation with the historical and social realities of her subject matter." It was selected for the "New York Times Book Review"s "10 Best Books of 2020" list. Television adaptation. Within a month of publication it was reported that HBO had acquired the rights for "low seven-figures" to develop a limited series with Brit Bennett as executive producer.

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La Bastarda La Bastarda is a novel by Trifonia Melibea Obono originally published in Spanish in 2016. The book is banned in Equatorial Guinea. The book tells the story of Okomo, an orphan who was born a bastard whose mother died during childbirth, and lives in a traditional village in Equatorial Guinea that is about a day's walk from Gabon. She is forced to confront her cultures attitudes about gender roles, requirements for women to have sex for the purpose of reproduction at the direction of men, and sexuality. After being outed, she eventually retreats to the sanctuary of the freedom of the forest. Trifonia Melibea Obono is considered one of the most avant-garde and brave Black African voices in former colonial Spanish Africa. The book is her second major novel published in Spanish. Background. "La Bastarda" was written by Trifonia Melibea Obono, a Spanish-speaking black woman from Equatorial Guinea. It is her second major novel in Spanish, and third overall. Obono has been described by "ABC" and Casa Africa as one of the most avant-garde and brave Black African voices in former colonial Spanish Africa. Obono is considered Spanish when at home in Equatorial Guinea, while being considered a "negra" while living in Spain. People in her society sometimes consider her crazy for how she dissects and dismantles societal norms. Her previous published works in Spanish included "Herencia de bindendee". The author graduated from Universidad de Murcia with a bachelor's degree in political science. She later earned a Masters in International Cooperation and Development from the same university. She then became a professor at the Universidad Nacional de Guinea Ecuatoria in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. She also is a faculty member at Spain's Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED), as part of its Center for Afro-Hispanic Studies. In 2017, she completed her doctorate at the Universidad de Salamanca, writing her thesis about traditional marriage and dowry practices among the Fang people of her home country. In an interview with "ABC", she has said the book is not autobiographical. The surroundings in which the main character, Okomo, is placed are similar to those which the author grew up in. Plot summary. Okomo, an orphan who was born a bastard and whose mother died during childbirth, lives in a traditional village in Equatorial Guinea that is about a day's walk from Gabon. As a sixteen-year-old who had her period, she is watched over by her grandfather's first wife, her grandfather and a community who has already rejected her because of her birth. Given her place in this polygamous family and not knowing who she is, Okomo seeks to know more about her father. Her family tries to prevent her from doing so and has forbidden her from trying to find and contact him. Okomo has a special relationship with an uncle, her mother's brother and another child of her grandfather's first wife, named Marcelo. Because her uncle is a woman man, the family is estranged from him and Okomo becomes a key contact person in their attempts to get Marcelo to have sex with his sister-in-law. This is important as the grandfather's first born son is barren, and Marcelo is a familial relation who can ensure the family line continues. He declines, and Marcelo's house is burned, but not before he managed to escape to the forest. Attempts to control Okomo by prohibiting her from contacting Marcelo and other social undesirables lead to Okomo to walk with a group of three girls who have also largely rejected the expectations of them from Fang society. In the middle of one walk, Okomo engages in sex in the forest with the three girls. She soon forms a bond with one girl, Dina, to the exclusion of the other two and against the rules of the group that sex should only be communal among them. This later leads to the other girls to feeling jealous and excluded, outing Okomo and Dina during the saint's day feast of Okomo's grandfather. After everyone pretended to ignore this, the two girls beat Okomo when she went to get water. The full story came out, and two girls were married off. One girl was isolated to live with her father who got her pregnant and abused her. Okomo's grandmother basically sends her away to Okomo's mother's sister to get money to fund a cure for her barrenness as a result of syphilis. All four girls eventually flee to the forest, joining Marcelo and his partner, while creating a family amongst themselves. Main themes. One of the main themes is about the comparisons between heterosexuality and homosexuality in rural Equatorial Guinea. At the same time, it shows the invisibility of lesbians in Fang society. It is also about the importance of gender roles in this society, and how they intersect with sexuality. The book is also about being liberated from these restrictive ideas around sexuality and gender roles. The importance of gender roles is shown among other ways when the main character cuts the toenails of her grandfather. It demonstrates how in Fang society the older man is always in charge, and how is often does not listen to those below him in the social hierarchy and who is never there when you need him. The leading male figures in people's lives may know nothing because people are too scared to tell him things. Invisibility of lesbians in the book is discussed through the terms used for gay men and lesbian women. Gay men are referred to as "fam e mina" in Spanish and "bequebe fafam" in Fang, meaning man woman or man who behaves like his sister. While the Fang language has a word to describe gay men, the language has no word to describe lesbians. The book shows throughout that the value of men is in owning a home and in siring children. Women's value is derived through giving birth and having children. Gay men challenge this system because they are not engaged in reproductive activities. Women's importance in sexual relations is minimal, with no real thought given to their consent or pleasure in the act. In the book, being a woman is about fulfilling expectations of others to procreate at an early age. This is an expectation set by her grandmother that is put on the orphaned Okomo after she gets her first period. The irrelevance of women as things other than tools for procreation is shown through the sale of two girls to pay off debts by their fathers. Liberation from the cultural and societal restrictions around sexuality and gender roles in the book are expressed through Marcelo retreating to the forest where he can be with his partner. The four lesbian girls later follow him in stages to gain their own liberation. Literary significance and critical reaction. "La Bastarda" is the first story about lesbians from Equatorial Guinea to be published in Spanish. In 2016, the book was included on a list by "El País" as one of the ten best books by an African writer. Alejandro de los Santos, writing for "afribuku.com," liked the book, but felt the last chapter was a bit rushed. The pacing was not consistent with the rest of the chapters. Publication history. The book was first published in Spanish in 2016 by Flores Raras. It is 116 pages long. A second edition was published in 2017. An English-language version was published in 2018 by The Feminist Press. It was translated by Lawrence Schimel, with an afterword by Abosede George. "La Bastarda" is being sold in Equatorial Guinea, though it can be hard to find. The book is officially banned in the country. It is difficult for local authors to publish in any language, let alone Spanish, in the country.

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Chinatown Family Chinatown Family is a 1948 novel by Lin Yutang set in New York City's Chinatown of the 1920s and 1930s, concerning the experiences of the Fongs, a Chinese-American family in becoming successful by hard work and endurance in a sometimes less than welcoming America. Plot. Tom, Sr. who runs a laundry on the Upper East Side, has succeeded in bringing his younger daughter (Eva) and son (Tom, Jr.) from China to New York to join him, his wife (Mother Fong), and his other children. The family succeeds in establishing itself in American culture by its hard work and devotion to democratic principles. It offers a critique of Americans who do not live up to these ideals. The family welcomes a new daughter-in-law, Flora, an Italian-American. They say "you are like a Chinese woman" because you "work hard all day and have no quarrels with your husband and the parents." In Italy, she replies, "a padre is a padre." Another Fong brother becomes an insurance salesman, who becomes infatuated with a nightclub dancer who is interested only in material things. Tom, Jr., the leading character, learns English with a diligence which helps Miss Cartwright, his American teacher, to "rediscover the English language." He shows up American students who do not appreciate their own language and do not work hard to master it. He paraphrases the Declaration of Independence into basic English to reveal its importance for the world. He has to learn Mandarin Chinese in addition to his Cantonese to court Elsie, who came from Shanghai, and then has to study literature, both Walt Whitman and Laozi. In the late 1930s, when the Japanese army is invading China, Elsie leaves to return to her homeland to support the war effort. Tom, Sr. is hit by a car while crossing the street, "dying a typically American death." The mother of the driver shows up to offer the family compensation money, enough to send Tom, Jr., to college and to finance the opening of their restaurant in Chinatown. Critical reception. The Chinese American themes have earned it thoughtful critical attention. Cheng Lok Chua points out that Lin identified with the Fongs as immigrants and showed his solidarity with them as working-class Chinese. He adds that Lin bent reality at a time when immigration laws would have prevented Tom, Sr. from bringing his wife and children. Lin himself was the victim of American discrimination and humiliation, which make the genial tone of the novel quite remarkable, perhaps even disingenuous. Richard Jean So traces Lin's composition of the manuscript and finds that his publisher, Richard Walsh, had suggested to Lin that he write a novel as a way to instruct Americans about Chinese Americans. David Palumbo-Liu observes that such Asian Americans (later called the "model minority") serve "both to prove the rightness of American democracy as a worldwide model and to remind Americans of the traditional values it has cast aside in the rush to modernization."

