If He Hollers, Let Him Go

If He Hollers, Let Him Go PDF Author: Chester Himes
Publisher: Penguin Classics
ISBN: 9780241692424
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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If He Hollers, Let Him Go

If He Hollers, Let Him Go PDF Author: Chester Himes
Publisher: Penguin Classics
ISBN: 9780241692424
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description


If He Hollers, Let Him Go

If He Hollers, Let Him Go PDF Author: Chester Himes
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 180206561X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
The searing debut novel by Chester Himes, ‘written with youthful panache and a bellyful of anger’ (Observer) Robert ‘Bob’ Jones – crew leader, shipyard worker, educated, employed – is finding life impossible. Though he’s recently been promoted to supervisor, he is disrespected and resented by white colleagues; and despite his relationship with the high-class Alice, he is crudely baited by the manipulative Madge. Over the course of four fraught days in Los Angeles, he is plagued with increasingly violent urges as the bigotry and cruelty he faces day-in-day-out become unbearable. Chester Himes’s shattering debut is a masterful reckoning with the poisonous effects of racism, and a monumental protest novel. ‘A relentless, gripping, classic novel, one of the most powerful exposés of what it is like to be black in America’ LA Times

If He Hollers Let Him Go

If He Hollers Let Him Go PDF Author: Chester Himes
Publisher: Serpent's Tail
ISBN: 1847653111
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Robert Jones is a crew leader in a naval shipyard in Los Angeles in the 1940s. He should have a lot going for him, being educated, with a steady job and a steady relationship. But in the four days covered in this novel, the impossibility of life as a black man in a white world is made devastatingly clear. Jones is surrounded by prejudice, suspicion and paranoia, and his daily experiences influence his thoughts, dreams and behaviour. Immediately recognised as a masterful expose of racism in everyday life, If He Hollers Let Him Go is Chester Himes' first book, originally published in 1945.

Loving Day

Loving Day PDF Author: Mat Johnson
Publisher: One World
ISBN: 0812983661
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • “[Mat Johnson’s] unrelenting examination of blackness, whiteness and everything in between is handled with ruthless candor and riotous humor.”—Los Angeles Times “Razor-sharp . . . Loving Day is that rare mélange: cerebral comedy with pathos.”—The New York Times Book Review NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times • San Francisco Chronicle • NPR • Men’s Journal • The Miami Herald • The Denver Post • Slate • The Kansas City Star • San Antonio Express-News • Time Out New York Warren Duffy has returned to America for all the worst reasons: His marriage to a beautiful Welsh woman has come apart; his comics shop in Cardiff has failed; and his Irish American father has died, bequeathing to Warren his last possession, a roofless, half-renovated mansion in the heart of black Philadelphia. On his first night in his new home, Warren spies two figures outside in the grass. When he screws up the nerve to confront them, they disappear. The next day he encounters ghosts of a different kind: In the face of a teenage girl he meets at a comics convention he sees the mingled features of his white father and his black mother, both now dead. The girl, Tal, is his daughter, and she’s been raised to think she’s white. Spinning from these revelations, Warren sets off to remake his life with a reluctant daughter he’s never known, in a haunted house with a history he knows too well. In their search for a new life, he and Tal struggle with ghosts, fall in with a utopian mixed-race cult, and ignite a riot on Loving Day, the unsung holiday for interracial lovers. A frequently hilarious, surprisingly moving story about blacks and whites, fathers and daughters, the living and the dead, Loving Day celebrates the wonders of opposites bound in love. Praise for Loving Day “Incisive . . . razor-sharp . . . that rare mélange: cerebral comedy with pathos. The vitality of our narrator deserves much of the credit for that. He has the neurotic bawdiness of Philip Roth’s Alexander Portnoy; the keen, caustic eye of Bob Jones in Chester Himes’s If He Hollers Let Him Go; the existential insight of Ellison’s Invisible Man.”—The New York Times Book Review “Exceptional . . . To say that Loving Day is a book about race is like saying Moby-Dick is a book about whales. . . . [Mat Johnson’s] unrelenting examination of blackness, whiteness and everything in between is handled with ruthless candor and riotous humor. . . . Even when the novel’s family strife and racial politics are at peak intensity, Johnson’s comic timing is impeccable.”—Los Angeles Times “Johnson, at his best, is a powerful comic observer [and] a gifted writer, always worth reading on the topics of race and privilege.’”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times

Yesterday Will Make You Cry

Yesterday Will Make You Cry PDF Author: Chester B. Himes
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393318296
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
"There could not be a fitter time or place for the publication of this great prison novel than today's United States." --H. Bruce Franklin, The Nation

