This book takes us deep in the heart of Mississippi. A black family living in poverty and dysfunction. Add the tension of a hurricane that is heading their way gives the reader a captivating and raw story. The title is interesting and my guess is the writer is directing our attention to the rawne...
Jesmyn Ward is a force. The impressions and emotions left by her novel "Salvage the Bones" have stayed with me for years. This book is a collection of very personal stories of herself and men from her community who died young and undeservedly. Ward's language is precise--she conjures up the se...
In my half sleep, I see myself in the bathroom, hunched over the toilet, one hand on the back of the bowl, vomiting. But then the retching becomes louder, sounds like my tongue is curling up and out of my throat, and I realize I am not throwing up. I have never been so loud; have never made that ...
J., one of my many cousins, moves into sharp relief is when he was around six and I was around twelve. He was fair and had a face full of freckles. As a toddler, he’d been blond like Josh, but as he grew older his hair darkened, grew long and curly, and his mother braided it to his head or cut it...
They had been debating whether to get a bunch of individual bottle rockets and roman candles and rocket bombs; Joshua thought they'd save money if they picked and chose what they wanted, and Christophe wanted one of the kits because it contained a special super-bomb. In the picture pasted to the ...