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Dear Martin Dear Martin, published in 2017 by Crown Publishing Group, is a young adult novel by Nic Stone. It is Stone's debut novel, written as a reaction to the murder of Jordan Davis. The book appeared as #4 on The New York Times Best Seller list. Development and publication. Stone began writing the book after a series of racially-charge events, including the 2012 murder of Jordan Davis, a 17-year-old who was killed by man who shot several rounds into a car of teenagers over a dispute about loud rap music, and the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown. Stone was also inspired to write the book for her sons. Stone sold her book as a proposal, resulting in her writing and researching simultaneously over an eight-week period to develop a draft. Stone described the experience as "excruciating" and stated that she was not interested in repeating it. "Dear Martin" has been published and translated in Germany, Brazil, Indonesia, The Netherlands, UK, Turkey, and Romania. Plot. "Dear Martin" follows Justyce McAllister, a high school student living in Atlanta and attending a predominantly white preparatory high school on a scholarship. Justyce is thrown to the ground and handcuffed by a white police officer. After the incident, Justyce attempts to make sense of life as a black teenager in the current political climate and begins writing letters to the spirit of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, asking himself, "What would Dr. King do if he were alive today?". Reception. The book received a starred review from Booklist. In February 2020, two years after it was first published, "Dear Martin" again hit the New York Times bestseller list, as the #1 Young Adult Paperback. "Dear Martin" received the following accolades: Sequel. Stone wrote a sequel, "Dear Justyce," which was published in October 2020. The book is about an incarcerated teen, Quan, who is on trial for murder charges. Quan first appears in "Dear Martin" as the cousin of Justyce's best friend. Stone was not planning on writing a sequel, but was encouraged by her publisher and decided to write a book about a "black boy that everybody is afraid of."

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Kings Will Be Tyrants Kings Will Be Tyrants by Ward Hawkins is a 1959 novel about fighting in Cuba. Bernardo Manuel Patrick O'Brien is a former U.S. Marine who winds up fighting for Castro. Though a Marine, he has to deal with the conflict of his heritage, both Cuban and American.

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The Hate U Give The Hate U Give is a 2017 young adult novel by Angie Thomas. It is Thomas's debut novel, expanded from a short story she wrote in college in reaction to the police shooting of Oscar Grant. The book is narrated by Starr Carter, a 16-year-old black girl from a poor neighborhood who attends an elite private school in a predominantly white, affluent part of the city. Starr becomes entangled in a national news story after she witnesses a white police officer shoot and kill her childhood friend, Khalil. She speaks up about the shooting in increasingly public ways, and social tensions culminate in a riot after a grand jury decides not to indict the police officer for the shooting. "The Hate U Give" was published on February 28, 2017, by HarperCollins imprint Balzer + Bray, which had won a bidding war for the rights to the novel. The book was a commercial success, debuting at number one on "The New York Times" young adult best-seller list, where it remained for 50 weeks. It won several awards and received critical praise for Thomas's writing and timely subject matter. In writing the novel, Thomas attempted to expand readers' understanding of the Black Lives Matter movement as well as difficulties faced by black Americans who employ code switching. These themes, as well as the vulgar language, attracted some controversy and caused the book to be one of the most challenged books of 2017 and 2018 according to the American Library Association. The book was adapted into a film by Fox 2000 in October 2018, which received positive reviews. The novel was also adapted into an audiobook, won several awards and praise for its narrator, Bahni Turpin. Development and publication. Shaken by the 2009 police shooting of Oscar Grant, then-college student Angie Thomas began the project as a short story for her senior project in Belhaven University's creative writing program. While writing the short story, the project quickly expanded, though Thomas put it aside for a few years after graduation. Speaking to her hometown newspaper, Thomas said, "I wanted to make sure I approached it not just in anger, but with love even". The deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and Sandra Bland drew Thomas back to expand the project into a novel, which she titled after Tupac Shakur's "THUG LIFE" concept: "The Hate U Give Little Infants Fucks Everybody". Events surrounding the killings of Alton Sterling, Philando Castile and Michael Brown, and widespread ensuing protests against racism and police brutality, also informed moments in the book. Unsure whether publishers would be interested in the Black Lives Matter-inspired material, Thomas reached out to literary agent Brooks Sherman on Twitter in June 2015 to ask for advice. In February 2016, HarperCollins' imprint Balzer + Bray bought the rights to the novel in an auction, outbidding 13 other publishing houses, and signed a two-book deal with Thomas. Fox 2000 optioned the film rights the following month. The 464-page book was published on February 28, 2017, when the industry was attempting to address a decade-long stagnation in the number of children's books by African-American authors. Since its publication, Thomas has become an example of attempts by publishers to publish more young adult African-American novelists. Plot. Starr Carter is a 16-year-old black girl, who lives in the fictional mostly poor black neighborhood of Garden Heights, but attends an affluent predominantly white private school, Williamson Prep. After a shooting breaks up a party Starr is attending, she is driven home by her childhood best friend and sometimes crush Khalil. They are stopped by a white police officer. The officer instructs Khalil, who is black, to exit the car; while outside the car, Khalil leans into the driver-side window to check in on Starr. The officer then shoots Khalil three times, killing him. Starr agrees to an interview with police about the shooting after being encouraged by her Uncle Carlos, who is also a detective. Carlos was a father figure to Starr when her father, Maverick, spent three years in prison for gang activity. Following his release, Maverick left the gang and became the owner of the Garden Heights grocery store where Starr and her older half-brother Seven work. Maverick was only allowed to leave his gang, the King Lords, because he confessed to a crime to protect gang-leader King. Widely feared in the neighborhood, King now lives with Seven's mother, Seven's half-sister Kenya, who is friends with Starr, and Kenya's little sister, Lyric. Khalil's death becomes a national news story. The media portrays Khalil as a gang banger and drug dealer, while portraying the white officer who killed him more favorably. Starr's identity as the witness is initially kept secret from everyone outside Starr's family, including her younger brother Sekani. Keeping the secret from her white boyfriend Chris and her best friends Hailey Grant and Maya Yang – who all attend Williamson Prep – weighs on Starr, as does her need to keep her Williamson and Garden Heights personalities separate. Starr's struggles with her identity are further complicated after her mother gets a higher-paying job and the family moves out of Garden Heights. After a grand jury fails to indict the white officer, Garden Heights erupts into both peaceful protests and riots. The failure of the criminal justice system to hold the officer accountable pushes Starr to take an increasingly public role, first giving a television interview and then speaking out during the protests, which are met by police in riot gear. Her increasing identification with the people of Garden Heights causes tension with Starr's friends, especially with her boyfriend Chris. But by the end of the novel, Starr and Maya have started standing up to Hailey's racist comments while Chris offers support to Starr. The climax of the novel occurs during the riot following the grand jury decision. Starr, Chris, Seven, and DeVante – whom Maverick helped leave the King Lords – successfully defend Maverick's store from King. The neighborhood stands up to King and as a result of testimony by DeVante, King is arrested and expected to be imprisoned for a lengthy sentence. Starr promises to keep Khalil's memory alive and to continue her advocacy against injustice. Style. Vincent Haddad of Central State University reads "The Hate U Give" as an attempt to build empathy with the Black Lives Matter movement, as "the appeals for empathy figured by Starr's first-person account ultimately serve to discipline those who seek solutions deemed too 'un-realistic' to oppose the 'sustained violence against Black communities. By