I have mixed feelings about this one. On the one hand, there are some really, really good essays in here. Wonderful insights and extremely compelling. The ones I remember most are the ones by Paul Aster, Salman Rushdie, Pico Iyer, Nadine Gordimer, and John Updike. On the other hand, there's a fai...
This story is about three children who stay with their grandmother for the day. Their mother leaves a detailed list on the refrigerator of things for the children to do, but the grandmother has her own fun plans for the day. The children spend the day listening to stories and making fudge with th...
It is time for change; slowly but inexorably the spirit of the age finds a new voice. The white lords and black subhumans begin to alter their established, longstanding social positions. From this sense of foreboding out comes Sula.The black community confined to the hills up there in a small Ohi...
1981The generation gap between the retirement-age black couple who are the servants [originally from Philadelphia] and their jetset highly educated and sophisticated niece -- perhaps foreshadows the generation gap in The Butler.A small cast of characters who all interact. Diversity in wealth, rac...
Thirty-two stories examine African American lesbian and gay identity.
“Well, think of something. Fast. Or I will.” “What? What can you tell him?” “The purpose of a zipper. The responsibility of a father. The mortality rate of AIDS.” “AIDS?” “Who knows where she’s been or with who? Who is she, anyway? Got no people, nobody ever heard of her. Dresses like a street wo...
Fog, Atlantic and reeking of plant life, blanketed the bay and slowed him. He could see his boots sloshing but not his satchel nor his hands. When the surf was behind him and his soles sank in mud, he turned to wave to the sloopmen, but because the mast had disappeared in the fog he could not tel...
Flat, waiting, always waiting. Not patient, not hopeless, but suspended. Cee. Ycidra. My sister. Now my only family. When you write this down, know this: she was a shadow for most of my life, a presence marking its own absence, or maybe mine. Who am I without her—that underfed girl with the sad, ...
Thirteen years after Golden Gray stiffened himself to look at that girl, the harm she could do was still alive. Pregnant girls were the most susceptible, but so were the grandfathers. Any fascination could mark a newborn: melons, rabbits, wisteria, rope, and, more than a shed snakeskin, a wild wo...
I don’t care how wild a dancing crowd is, you just don’t grab somebody from behind like that unless you know them. But she didn’t mind at all. She let him squeeze her, rub up against her and she didn’t know a thing about him, still doesn’t. But I do. I saw him with a bunch of raggedy losers at th...
Probably because the mint green Cadillac in which they died had annoyed them for some time. They did all the right things, of course: brought food, telephoned their sorrow, got up a collection; but the shine of excitement in their eyes was clear. When the journalist came, Mavis sat in the corner ...
Winter moves into it and presides there. His eyes become a cliff of snow threatening to avalanche; his eyebrows bend like black limbs of leafless trees. His skin takes on the pale, cheerless yellow of winter sun; for a jaw he has the edges of a snowbound field dotted with stubble; his high forehe...
The scraps stayed with him all night and he remembered Magdalene called Lena and Corinthians bending in the wind to catch the heart-red pieces of velvet that had floated under the gaze of Mr. Robert Smith. Only Guitar’s scraps were different. The bits of Sunday dresses that he saw did not fly; th...