Message from a Native Son from a Cell

Message from a Native Son from a Cell PDF Author: Julian Martin
Publisher: Trafford Publishing
ISBN: 1466913266
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 167

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Book Description
The main objective that I had my entire life was to just fit in with this brood of bully kids that were my older siblings. I further had to survive a brutal, dominant, religious zealot mother and an illiterate father, who could be swayed due to his innocence and uncorrupt childlike manner, which his mother would happily manipulate if she finds it necessary. My story is a story that no one wants me to write. That cool look that the band Green Day projected, that hurt, disgruntled, maligned look, is my real, true look. I wasnt making this up. Yet a horrible neighborhood where I was brought up to would use these weaknesses, which I was afflicted with, to their gain to vilify me and all the good that I might tried to get done.

Message from a Native Son from a Cell

Message from a Native Son from a Cell PDF Author: Julian Martin
Publisher: Trafford Publishing
ISBN: 1466913266
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 167

Get Book Here

Book Description
The main objective that I had my entire life was to just fit in with this brood of bully kids that were my older siblings. I further had to survive a brutal, dominant, religious zealot mother and an illiterate father, who could be swayed due to his innocence and uncorrupt childlike manner, which his mother would happily manipulate if she finds it necessary. My story is a story that no one wants me to write. That cool look that the band Green Day projected, that hurt, disgruntled, maligned look, is my real, true look. I wasnt making this up. Yet a horrible neighborhood where I was brought up to would use these weaknesses, which I was afflicted with, to their gain to vilify me and all the good that I might tried to get done.

Native Son

Native Son PDF Author: Richard A. Wright
Publisher: Harper Perennial Modern Classics
ISBN: 9780060929800
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 528

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Book Description
Right from the start, Bigger Thomas had been headed for jail. It could have been for assault or petty larceny; by chance, it was for murder and rape. Native Son tells the story of this young black man caught in a downward spiral after he kills a young white woman in a brief moment of panic. Set in Chicago in the 1930s, Wright's powerful novel is an unsparing reflection on the poverty and feelings of hopelessness experienced by people in inner cities across the country and of what it means to be black in America.

How "Bigger" was Born

How Author: Richard Wright
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Thomas, Bigger (Fictitious character)
Languages : en
Pages : 48

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Book Description


Native Sons

Native Sons PDF Author: James Baldwin
Publisher: One World
ISBN: 0307538826
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
James Baldwin was beginning to be recognized as the most brilliant black writer of his generation when his first book of essays, Notes of a Native Son, established his reputation in 1955. No one was more pleased by the book’s reception than Baldwin’s high school friend Sol Stein. A rising New York editor, novelist, and playwright, Stein had suggested that Baldwin do the book and coaxed his old friend through the long and sometimes agonizing process of putting the volume together and seeing it into print. Now, in this fascinating new book, Sol Stein documents the story of his intense creative partnership with Baldwin through newly uncovered letters, photos, inscriptions, and an illuminating memoir of the friendship that resulted in one of the classics of American literature. Included in this book are the two works they created together–the story “Dark Runner” and the play Equal in Paris, both published here for the first time. Though a world of difference separated them–Baldwin was black and gay, living in self-imposed exile in Europe; Stein was Jewish and married, with a growing family to support–the two men shared the same fundamental passion. Nothing mattered more to either of them than telling and writing the truth, which was not always welcome. As Stein wrote Baldwin in a long, heartfelt letter, “You are the only friend with whom I feel comfortable about all three: heart, head, and writing.” In this extraordinary book, Stein unfolds how that shared passion played out in the months surrounding the creation and publication of Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, in which Baldwin’s main themes are illuminated. A literary event published to honor the eightieth anniversary of James Baldwin’s birth, Native Sons is a celebration of one of the most fruitful and influential friendships in American letters.

Black Boy [Seventy-fifth Anniversary Edition]

Black Boy [Seventy-fifth Anniversary Edition] PDF Author: Richard Wright
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 006302859X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 534

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Book Description
A special 75th anniversary edition of Richard Wright's powerful and unforgettable memoir, with a new foreword by John Edgar Wideman and an afterword by Malcolm Wright, the author’s grandson. When it exploded onto the literary scene in 1945, Black Boy was both praised and condemned. Orville Prescott of the New York Times wrote that “if enough such books are written, if enough millions of people read them maybe, someday, in the fullness of time, there will be a greater understanding and a more true democracy.” Yet from 1975 to 1978, Black Boy was banned in schools throughout the United States for “obscenity” and “instigating hatred between the races.” Wright’s once controversial, now celebrated autobiography measures the raw brutality of the Jim Crow South against the sheer desperate will it took to survive as a Black boy. Enduring poverty, hunger, fear, abuse, and hatred while growing up in the woods of Mississippi, Wright lied, stole, and raged at those around him—whites indifferent, pitying, or cruel and Blacks resentful of anyone trying to rise above their circumstances. Desperate for a different way of life, he headed north, eventually arriving in Chicago, where he forged a new path and began his career as a writer. At the end of Black Boy, Wright sits poised with pencil in hand, determined to “hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo.” Seventy-five years later, his words continue to reverberate. “To read Black Boy is to stare into the heart of darkness,” John Edgar Wideman writes in his foreword. “Not the dark heart Conrad searched for in Congo jungles but the beating heart I bear.” One of the great American memoirs, Wright’s account is a poignant record of struggle and endurance—a seminal literary work that illuminates our own time.