maintaining realism, and explicitly naming real-world victims of police brutality, Haddad contends that Thomas is able to spur action in her readers. However, he ultimately feels that there are limits to this approach because it is about the individual rather than the collective. By contrast, Vox's Constance Grady argues that this realism is what makes the novel ultimately work to larger purposes: "The specificity and whimsy of ideas like the anger scale of breakup songs is what keeps "The Hate U Give" moving so deftly through its heavy subject matter; it stays warm and focused and grounded in character even when it's dealing with big, amorphous ideas like systemic racism." Themes. Examining race relations is a core theme of the novel. Professor Khalil Muhammad of Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government sees the novel as a way to have discussions among people who might not otherwise discuss Black Lives Matter: "The book – and to some degree the movie – has been read and will be read by students in all-white spaces, where otherwise the urgency of these issues has not affected them personally." At the same time, it could offer solace for black teens who have faced similar challenges to Starr. An example of this is Starr's ability to code switch between her private school and home, which Thomas demonstrates through the slang that Starr uses in each context's dialogue. Also helping Starr is her family who offer a variety of points of view, including her Uncle's thoughts as a police officer and her father teaching Starr and her siblings about the Black Panther Party. The novel also shows Starr's parents' struggles with remaining connected to their community while needing to protect and give opportunity to their children. "The Hate U Give" shows Starr's dual need to respond both to the trauma of witnessing Khalil's death and her need to do so politically. This dual need, combined with Thomas's ability to root these struggles in their historical context, helps give the book its power, according to Jonathan Alexander writing in the "Los Angeles Review of Books". "Los Angeles Times" critic Adriana Ramirez sees Starr as similar to the protagonists of fantasy dystopian novels like "Divergent" and "The Hunger Games" as she seeks to change an entrenched system of power, noting, "it is also a dystopian young adult novel that happens to be set in reality". Nick Smart, a professor at the College of New Rochelle, takes this further, stating, "In "The Hate U Give", there's also a girl – who happens to be a black girl – being sent out against the system, against the world, against an entrenched opposition", while Ramirez notes that Starr's blackness is a core element for some readers. Before its publication, exploring a female perspective on the isolation and need to be a model minority at an elite private school was something which had not been conducted in literature or film with the same frequency as for males. Thomas's ability to capture these feelings stemmed from her own experiences with the reactions of her white classmates following the death of Oscar Grant. The novel does not shy away from the realities of urban life, exemplified by the title's reference to the Tupac Shakur quote. Starr's feelings about Khalil evolve during the novel. The reader is first introduced to him at the party as a friend of Starr's and as a victim of a police shooting. This narrative is then complicated both for Starr and in the novel's world at large when it is learned that Khalil dealt drugs. However, Starr comes to disagree with the way the media is portraying Khalil. As Starr finds her own agency, she is able to challenge this narrative first for herself and then for others, recognizing that Khalil was forced into these circumstances by poverty, hunger, and a desire to care for his drug addict mother. She is able to show her courage speaking to the grand jury, and realizes that she needs to participate in the protests which follow its decision. How and where Khalil and Starr can find justice also drives Starr's decision to join in the protests. Reception. The book debuted at the top of "The New York Times" young adult (YA) best-seller list, and was on it for more than 80 weeks. The book had 100,000 copies in print in the first month, eventually selling more than 850,000 copies . The book was popular with readers, winning Goodreads annual awards vote in the categories of Best Young Adult Fiction and Debut Author. Critics also widely praised the book. In the "Christian Science Monitor", Katie Ward Beim-Esche wrote, "Believe the hype: "The Hate U Give," Angie Thomas's extraordinary and fearless debut, really is that good." Shannon Ozirny of "The Globe and Mail" also felt it would have wide appeal, "Ignore the YA label – this should be the one book everyone reads this year." On "Salon", Erin Keane wrote that the novel is "topical, urgent, necessary, and if that weren't enough, it's also a highly entertaining and engaging read." The book also earned starred reviews from multiple review journals. "Kirkus", which nominated the book for its Kirkus Prize, praised both its writing and timelines: "With smooth but powerful prose ... This story is necessary. This story is important." Young adult literature expert Michael Cart, writing in "Booklist", also praised Thomas's writing as Starr: "Beautifully written in Starr's authentic first-person voice, this is a marvel of verisimilitude." While praising the overall book in a starred review, "School Library Journal"s Mahnaz Dar criticized the writing of several characters as "slightly uneven". The "Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books", "Horn Book Magazine", and "VOYA" also gave the book their equivalents of starred reviews. Awards. "The Hate U Give" has received the following awards and accolades: Challenges. The American Library Association listed the book as one of the ten most-challenged books of 2017 (), 2018 (), and 2020 (10) "because it was considered 'pervasively vulgar,'" contained "drug use, profanity, and offensive language," as well as sexual references, and "was thought to promote an anti-police message." In July 2018, a South Carolina police union raised objections to the inclusion of the book, as well as the similarly themed "All American Boys" by Brendan Kiely and Jason Reynolds, in the summer reading list for ninth-grade students of Wando High School. A representative of the police lodge described the inclusion of the books as "almost indoctrination of distrust of police" and asserted that "we've got to put a stop to that." The books remained on the list and Wando's principal was later recognized by the state school library association for her defense of the challenged books. The book was removed from the school libraries of the Katy Independent School District due to its explicit language. Thomas responded to these challenges by defending the book's message and saying that it is a spur for conversation. Adaptations. Film. Fox 2000 optioned "The Hate U Give" for a film adaption in March 2016, shortly after the book's auction. Director George Tillman Jr. and actress Amandla Stenberg were immediately attached to the project. The movie also features Issa Rae, Regina Hall, Russell Hornsby, Algee Smith, KJ Apa, Lamar Johnson, Anthony Mackie, Common, and Sabrina Carpenter. The film is based on a screenplay by Audrey Wells, who died one day before it was released. Stenberg's casting received some criticism because of her lighter complexion as compared to the girl on the novel's cover. The movie was given a limited release on October 5, 2018, and a wide release on October 19, 2018. The film was favorably received, with a Rotten Tomatoes critics score of 8.2 out of 10, and an A+ CinemaScore. the film had a worldwide box office gross of $34 million against a budget of $23 million. Audiobook. An audiobook was released by Harper Audio on the same day as the novel and featured narration by Bahni Turpin, whom Thomas had selected. Audiobook producer Caitlin Garing spoke of the importance of matching the material with the narrator and spoke of Turpin's skill, "you can trust her to get to the heart of a story and lead the listener there". It was well reviewed and won Audie Awards for best YA and best female narrator. In her acceptance speech, Turpin said it was "an important book for our time". It also won the 2018 Odyssey Award for best children's audiobook. Odyssey committee chair Joan Schroeder Kindig said, "Bahni Turpin's powerful narration of this timely novel will inspire listeners to find their own voices." Turpin downplayed the award saying, "I don't think the public is aware of most of our awards, though – in general, I think those who most appreciate the awards are ... the people in the business of books". "Publishers Weekly", in its starred review of the audiobook, praised Turpin's abilities to convey "the complexity of the 16-year-old protagonist who sounds both youthful and mature for her age, as she relies on code-switching to navigate two different social settings". Maggie Knapp in her starred review for "School Library Journal" and Lynette Pitrak in her starred review for "Booklist" also praised Turpin's ability to capture Starr's voice in her performance.

