Freak. That's what folks are calling Lyric Freeman after a horrific crash kills her best friend and nearly claims Lyric. Her injuries result in the ability to hear the dying speak, and soon she finds she must help deceased slaves find freedom. Not so bad, right? Wrong... STRANGE FRUIT: A Ghost Story is a wild ride through the American Slave Trade to a modern day haunted house and is inspired by the protest poem by Abel Meeropol and the haunting musical versions by Nina Simone and Billie Holliday (and the many others who have done this ode justice). "Totally mesmerizing...." - Sandra Carrington-Smith "I was absolutely gripped with fear and interest from the very beginning!" - Natalie Rae Kimber
Set between the rise of the U.S. and Japan as Pacific imperial powers in the 1890s and the aftermath of the latter’s defeat in World War II, Strange Fruit of the Black Pacific traces the interrelated migrations of African Americans, Japanese Americans, and Filipinos across U.S. domains. Offering readings in literature, blues and jazz culture, film,theatre, journalism, and private correspondence, Vince Schleitwiler considers how the collective yearnings and speculative destinies of these groups were bound together along what W.E.B. Du Bois called the world-belting color line. The links were forged by the paradoxical practices of race-making in an aspiring empire—benevolent uplift through tutelage, alongside overwhelming sexualized violence—which together comprise what Schleitwiler calls “imperialism’s racial justice.” This process could only be sustained through an ongoing training of perception in an aesthetics of racial terror, through rituals of racial and colonial violence that also provide the conditions for an elusive countertraining. With an innovative prose style, Strange Fruit of the Black Pacific pursues the poetic and ethical challenge of reading, or learning how to read, the black and Asian literatures that take form and flight within the fissures of imperialism’s racial justice. Through startling reinterpretations of such canonical writers as James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larsen, Toshio Mori, and Carlos Bulosan, alongside considerations of unexpected figures such as the musician Robert Johnson and the playwright Eulalie Spence, Schleitwiler seeks to reactivate the radical potential of the Afro-Asian imagination through graceful meditations on its representations of failure, loss, and overwhelming violence.
The first official publisher’s anthology featuring the exemplary talents of the authors of BLACK BED SHEET BOOKS! "Black Bed Sheet is not only a publisher of fantastically creative horror books but knows the meaning of heart and integrity....Grabowsky has taken BBS to heights that few could have imagined with his drive, determination and talent, along with the talent in his stable. If you haven't read anything from BBS, it's past time you did but it's never too late!" --- Gene Tipton, A SHOT IN THE DARK COMICS "I had this idea for an anthology. A crazy, outside the box thought that I hoped would at least ignite some interest. Well, it not only ignited, the damn thing drenched the entire office at Black Bed Sheet Books and its publisher Nicholas Grabowsky in a orange and red hue of excitement. This has now become a solid joint effort spanning the many talented authors of Black Bed Sheet Books, highlighting the core value of writing: character depth. When Nick gave me the green light, I began to construct this list of talented writers. Some are veterans of the writing landscape [such as myself], others are brand new and cutting their jagged incisors deep into the skin of the publishing world. My only requirement for the authors became the simple task of all, write a story that has deep characters and emotion. A story evolves only so far as the characters propel it. I wanted the characters stripped down to their skeletons. Heroes, villains, somewhere in the middle? Bring them through the emotional grinder, chew them up, spit them out, where will it take the reader? Or, what about a few stories with different spins on such figures as Dracula, Adolph Hitler, the Devil, and Snow White. A few of these stories are dark in nature, or splashed with a form of comic ingenuity. Others are entrenched in history with a different spin that left me squirming in my seat. These authors are bright, fresh, talented, comedic, compassionate, and downright scary when they want to be. So sit back, turn off the lights, and read the book. Or die. I wouldn’t want that to happen to you, but then again once you step inside our world, anything can happen. Close your eyes. Take a breath. The sounds you hear are real. There is no turning back. Keep reading. Or die." --from Introduction by Jason Gehlert --Featuring the talents of— Fred Wiehe - Cinsearae Santiago - Brandon Ford Jessica Lynne Gardner - Lincoln Crisler - Jason Gehlert - William Cook - Reyna Young - Tom Sawyer - K.K. - Rey Otis - Shannon Lee - B.L. Morgan - Tammy Gehlert - S.C. Hayden - Franchisca Weatherman - Patrick James Ryan - Horns - Jason M. Tucker Amity Green – Adam Aresty – Jennifer Caress And Nicholas Grabowsky Edited by Jason Gehlert