The Fire Next Time

The Fire Next Time PDF Author: James Baldwin
Publisher:
ISBN: 9783836551038
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
First published in 1963, James Baldwin's A Fire Next Time stabbed at the heart of America's so-called ldquo;Negro problemrdquo;. As remarkable for its masterful prose as it is for its uncompromising account of black experience in the United States, it is considered to this day one of the most articulate and influential expressions of 1960s race relations. The book consists of two essays, ldquo;My Dungeon Shook mdash; Letter to my Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of Emancipation,rdquo; and ldquo;Down At The Cross mdash; Letter from a Region of My Mind.rdquo; It weaves thematic threads of love, faith, and family into a candid assault on the hypocrisy of the so-say ldquo;land of the freerdquo;, insisting on the inequality implicit to American society. ldquo;You were born where you were born and faced the future that you facedrdquo;, Baldwin writes to his nephew, ldquo;because you were black and for no other reason.rdquo; His profound sense of injustice is matched by a robust belief in ldquo;monumental dignityrdquo;, in patience, empathy, and the possibility of transforming America into ldquo;what America must become.rdquo;

Nobody Knows My Name

Nobody Knows My Name PDF Author: James Baldwin
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 014191596X
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 175

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Book Description
'These essays ... live and grow in the mind' James Campbell, Independent Being a writer, says James Baldwin in this searing collection of essays, requires 'every ounce of stamina he can summon to attempt to look on himself and the world as they are'. His seminal 1961 follow-up to Notes on a Native Son shows him responding to his times and exploring his role as an artist with biting precision and emotional power: from polemical pieces on racial segregation and a journey to 'the Old Country' of the Southern states, to reflections on figures such as Ingmar Bergman and André Gide, and on the first great conference of African writers and artists in Paris. 'Brilliant...accomplished...strong...vivid...honest...masterly' The New York Times 'A bright and alive book, full of grief, love and anger' Chicago Tribune

Renaming the Earth

Renaming the Earth PDF Author: Ray Gonz‡lez
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 9780816524075
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 186

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Book Description
In his distinctive and spirited way, Ray Gonzalez, the well-known essayist, poet, fiction writer, and anthologist, reflects on the American SouthwestÑwhere he was raised and to which he still feels attached (even though he has lived much of his life elsewhere). It is a place that tugs at him, from its arid desert landscapes to its polyglot citiesÑpart Mexican, part Anglo, part something in-betweenÑalways in the process of redefining themselves. Nowhere does the process of redefinition hit Gonzalez quite as hard as in his native city of El Paso, Texas. There he finds the Òsegregated little town of my childhoodÓ transformed into Òa metropolis of fast Latino zip codes . . . a world where the cell phone, the quick beer, the rented apartment, and the low-paying job say you can be young and happy on the border.Ó Readers will wonder, along with the author, whether life along the Ònew borderÓ is worth Òthe extermination of the old boundaries.Ó But there is another side of the Southwest for this Òson of the desertÓÑthe world of dusty canyons, ponderosa pines, ocotillo, and mesquite. Here, he writes, Òthere is a shadow, and it is called ancient homeÑstructures erased from their seed to grow elsewhere, vultured strings searching for a frame that stands atop history and renames the ground.Ó Rooted in the desert sand and in the banks of the Rio Grande, the muddy river that forms the border between nations, these essays are by turns lyrical, mournful, warm to the ways of the land, and lukewarm to the ways of man.

SONNY S BLUES

SONNY S BLUES PDF Author: James Baldwin
Publisher:
ISBN: 9783125765009
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 88

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Book Description


Having and Being Had

Having and Being Had PDF Author: Eula Biss
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0525537473
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY TIME , NPR, INSTYLE, AND GOOD HOUSEKEEPING “A sensational new book [that] tries to figure out whether it’s possible to live an ethical life in a capitalist society. . . . The results are enthralling.” —Associated Press A timely and arresting new look at affluence by the New York Times bestselling author, “one of the leading lights of the modern American essay.” —Financial Times “My adult life can be divided into two distinct parts,” Eula Biss writes, “the time before I owned a washing machine and the time after.” Having just purchased her first home, the poet and essayist now embarks on a provocative exploration of the value system she has bought into. Through a series of engaging exchanges—in libraries and laundromats, over barstools and backyard fences—she examines our assumptions about class and property and the ways we internalize the demands of capitalism. Described by the New York Times as a writer who “advances from all sides, like a chess player,” Biss offers an uncommonly immersive and deeply revealing new portrait of work and luxury, of accumulation and consumption, of the value of time and how we spend it. Ranging from IKEA to Beyoncé to Pokemon, Biss asks, of both herself and her class, “In what have we invested?”