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Doina (Eminescu) Doina, or Doină (sometimes translated as "Lament"), is a political poem by the Romanian Mihai Eminescu. It was first published in 1883 and is therefore seen by some as Eminescu's final work in verse, although it may actually be an 1870s piece, inspired or enhanced by the perceived injustice of the Berlin Treaty. A variation of the "doina" (plural: "doine"), picked up from Romanian folklore, it is noticeably angry to the point of rhetorical violence, a radical expression of Romanian nationalism against invading "foreigners", noted for its hints of ecopoetry and "anti-technicist" discourse. "Doina" delineates the ideal geographical space of Greater Romania, at a time when Romanian-inhabited regions were divided between an independent kingdom and multinational empires. Its final lines call on Stephen the Great, depicted as a sleeping hero, to take up the cause of Romanians and chase foreigners out with the sound of his horn. The same basic themes appear in another poem by Eminescu, the anthem-like "La arme" ("To Arms"), which is sometimes discussed as a variant of "Doina". Expressly anti-Russian, also read as antisemitic, anti-German, anti-Greek, anti-Hungarian, and anti-Ukrainian, "Doina" has been described as "chauvinistic" and "minor" by some critics, "beautiful" by others. It has been present in the Romanian curriculum since the 1890s, while also serving as subversive literature among Romanian communities in the Russian Empire. During the interwar, with Greater Romania established as a political reality, "Doina" became a rallying call for revolutionary nationalists and fascists. It was deemed problematic and censored during the communist period, although tacitly endorsed under the regime's latter, national-communist, phase. It returned in focus during the Romanian Revolution of 1989 and after, when it also became a public symbol of Romanian identity in Moldova. Outline. "Doina" opens with a localization of the Romanian space, highlighting regions which were at the time in Russia and Austria-Hungary: Eminescu moves focus on Bessarabia, depicted as raided by "muscali" on horseback; on Bukovina, with foreigners as "caterpillars" and stalkers of the local Romanians; then on Transylvania, crossed by the foreigners' "inroads". Overall, the projected country is aflush with intruders and the Romanian is a "foreigner in his own land"; birds are chased away, songs are extinguished, and the forest, "brother of the Romanian", is depleted. The description of this desolate landscape ends in imprecation: The ending of "Doina" is Eminescu's contribution to a "trans-historical" cult of Prince Stephen, who had consolidated Moldavia's statehood in the 15th century: Background. A poet as well as a folklorist, Eminescu was well acquainted with the traditional forms of Romanian poetry, and wrote several poems in folkloric style—his Transylvanian enemy, Alexandru Grama, could therefore claim that Eminescu had simply plagiarized Transylvanian "doine". As noted by Eminescu expert Perpessicius, one of his first published works, taken up by "Familia" in the 1860s, was a "type of "doina"" or a "pseudo-"doina"". Another variation on that pattern is addressed to "His Majesty, The Forest" ("Codrule, Măria ta"), with the poet asking to be turned into a tree branch, rocking into eternal slumber. Seen by scholars as an early draft of "Doina", it was described as "hollow" and "rudimentary" by critic Constanța Marinescu. However, according to Călinescu, such works sound less "gauche" than actual folk poetry, as polished for print by Vasile Alecsandri. Contrarily, Perpessicius asserts that Eminescu was less talented that Alecsandri, never matching his work as a folklorist or folklore-inspired versifier. According to scholar Marin Bucur, Marinescu is essentially wrong in treating the draft as an actual poem, and also in failing to see why "Doina" itself is a worthy piece. Eminescu's interest in "doine" only peaked after 1877, when he was living as a journalist in Bucharest, and began systematic readings from collections of folk poetry. They were integrated into a vast fund of drafts and versions for "Doina", which, as noted by Perpessicius, cannot realistically be published together as a critical instrument. In its final form, "Doina" is popularly associated with the unveiling at Iași in June 1883, of a monument to Prince Stephen. Eminescu was by then erratic and fatigued, displaying, already from May 1883, the early stages of a mental breakdown. Lodging with Ion Creangă in Iași, he shocked his old friend by brandishing a revolver, explained by the poet as a defense against unspecified enemies. He never actually attended the unveiling of Stephen's statue, only showing up for parallel ceremonies at "Junimea" society. It was there that he first read his "Doina", on June 4. The audience was reportedly enthusiastic, and moved in to hug Eminescu. "Doina" was first published by the "Junimist" monthly "Convorbiri Literare" on July 1. An emotional Creangă later claimed that his friend had written the poem over those few days, at Creangă's own home, the peasant-style "Bojdeuca". Scholar Dumitru Caracostea similarly believes that "Doina" is the last of Eminescu's poems, composed just before "his collapse in 1883". This is contradicted by other accounts. Researcher D. Murărașu believes that Eminescu had actually completed the poem 13 years before, while present at Putna for Prince Stephen's commemoration, and merely reused it for the 1883 feast. Eminescu expert Dumitru Irimia groups "Doina" and "Luceafărul" into Eminescu's "final effort". He proposes that Eminescu, sensing his "mental equilibrium" slipping away, concentrated on finishing up both works, which outline his universal and social queries. However, he dates the earliest recognizable drafts of "Doina" to 1878, and Eminescu's anger over the Berlin Treaty, which awarded Southern Bessarabia (the Budjak) to Russia, noting parallels with the author's political columns, taken up by "Timpul" in the early 1880s. According to Perpessicius, while the poem's references to rail transport may correspond to the unraveling of the Strousberg Affair, "Doina" is the product of 1878, written "a day after [the Budjak's] cession [...], five years before the celebrations in Iași". He believes that "Doina" was in any event completed in December 1882, which was the original date set for the inauguration of Stephen's statue. In 1883, Eminescu had written two hymns about Stephen in preparation for the celebrations in Iași, but never used them. Themes. Xenophobia debate. Himself a nationalist, Nicolae Iorga described the piece as both "beautiful" and "political", marked by Eminescu's "hatred of an unrelenting foreign invasion". Without endorsing the political message, critic Nicolae Manolescu also found Eminescu's piece aesthetically pleasing. Other commentators disagree with these verdicts. Constantin Coroiu describes "Doina" as "not a masterpiece, not even a small one", while Z. Ornea includes it among Eminescu's lesser poems, a "modest work in verse". Essayist Nicolae Steinhardt took an intermediary position. While he recognized "Doina" as inferior to Eminescu's philosophical poetry, he proposed that the verse still had "beauty bubbling like geysers", the beauty of "Thracian rocks collapsing". Grama, who saw himself as a fellow nationalist, accused Eminescu of insincerity, noting that the message of "Doina" contrasted first and foremost with Eminescu's own recourse to "cosmopolitan" themes in his other work. Also according to Grama, the "idiotic" poet wrote apocalyptic verse at a time when Romanians' fates were actually improving. This verdict is not shared by other commentators. In 1934, critic Mihail Dragomirescu argued that "Doina" and "Scrisoarea III" contained Eminescu's "innermost thoughts", which led to Simion Bărnuțiu, "Romanianism", and "national mysticism". Caracostea defines the poem as an "excruciating ethnic elegy", and a sample of the "liveliest indignation"—reserved by Eminescu for politics and social commentary. According to scholar Lucian Boia, Eminescu's poetry is overall the best expression of an "anti-cosmopolitan" drive in Romanian nationalism. Boia sees "Doina" as sketching out Eminescu's "dream": "a pure Romanian civilization, untouched by foreign influences and still less by the effective presence of foreigners." Irimia notes the work for "absolutely confound[ing]" the poetic self with national identity, "taking on the historical