How Americans learned to wait on time for racial change What if, Joseph Darda asks, our desire to solve racism—with science, civil rights, antiracist literature, integration, and color blindness—has entrenched it further? In The Strange Career of Racial Liberalism, he traces the rise of liberal antiracism, showing how reformers' faith in time, in the moral arc of the universe, has undercut future movements with the insistence that racism constitutes a time-limited crisis to be solved with time-limited remedies. Most historians attribute the shortcomings of the civil rights era to a conservative backlash or to the fracturing of the liberal establishment in the late 1960s, but the civil rights movement also faced resistance from a liberal "frontlash," from antiredistributive allies who, before it ever took off, constrained what the movement could demand and how it could demand it. Telling the stories of Ruth Benedict, Kenneth Clark, W. E. B. Du Bois, John Howard Griffin, Pauli Murray, Lillian Smith, Richard Wright, and others, Darda reveals how Americans learned to wait on time for racial change and the enduring harm of that trust in the clock.
Beautifully written, with a powerful series of textual readings, this book looks at the way three centuries of women writers have tackled the subject of race in both Britian and America.
Image and Power is an important work of literary and cultural criticism. This collection of essays focuses on some of the major issues addressed by women's writing in the twentieth century, concerning genre, subjectivity and social and cultural expectations, issues which in the past have been regarded from an essentially male perspective. The text introduces women writers whose novels have been widely read and provides an important contribution to the debate about women in literature.
A new, lyrical collection of famous stories and the less well-known. A collection of characteristically playful yet philosophical Irish ghost stories from authors such as Oscar Wilde (The Canterville Ghost), Sheridan Le Fanu (The Child That Went With The Fairies, Stories Of Lough Guir), Charles Maturin (extracts from Melmoth the Wanderer), Lord Dunsany ('The Sword of Welleran') and Fitz-James O'Brien ('The Diamond Lens', 'What Was It?'). FLAME TREE 451: From myth to mystery, the supernatural to horror, fantasy and science fiction, Flame Tree 451 offers a healthy diet of werewolves and mechanical men, blood-lusty vampires, dastardly villains, mad scientists, secret worlds, lost civilizations and escapist fantasies. Discover a storehouse of tales gathered specifically for the reader of the fantastic.
When I was 17 years old and living in Europe, a strange woman started following me. She would find me everywhere. And all she wanted me to do was take her orange. I moved to America a year after the first incident. Ten years later, she found me again. This is the story of her, the woman holding the orange. --from the back of the book.
Ever since Bessie Smith’s powerful voice conspired with the “race records” industry to make her a star in the 1920s, African American writers have memorialized the sounds and theorized the politics of black women’s singing. In Black Resonance, Emily J. Lordi analyzes writings by Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Gayl Jones, and Nikki Giovanni that engage such iconic singers as Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Mahalia Jackson, and Aretha Franklin. Focusing on two generations of artists from the 1920s to the 1970s, Black Resonance reveals a musical-literary tradition in which singers and writers, faced with similar challenges and harboring similar aims, developed comparable expressive techniques. Drawing together such seemingly disparate works as Bessie Smith’s blues and Richard Wright’s neglected film of Native Son, Mahalia Jackson’s gospel music and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, each chapter pairs one writer with one singer to crystallize the artistic practice they share: lyricism, sincerity, understatement, haunting, and the creation of a signature voice. In the process, Lordi demonstrates that popular female singers are not passive muses with raw, natural, or ineffable talent. Rather, they are experimental artists who innovate black expressive possibilities right alongside their literary peers. The first study of black music and literature to centralize the music of black women, Black Resonance offers new ways of reading and hearing some of the twentieth century’s most beloved and challenging voices.