The several lives of Chester Himes

The several lives of Chester Himes PDF Author:
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 9781617035081
Category : African American novelists
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
The Writings of Chester Himes are colored by a fascinating blend of hatred and tenderness, of hard-boiled realism and generous idealism. His life was complex, his relationships complicated. How did this gifted son of a respectable southern black family become a juvenile delinquent? How did he acquire self-esteem and a new sense of identity by writing short stories while in the Ohio state penitentiary? Drawn from his letters, notebooks, memoirs, and fiction, this straightforward account of Himes's varied, episodic life attempts to trace the origins of his significant literary gift. It details the socioeconomic, familial, and cultural background that fed his ambivalent views on race in America. His Deep South childhood, his adolescence in the Midwest, his young manhood in prison, his years as a menial laborer, his struggle as an author in California and New York City, and finally his glory days as an expatriate and celebrity in France and Spain are plumbed deeply for their effects upon his creative urges and his works. In his native country Himes is recalled more as the author of successful detective novels such as Cotton Comes to Harlem than as a practitioner of the art of fiction. In France and Spain, his adopted countries, he is regarded as a literary master. This critical biography is the bittersweet story of a troubled man who found salvation in writing.

Chester B. Himes: A Biography

Chester B. Himes: A Biography PDF Author: Lawrence P. Jackson
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393634132
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 766

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Book Description
Winner of the Edgar Award for Best Critical/Biographical Work Finalist for the PEN America/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography The definitive biography of the groundbreaking African American author who had an extraordinary legacy on black writers globally. Chester B. Himes has been called “one of the towering figures of the black literary tradition” (Henry Louis Gates Jr.), “the best writer of mayhem yarns since Raymond Chandler” (San Francisco Chronicle), and “a quirky American genius” (Walter Mosely). He was the twentieth century’s most prolific black writer, captured the spirit of his times expertly, and left a distinctive mark on American literature. Yet today he stands largely forgotten. In this definitive biography of Chester B. Himes (1909–1984), Lawrence P. Jackson uses exclusive interviews and unrestricted access to Himes’s full archives to portray a controversial American writer whose novels unflinchingly confront sex, racism, and black identity. Himes brutally rendered racial politics in the best-selling novel If He Hollers Let Him Go, but he became famous for his Harlem detective series, including Cotton Comes to Harlem. A serious literary tastemaker in his day, Himes had friendships—sometimes uneasy—with such luminaries as Ralph Ellison, Carl Van Vechten, and Richard Wright. Jackson’s scholarship and astute commentary illuminates Himes’s improbable life—his middle-class origins, his eight years in prison, his painful odyssey as a black World War II–era artist, and his escape to Europe for success. More than ten years in the writing, Jackson’s biography restores the legacy of a fascinating maverick caught between his aspirations for commercial success and his disturbing, vivid portraits of the United States.

Plan B

Plan B PDF Author: Chester Himes
Publisher: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard
ISBN: 0593686144
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description
The final, posthumous installment of the ground-breaking Harlem Detectives series, a novel of explosive, apocalyptic violence, and a startling vision of the effects of racism in America The roots of racism and persecution in Tomsson Black's ancestry are deep and staggering. In his own lifetime, his misfortunes have become unbearable and, as they mount, serve as an impetus for a final and cataclysmic act of vengeance—the violent overthrow of white society. When acclaimed crime writer Chester Himes died in Spain in 1984, it was rumored that an unfinished story in the Harlem Detective series existed that had all but extinguished his heroes and their fraught city in an explosive paroxysm of racial strife. Completed from his notes by Michel Fabre and Robert E. Skinner, Plan B is that harrowing story. Includes an illuminating introduction by editors Michel Fabre and Robert E. Skinner.

Cotton Comes to Harlem

Cotton Comes to Harlem PDF Author: Chester Himes
Publisher: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard
ISBN: 0307803244
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
From “the best writer of mayhem yarns since Raymond Chandler” (San Francisco Chronicle) comes a hard-hitting, entertaining entry in the trailblazing Harlem Detectives series about two NYPD detectives who must piece together the clues of the scam of a lifetime. Flim-flam man Deke O’Hara is no sooner out of Atlanta’s state penitentiary than he’s back on the streets working a big scam. As sponsor of the Back-to-Africa movement, he’s counting on a big Harlem rally to produce a massive collection—for his own private charity. But the take is hijacked by white gunmen and hidden in a bale of cotton that suddenly everyone wants to get his hands on. As NYPD detectives “Coffin Ed” Johnson and “Grave Digger” Jones face the complexity of the scheme, we are treated to Himes’s brand of hard-boiled crime fiction at its very best.

Words That Wound

Words That Wound PDF Author: Mari J Matsuda
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429982577
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
In this book, the authors, all legal scholars from the tradition of critical race theory start from the experience of injury from racist hate speech and develop a theory of the first amendment that recognizes such injuries. In their critique of "first amendment orthodoxy", the authors argue that only a history of racism can explain why defamation, invasion of privacy and fraud are exempt from free-speech guarantees but racist verbal assault is not.