being of the Romanians [and] harmonizing it with the sacred dimension of the universal being." According to musicologist Carmen Manea, both "Doina" and "Scrisoarea III" resemble in intent Frédéric Chopin's "Polonaises". The poem is one of "national revival", looking forward to a Greater Romania comprising all the Romanian-inhabited regions and, as argued by comparatist Călin-Andrei Mihăilescu, is "explosive" in "deplor[ing] the alienation of Romanians in their own lands". Literary historian John Neubauer notes "Doina"s "chauvinistic remarks", while Bernard Camboulives refers to its "notes of xenophobia", stemming from a "growing intellectual despair". These, Camboulives notes, "might shock those readers who are unfamiliar with Romanian history". The opening lines vaguely mention "foreigners", but the portion may refer to the situation in Eminescu's own Bukovina, specifically to relatively recent presence there of Germans, Ukrainians, and especially Bukovina Jews. According to scholar Petru Zugun, there is nothing specifically xenophobic or antisemitic about "Doina", whose introductory portion is simply a critique of "unproductive foreigners", some of whom happened to be Jews, immigrating to Bukovina. Zugun further argues that Eminescu was even more critical of his co-nationals, when these were unproductive. Manolescu acknowledges that background is xenophobic, targeting Russians, Jews and Hungarians. However, he argues that the poem, unlike Eminescu's articles, can be appreciated without such "sociological" hints. Critic Alex. Ștefănescu explains "Doina" as "sentimental, not ideological", to be understood as a declaration of love to Romania. He also notes that Eminescu was writing after "century-long dramas" provoked by "foreign occupations or by foreigners peacefully infiltrated, but never really integrated, into Romanian society, never giving up on their ethnic solidarity." As noted by culture critic Garabet Ibrăileanu, Eminescu was a xenophobe who, overall, preferred the Jews to the Romanian liberals, viewing the former as more honest and reliable. Literary historian Leon Volovici also sees Eminescu as guided by an economic theory, but notes his vision of an "objective conflict" between Romanians and foreigners, including in particular Jews (assimilated or not) and Greeks; the "apocalyptic" "Doina" formed part of that discourse. Romania's Jews, Eminescu insisted, were most removed from the authentically Romanian peasantry, and therefore "could not merge with our people." Draft versions of the poem make explicit mention of "Stephen's Romanians" being "in kike hands", and record with alarm the spread of Yiddish in Bukovina. Another manuscript proclaims specific curses against the perceived enablers of Jews, Greeks, and Russians; for instance: The Bukovina themes had appeared in several Eminescu "doine", notably including an 1877 stanza in which Eminescu, or his peasant inspiration, describes the region at "the mercy of the foreigner, which is like a thistle's shadow". The latter metaphor is also found in "Doina", suggesting "the image of poverty sweeping over the country [...]. In times of drought, the thistle's shadow is more desolate than no shadow at all, a mock-offering to the heat-stricken people." A specific reference to the village of Boian, in "Doina"s ninth line, has contributed to that locality's notoriety in a Romanian cultural context. Another discernible issue is anger over the plight of Romanians in Russia's Bessarabia Governorate, which included the Budjak. As noted by Irimia, the two occupations appear as a continuum in Eminescu's lyrical universe. The Bessarabian topic is addressed in a parallel poem, referring to the Russians as "dog-headed" and "dog-hearted" Kalmyks, likely to "tear out the tongues" of Romanian-speakers. The early versions of "Doina" still made mentions of "Tatar and Kalmyk hordes". Also from the period, "La arme" ("To Arms"), sometimes seen as a "Doina" variant, urges Romanians to answer the call of "gentle Bessarabia", "our younger sister", "awaiting to be murdered by dogs". Traditionalism and biblical echoes. According to Steinhardt, the central message is not xenophobic, but "ecological", "anti-technicist", and "obviously Heideggerian", its violence being Eminescu's attempt to fend off an "ancient curse". This reading refers in particular to a line which mentions the "iron road" (the Austrian rail company) bringing in foreigners to "kill all the songs", as well as to the claim that the forest and the Romanian are like "brothers". The same lines are also highlighted by critic Barbu Cioculescu: "That Eminescu was our first environmentalist is an established fact, beyond all debate [...]. The construction of railways across the country's virgin plains, centenary forests, and murmuring waters drove him to despair". Ștefănescu rejects literal readings of the "iron road" verse, noting that Eminescu stood not for an aversion to progress, but rather against the "brutal destruction of a slowly emerging harmony", an "irreversible destruction of beautiful things." Trains have first appeared as instruments of corruption in Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu's "Iron Road" (1864), which exegets such as Liviu Marian saw as "quasi-identical" with the passage in "Doina", and which is primarily about the Strousberg scandal. Several commentators focus on the poem's prophetic outbursts and their literary sources. Some see "Doina" as primarily a curse, similar to Saint Basil's exorcism or to the Kosovo curse, in the Vuk Karadžić version. As noted by Ștefănescu, Eminescu changes the meaning of words, turning the mere fondness of strangers into a punishable crime: "[He] can make words into soft twigs, sketching on the surface of water, and also into daggers." Al. Andriescu, the Biblical scholar, argued that the central themes, of national perdition and redemption, are echoes of the "Psalms", arriving at Eminescu through his readings from Dosoftei. Building on this verdict, Ukrainian researcher Volodymyr Antofiychuk proposes that "Doina" is a parallel to Taras Shevchenko's own psalmodic verse. Both authors, Antofiychuk notes, invoked the Bible specifically against Russian expansionism. Although rejecting Eminescu's overall contribution, including most of "Doina", Grama reserved praise for this final scene, calling it a "masterpiece", when viewed separately: "most Romanians cannot fail to be moved" by it. Comparatist Grete Tartler proposes that the "famous invocation" deepens folkloric accounts about Stephen as a sleeping hero, on par with Ogier the Dane and Frederick Barbarossa. Commenting on this portion of "Doina", critic Cornelia Mănicuță notes that Eminescu was reusing a Stephen motif already found in Romantic literature. Overall, Camboulives explains Stephen's invocation as an homage to his resisting the much more powerful Ottoman Empire, and defending "the whole of Christendom." Similarly, Ștefănescu argues that Eminescu appealed primarily to the "Romanian mythology", of Stephen as an "unvanquished hero". Historian Ovidiu Pecican notes that the line about how "woods will come to your aid" could be a reference to peasant republics existing on the forested border areas of old Moldavia, providing a stable levy army. This interpretation is disputed by another scholar, Sorin Nemeti, who argues that "nobody could be convinced" of "Doina"s value as a historical record. Legacy. Becoming a symbol. "Doina" was included by Titu Maiorescu in his first-ever critical edition of Eminescu's poems, published at Editura Socec as the author had withdrawn from public life. The "classic" selection and arrangement, which place "Doina" right before "One Wish Alone Have I", were praised by Perpessicius as particularly tactful. Nevertheless, critics were flummoxed by Maiorescu's apparent carelessness, which, in poems such as "Doina", proliferated known typos. The Socec collection is known for missing an entire line of the poem, alluding to the foreigners' reliance on the "iron road". The corrected version of "Doina" was published in February 1884 by Maiorescu's rivals at "Contemporanul". Socec itself amended the text in its revised edition of 1895. "La arme" remained unpublished until 1902, but was widely known through its musical adaptation by Eduard Caudella, which is probably from 1883. Caudella himself believed that the work was a suitable anthem, "the Romanians' "Marseillaise"". Another version, circulated in the Banat by Liviu Tempea, was sung to the tune of "Chant du départ". The