Synopses & Reviews
Introducing the first volume in an exciting new annual anthology featuring the years most outstanding fiction by some of todays finest African American writers.
From stories that depict black life in times gone by to those that address contemporary issues, this inaugural volume gathers the very best recent African American fiction. Created during a period of electrifying political dialogue and cultural, social, and economic change that is sure to captivate the imaginations of writers and readers for years to come, these short stories and novel excerpts explore a rich variety of subjects. But most of all, they represent exceptional artistry.
Here youll find work by both established names and up-and-comers, ranging from Walter Dean Myers to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Mat Johnson, and Junot Díaz. They write about subjects as diverse as the complexities of black middle-class life and the challenges of interracial relationships, a modern-day lynching in the South and a young musicians coming-of-age during the Harlem Renaissance. What unites these stories, whether set in suburbia, in eighteenth-century New York City, or on a Caribbean island that is supposed to be “brown skin paradise,” is their creators passionate engagement with matters of the human heart.
Masterful and engaging, this first volume of Best African American Fiction features stories youll want to savor, share, and return to again and again.
Please click the "Behind the Book" link for contributors bios.
From the Hardcover edition.
Synopsis
"Best African American Fiction" brings together short fiction by well known and up-and coming young writers to watch.
About the Author
E. Lynn Harris is a nine-time
New York Times bestselling author. His work includes the memoir
What Becomes of the Brokenhearted and the novels
, A Love of My Own, Just as I Am, Any Way the Wind Blows (all three of which were named Novel of the Year by the Blackboard African American Bestsellers),
I Say a Little Prayer, If This World Were Mine (which
won the James Baldwin Award for Literary Excellence), and the classic
Invisible Life. His latest book is
Just Too Good to Be True.
Gerald Early is a noted essayist and American culture critic. A professor of English, African & African American Studies, and American Culture Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, Early is the author of several books, including The Culture of Bruising: Essays on Prizefighting, Literature, and Modern American Culture, which won the 1994 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism, and This Is Where I Came In: Black America in the 1960s. He is also editor of numerous volumes, including The Muhammad Ali Reader and The Sammy Davis, Jr. Reader. He served as a consultant on four of Ken Burnss documentary films, Baseball, Jazz, Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson, and The War, and appeared in the first three as an on-air analyst.
Table of Contents
Introduction/By Gerald Early, Series EditorIntroduction/By E. Lynn Harris, Guest Editor
Stories
Pita Delicious/By ZZ Packer
Albino Crow/By Chris Abani
Orb Weaver/By Emily Raboteau
The Saving Work/By Tiphanie Yanique
Dance for Me/By Amina Gautier
Cell One/By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
In the Blink of God’s Eye/By Edward P. Jones
This Kind of Red/By Helen Elaine Lee
Novel Excerpts
Dark Reflections/By Samuel R. Delany
The Great Negro Plot/By Mat Johnson
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao/By Junot Díaz
Man Gone Down/By Michael Thomas
Young Adult Fiction
Excerpt from Feathers/By Jacqueline Woodson
Excerpt from Harlem Summer/By Walter Dean Myers
Excerpt from Elijah of Buxton/By Christopher Paul Curtis
Excerpt from Up for It: A Tale of the Underground/By L.F. Haines
Permissions and Credits
About the Editors
From the Hardcover edition.