first use of "Doina" as an object of study in academia was I. Manliu's manual of poetics, published in 1890 and heavily indebted to Maiorescu's observations, closely followed in 1893 by Enea Hodoș's reader, aimed at Romanian schoolteachers in the Banat, and by Gheorghe Adamescu's chrestomathy. In the Kingdom of Romania, three literature textbooks for schoolchildren included "Doina" before 1900. The poem was also part of the theatrical repertoire, recited during intermissions by Aristizza Romanescu. In 1904, a Stephen obelisk was dedicated by the peasants of Bârsești. It included a stanza of "Doina", carved into a slab of concrete. Iorga's associate A. C. Cuza, who published in 1914 a "people's edition" of Eminescu's work, set apart a section for the "doine". The cover had art by Ipolit Strâmbu, depicting the final scene of "Doina", with Stephen sounding his horn. As noted at the time by Ibrăileanu, nationalism permeated the reading of Eminescu's work: while "Doina" and "Scrisoarea III" could still "serve nationalism", most of his poetry could not. Ibrăileanu argues that this realization prompted Ilarie Chendi and others to seek the publication of Eminescu's other, lesser and unfinished, prose works. The poem, and especially its reference to the "iron road", was also popular with the socialist "Revista Socială", which saw the old gentry and the peasants as equally threatened by modernization. By 1900, Eminescu's posthumous followers included Duiliu Zamfirescu, who wrote a "Doina"-like poem specifically about Bukovina, and the Bukovinian Radu Sbiera. According to Ibrăileanu, the latter, being an "untalented Eminescian", was inspired by "Doina" to the point of plagiarism. In 1902, "Doina" also inspired the critically acclaimed debut of Octavian Goga, a Transylvanian. The poem was already an established political symbol, circulated clandestinely in Bessarabia by Ion Pelivan. Pelivan was arrested by the Special Corps of Gendarmes in 1903. During the inquiry, Pelivan reports, the Gendarmes produced an incompetent translation of "Doina" into Russian, missing out on its more inflammatory rhetoric. "Doina" was subsequently used as a rallying call in 1912, during the centennial of Bessarabia's annexation by Russia. Its recitation headlined the "festival" organized in Bucharest by the Cultural League for the Unity of All Romanians. The respite of censorship following the Russian Revolution of 1905 ultimately produced a blossoming of the Romanian Bessarabian press, including "Cuvânt Moldovenesc"—which, in 1913, put out an Eminescu selection, featuring both "Doina" and "Codrule, Măria ta". Meanwhile, Volovici notes, Eminescu's rhetoric partook in "exacerbat[ing] the negative image of the foreigner and stimulated xenophobia." As reported by writer Avram Axelard (A. A. Luca), "Doina" had also become an anthem for "Christian boys" in Bukovina, who used it as a justification to punch him and other Jews. In Greater Romania. Two years after the Cuza edition, the Romanian Kingdom entered World War I as an Entente country; the alliance favored the Russian Empire over Austria-Hungary, and the cause of Transylvania over that of Bessarabia. During the subsequent campaigns. "La arme" was a soldiers' anthem, used for instance during Nerva I. Paul's charge on German positions (October 1916), while "Doina" was sung by the "Lăutar" Cristache Ciolac as a "pitiful song of ancient woes". Driven into a war of attrition, Romania contemplated defeat in early 1918. Writing at the time in "Chemarea", the Jewish critic Benjamin Fondane reminded Iorga and other nationalists of the anti-Russian content of "Doina", which, he argued, had been proven right. The following months and years saw the creation and consolidation of Greater Romania, beginning with the union of Bessarabia with Romania. The culmination of the process was a "Great Union" (December 1, 1918), during which Romanians from Transylvania and satellite regions expressed their wish to join the country. Though invoked on the day, the slogan "From the Dniester to the Tisza" caused some controversy, as delegates from Northern Maramuresh found that it excluded their homeland. The matter was addressed by a Transylvanian delegate, Ștefan Cicio Pop, who endorsed the new slogan: "Trăiască România Mare de la Nistru și până dincolo de Tisa!" ("Long live Greater Romania from the Dniester to the Tisza and beyond!"). In interwar Bessarabia, "Doina" continued to have an especially strong presence as a political symbol and poetic model, while "La arme" was quoted as an opening text by the literary review "Viața Basarabiei". "Doina" was also a major of influence on the anti-Russian poetry published at the time by Ion Buzdugan. In contrast, the left-wing Emilian Bucov parodied the poem, revising its central message: Eminescu's poem had become universally present in literature textbooks, and was for the first time made accessible to the youngest cohorts by the reading aids of Gheorghe Bogdan-Duică. It also influenced sculptor Ion Schmidt-Faur, who in 1929 added a "Doina"-inspired relief, of Stephen and his horn, at the base of his Eminescu statue in Iași. Before and during and World War II, the work was several times transposed into foreign languages. In 1927, Ramiro Ortiz put out an Eminescu reader in Italian, which included "Doina". A Hungarian-language "Doina" was completed by Sándor Kibédi in 1934. The Bukovinian Czech Božena Șesan published a translation into her native language in 1944. From ca. 1927, "Doina" was also especially popular with the Iron Guard, a fascist movement which similarly "express[ed] the ancestral, somehow atemporal, sense of Romanian purity and solidarity among Romanians" and gave Stephen an "exceptional position" in its propaganda works. The poem was also invoked by the National Christian Party, which shared the Guard's antisemitism and was sometimes allied with it. Its leader was the poet Goga, who used the lyrics to justify crimes committed by the Guard's Captain, Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, calling "Doina" a "gospel of Romanianism." The same appropriation happened with "La arme". "Almost confiscated [...] by far-right groups", it reportedly inspired Codreanu to designate the basic Iron Guard cells as "cuiburi" ("nests"). By 1936, Stelian Popescu of the nationalist paper "Universul" was reusing the "dogs-eating-hearts" line, in red lettering, against his Jewish and left-wing rivals at "Adevărul", accusing them of being a front for the Romanian Communist Party. As recalled by Cioculescu, during the National Legionary State the same slogan was "plastered all over the walls" of Romanian cities, "as if the Guard didn't have its own foreigners!" Communist censorship. In late 1944, shortly after King Michael's Coup and the onset of Soviet occupation in Romania, "La arme" was banned. At the time, Iron Guard commandos, supported by Nazi Germany, used "Doina" as a password. Under the subsequent Romanian communist regime, "Doina" was also targeted by political censorship: already in 1946, the quotation from "Doina" was removed from Schmidt-Faur's relief. The poem could not be published in Bessarabia, which was included in the Soviet Union as the Moldavian SSR. In both countries, it was "banned and recited only in private readings because it named Russia as one of the imperial powers that had oppressed the Romanian nation." Also uncomfortable were its "strident nationalism" and its mention of the Dniester, "at the time in the territory of the Soviet Union." Philologist Petru Creția also argued that "Doina" upset the communist rulers because they themselves were mostly "foreigners [...], extremely offended by the things one read in there". In Western countries, the anti-communist Romanian diaspora still published and discussed the poem. Diaspora journalist Virgil Ierunca noted at the time that Eminescu was both praised and censored with the acquiescence of a compliant intelligentsia. He highlighted this against the oppression experienced by the other social groups, quoting "Doina"s "all Romanians have complained to me". The poem's nationalist prestige was preserved by the self-exiled Iron Guard poet, Aron Cotruș, who wrote many pieces which allude to Eminescu's, in both style and intertexual references, updated to refer to communism and the Soviets. Dissidents at home also maintained a cult of the poem. As noted by Creția, "Doina" had a psychological appeal: "those who hid it under a bushel were mistaken, with this poem preserving a latent life in the national psyche; thus, the censors, instead of attenuating an obsession, have maintained it." Historian Zoe Petre recalls having been taught "Doina" as a youth, "in the summer of '44", which was already a gesture of defiance from her family. One theory claims that the disillusioned communist poet Nicolae Labiș openly recited "Doina" at a Bucharest locale in autumn 1956, the sign of his conversion to nationalism—a departure for which he was allegedly assassinated. Reportedly, at around the same time the left-wing Victor Eftimiu expressed a wish to expunge "Doina" from collective memory, "for its xenophobia". Dumitru Irimia recalls that, in the early 1960s, Eminescu was "la secret" ("under lock and key"), primarily quoted with his "Emperor and Proletarian", but also that his high school teacher privately advised him to read "Doina". Linguist Tatiana Slama-Cazacu also remembers that volumes containing "Doina" could not be checked out of public libraries. The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 brought anti-Russian sentiment to the forefront, allowing Sabin Drăgoi to compose and circulate a third musical version of "La arme". At around the same time, Eftimiu revised his stance, reciting "Doina" to his fellow writers at a meeting in Bragadiru Hall, Bucharest. Censorship again intervened in 1969, when a treatise of Romanian history by Polish author Juliusz Demel had to be withdrawn from Romanian bookshops for featuring the first two lines of "Doina" as a motto. In the 1970s, following the deterioration of contacts between Romania and the Soviet Union, communist leader Nicolae Ceaușescu became more lenient toward "Doina". At a Communist-Party plenary meeting early that decade, he reportedly cited the imprecation about dogs "eating the hearts" of xenophiles. Pimen Zainea, at the time a monk and tour guide at Putna, recalls that he was never prevented from reciting the poem to local visitors; and that Virgil Radulian, the Minister of Education, specifically asked him to quote "Doina" for Hungarians and Russians attending the 4th World Festival of Youth and Students. He further reports that Miu Dobrescu, a communist potentate in Suceava County, would not commit to having "Doina" republished in textbooks, "as you know how things are between us and our great neighbor in the East", but that he openly encouraged recitations to continue. In 1976, Ceaușescu proposed to publish a collection of Eminescu's "national" poetry, headlined by "Doina"s apparent claim to Bessarabia. Actor Ludovic Antal was reportedly the first in his profession to test censorship by publicly reciting "Doina", at some point before his death in 1979. References to "Doina" were still stripped from the 1977 Romanian edition of an Eminescu study, by the Frenchman Alain Guillermou. A French translation was done by Jean-Louis Courriol, but, as Courriol himself recalled, could still not be published in Romania in 1984. At around that time, Cezar Ivănescu wrote a pastiche of "Doina" with a covert critique of communism; this was detected, then eliminated, by the censors. By then, Adrian Păunescu of "Cenaclul Flacăra" was staging public readings of "Doina" in Romania. Sometimes broadcast by radio, these were also followed by Romanian activists in the Moldavian SSR. There, the poem had remained banned in the Brezhnev Era, with Nicolae Lupan threatened and ultimately expelled from the country for having circulated it. Soviet censorship was challenged by Grigore Vieru, who alluded to "Doina" in subversive poems such as "Ridică-te" ("Arise") and "Eminescu"—the latter includes and explicit mention: "Doina mi-o furară" ("They stole my "Doina""). With the onset of "Perestroika" reforms in the Soviet republic, the magazine "Nistru" published all versions of "Doina" in its first issue of 1988, an initiative credited to poet Dumitru Matcovschi. From her home in the Latvian SSR, Maria Macovei-Briedis published the Romanian magazine "Glasul", which also took up "Doina" in 1988. Recovery. At the Eminescu centennial, some eleven months before the Romanian Revolution of 1989, "Doina" was publicly quoted in Ceaușescu's own address. As noted by Slama-Cazacu, the message was read at the Romanian Athenaeum by Emil Bobu, who happened to be "one of [Ceaușescu's] least cultured ministers." The issue of "Doina" came up during long debates over the publication of Eminescu's complete works. The project was endorsed by philosopher Constantin Noica, who proposed putting out facsimiles from Eminescu's manuscripts. He acknowledged in 1977 that some were problematic for the regime, "xenophobic, anti-Russian", and suggested to "leave "Doina" out of it [...], we'll do it like type-writer girls—this we erase, the rest can appear." In 1989, Ceaușescu ultimately allowed Creția to republish "Doina" in a lithographic edition which reproduced the Maiorescu original. According to Petre, this was originally planned as a regular-type edition, but Creția, who defended the inclusion of "Doina", struggled with censorship for several years. During one episode of this exchange, he proposed changing "from the Dniester to the Tisza" to "from the Istros to the Tisza", which excluded reference to Bessarabia; "Dniester" would only be clarified in the erratum. The poem was again fully accessible during the revolutionary events, its opening lines used by the National Salvation Front in its first appeals to the Iași populace. Also then, actor Victor Rebengiuc walked into the Romanian Television building and recited the poem in a live broadcast, changing stress from its condemnation of foreigners to read like an attack on people associated with the old regime. According to Eminescu expert Cornelia Viziteu, there followed a period of "overtly nationalist" readings with "evidently superficial commentary", including popularization of "Doina" through other television broadcasts. "Doina" was again standard reading for seventh-grade students, a matter which, according to journalist Sorin Șerb, contributes to their cultural isolation: "The Romanian schoolchild doesn't live on Earth, in a universe filled with wonder, but within the borders of a 'national, sovereign, independent, unitary and indivisible state'". In the 1990s, "Doina" was featured on Romanian Orthodox icons, by a Comănești priest calling for Eminescu's canonization, and also reclaimed by Iron Guard revivalists. It was then controversially sourced by the Social Democratic politician, Nicolae Bacalbașa, during the presidential race of 2014, read as an attack on Klaus Iohannis (who is a Transylvanian Saxon). Eminescu is also revered in the post-Soviet Republic of Moldova (former Moldavian SSR), where he has a status equivalent to that of "national poet", within the larger debate about Moldovan identity. This status is seen by scholar Wim van Meurs as "artificial" and "completely false", in particular because it has to override his Greater Romanian nationalism, "expressed in the first lines of his poem "Doina"". In early 1994, a group of pro-Romanian scholars, including Ion Negrei, Pavel Parasca, Ion Țurcanu, and Ion Varta, issued an open letter addressed to President Mircea Snegur, questioning Snegur's apparent embrace of "Moldovenism". In that context, they cited "Doina" and other works by Eminescu to highlight that the poet had explicitly endorsed the notion that Bessarabians were Romanians. On the "Moldovenist" side of the debate, the issue was brought up in the 1990s by author Ion Druță. Druță suggested that both Eminescu and "Doina" are not representative for the Moldovan ethos, which, he argues, relies on other elements. In 1998, Ioana Both noted that "Doina" was instrumented as a slogan by the Moldova–Romania unionist movement. Writing in 2016, historian Robert D. Kaplan suggested that its first line continues to be quoted, "with its misty inoperable longing for a Greater Romania." "La arme", in the Caudella version, was also recovered as an anthem by Moldovan unionists in the early 1990s. This issue was highlighted in November 1993, just before Romania's national holiday, when a Moldovan Supreme Soviet delegate recited "Doina" in Parliament. The ambassadors of Hungary and Ukraine left the hall in protest, sparking a debate that also involved intellectuals on either side. At the time, the Hungarian teacher Lajos Ötvös wrote a piece giving contextual justification for "Doina"s rhetoric. In parallel, "Doina" continues to be of interest to Eminescu translators in other neighboring countries, with a Ukrainian version completed by Ivan Kideshuk.

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Checkerspot (magazine) Checkerspot was a biannual climate change magazine in Canada published by the Canadian Wildlife Federation. A free magazine, its inaugural issue was launched May 2007 and stopped production in 2009 due to the economic downturn. "Checkerspot" claimed to be a climate neutral publication. The magazine was named after a butterfly whose ranges were believed to be shifting as a result of global warming. Canadian Wildlife Federation. The Canadian Wildlife Federation, one of Canada's largest non-profit, non-governmental conservation organizations, works to protect Canada's wild species and spaces. "Checkerspot" was used to advance activism on and promote discussions about climate change. References. "Checkerspot" stops production

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Manchester Climate Monthly Manchester Climate Monthly (formerly Manchester Climate Fortnightly) is a digest of local, national and global climate news and campaign group activity based in Manchester, England. It aims to contribute to the fight against climate change by filling, what the editors describe, as a local media deficit on the issue. The newsletter aims to network local green groups, arm them with the latest climate change science, hold local influential forces to account and provide an accessible source of information for individuals who are curious about climate change campaigning in Manchester. Origins. "Manchester Climate Fortnightly" was born of the project Manchester Climate Forum. The first issue came out on 23 June 2008. Format. The newsletter is primarily distributed on-line, but is also available physically. One of the spin-offs of "Manchester Climate Fortnightly" has been the "Only Planet" book, a collection of articles and information on climate change, how it will affect Manchester and who is campaigning on it. Content. Each issue includes a list of local upcoming environmental events, a news digest for local, national and global news related to climate change, a summary of the latest 'scary science' on climate change, and at least one article investigating a current local issue. Many of the main articles have involved holding the City Council to account on their environmental promises, for example, Issue 3 appealed for the Council to release its delayed Climate Change Strategy.

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Icelandic Geographic Icelandic Geographic was a magazine about the nature and people of Iceland, founded by Thordis Hadda Yngvadottir and Ketill Sigurjonsson. The magazine was published between 2002 and 2005. History and profile. The first issue of "Icelandic Geographic" was published in August 2002. The magazine was part of Polar Publishing. It organized and hosted the "coolest" Travel Summit on the Planet; an international literary and photographic travel-event, held in Reykjavík in 2005. The speakers and panelists at the Travel Summit were: Faith D'Aluisio (author and television news producer), Keith Bellows (Editor-in-chief of National Geographic Traveler and Vice President of National Geographic), Tim Cahill (travel writer and first editor of Outside Magazine), Annie Griffiths Belt (National Geographic photographer), Dan Hayes (editor of CNN Traveller), Rudy Maxa (host and co-executive producer of "Smart Travels"), Peter Menzel (photojournalist), Tim Moore (writer), Maureen and Tony Wheeler (founders of Lonely Planet), Thora Arnorsdottir (journalist), Ragnar Axelsson (photographer), Ari Trausti Guðmundsson (geophysicist and mountaineer), Unnur Jokulsdóttir (writer and world-navigator), Joseph Kultgen (co-founder of TrekShare.com), David Leffman (photographer and travel writer), and Soren Sattrup (Editor-in-chief of the Danish Politiken guidebooks).

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Pacific Standard Pacific Standard was an American online magazine that reported on issues of social and environmental justice. Founded in 2008, the magazine was published in print and online for its first ten years until production of the print edition ceased in 2018 and it transitioned to an online-only format, which folded in 2019. "Pacific Standard" was published by The Social Justice Foundation, headquartered in Santa Barbara, California. On August 7, 2019, Nicholas Jackson, editor-in-chief, stated on Twitter that "Pacific Standard" was to close after its primary funder abruptly cut off all funding. On June 2, 2020, the CEO of Grist, Brady Piñero Walkinshaw, announced that Grist bought the Pacific Standard and will be keeping an archive of the magazines articles online. Background: Miller–McCune years. Pacific Standard, formerly "Miller–McCune" magazine, was launched in 2008 by Sara Miller McCune, the founder and head of Sage Publications. It was named one of the year's "hottest launches" by "MIN" magazine and received the same honor from "Library Journal" the following year. It also received the 2008–2009 Society of Environmental Journalists Award for Outstanding Explanatory Journalism and the Utne Reader Independent Press Award 2009 for science/technology coverage. In 2010, Miller McCune was named by "Folio" magazine to the FOLIO: 40 list of publishing innovators: "At a time when print is becoming a secondary product for many publishers (in mindset if not revenue), Miller–McCune is succeeding with long-form journalism." In 2010, the magazine launched "Miller–McCune LIVE", a special events program to bring articles to life through comprehensive debate featuring industry leaders. The first debate, on lobbying, took place in September in Washington, D.C. The second debate was held in New York City in November with panelists Sree Sreenivasan and Rachel Sklar, who dug into the effects of social media on "real life" and ways to humanize the Internet. In-depth pieces include stories such as "Native Environmentalism and the Alberta Oil Boom", "Global Warming: the Archaeological Frontier", "When Facebook Is Your Medical Record", as well as "Art and Alzheimer's: Another Way of Remembering", the story of Hilda Goldblatt Gorenstein (Hilgos) and the documentary "I Remember Better When I Paint". Transition to "Pacific Standard". In April 2011, editor John Mecklin announced his resignation, citing "creative differences" among other reasons. On May 17, the organization announced that Maria Streshinsky, former managing editor of "The Atlantic" magazine, would become the editor-in-chief of the magazine. On February 17, 2012, Miller–McCune announced that the magazine's name would be changed to "Pacific Standard" as of the May–June 2012 edition. In a May 2012 interview, Streshinsky said that the publication's new name reflected its taking a "western" perspective: "We want to tell the nationally important stories that are coming out of this side of the country, and from the edges of the Pacific... So many of the nation's biggest shifts have come from the West, and we want to showcase that." As of January 2014, the magazine enjoyed its largest website traffic month ever. It continues to get most of its funding from Sage Publications, with much smaller amounts from subscription, newsstand, and website revenue. In 2014, "Pacific Standard" was nominated for its first-ever National Magazine Award, presented by the American Society of Magazine Editors, in the category of General Excellence for Literature, Science and Politics Magazines. In 2015, digital director Nicholas Jackson was appointed editor-in-chief, and senior editor Ryan Jacobs was appointed deputy editor. They quickly brought on creative director Taylor Le and executive editor Jennifer Sahn. Jackson repositioned the magazine to tell "stories that matter," focusing most heavily on social and environmental justice. In 2017, the magazine was honored with its second National Magazine Award. Also in 2017, "Pacific Standard"' nonprofit parent changed its name from the Miller-McCune Center for Research, Media, and Public Policy to The Social Justice Foundation. Readership and topics covered. The magazine was created for opinion leaders, policymakers, and concerned citizens who are interested in developing solutions to some of the world’s toughest social and environmental problems. Its target readers are "influentials" who read "The Economist", "The Atlantic", "Mother Jones", and "Wired", but former editor-in-chief Streshinsky differentiated "Pacific Standard" by focusing on the behavioral and social sciences. In an interview, Streshinsky said: "... we’re also committed to producing old-fashioned, well-told, deeply reported magazine journalism on subjects and characters of national interest or curiosity—we just want to do it in a way that is especially steeped in the relevant research literature and intellectual context. We value great storytelling and cogent analysis as much as anyone else on the block. And we love “conceptual scoops”—the kind of piece that can powerfully, sharply, and accurately reframe the reader’s understanding of an important, complex subject."

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List of environmental periodicals This is a list of environmental periodicals, in print and online, focused on various aspects of the biophysical environment, the built environment, humans' relations to those environments, and other environment topics. This list presently includes literary magazines, general-interest magazines, newsletters, and others.