Before Wakanda, there was Telassar. Before Octavia Butler, NK Jemison, and Nisi Shawl, there was Pauline E. Hopkins. When Reuel Briggs, a man hiding his African American identity, discovers that he’s the king of a hidden city in Ethiopia, his mysterious origins are only starting to be revealed. Journey through perilous pyramids, haunted manors, and genres ranging from early science fiction to Gothic horror in this turn-of-the-century tale of romance, revenge, and reclamation of humanity lost. Hopkins boldly challenged the racist paradigms of her time, and even today’s, when female authors of color are still fighting for recognition within genre fiction. This new edition features a foreword by Diverse Worlds Grant-winning author Eden Royce, shining contemporary light on this hidden gem. Venture into the forgotten kingdom of Of One Blood and unearth its treasures for yourself
This inventive novel is a series of questions and confessional answers, an internal dialogue between Josemar, a construction worker, and Maria, a privileged young woman. Looking back at the teenage passion they shared from the remove of ten years, they try to reconstruct their story despite the obstacles of time's passage, societal disapproval, and family pressure. See in a provincial Brazilian town, Blood of Requited Love explores memory and its failing, self-deception and its costs, and the hidden manacles of machismo. Back in print after being unavailable for several years, this novel is a moving work that combines the high drama of pulp fiction with Puig's acclaimed, incisive writing style.
The Encyclopedia of the Novel is the first reference book that focuses on the development of the novel throughout the world. Entries on individual writers assess the place of that writer within the development of the novel form, explaining why and in exactly what ways that writer is importnant. Similarly, an entry on an individual novel discusses the importance of that novel not only form, analyzing the particular innovations that novel has introduced and the ways in which it has influenced the subsequent course of the genre. A wide range of topic entries explore the history, criticism, theory, production, dissemination and reception of the novel. A very important component of the Encyclopedia of the Novel is its long surveys of development of the novel in various regions of the world.
“Mysticism, horror, and racial identity merge fluidly in this thrilling tale of love, obsession, and power” (Publishers Weekly) written by one of the lesser-known literary figures of the much-lauded Harlem Renaissance. Pauline Hopkins is considered by some to be the most prolific African-American woman writer and the most influential literary editor of the first decade of the twentieth century, and Of One Blood is the last of four novels she wrote. Mixed-race medical student Reuel Briggs doesn't give a damn about being Black and cares less for African history. When he arrives in Ethiopia on an archeological trip, his only interest is to raid as much of the country's lost treasures as possible so that he can make big bucks on his return to the States. The last thing he expects is to be held captive in the six-thousand-year-old buried city of Telassar, ruled by the beautiful Queen Candace. In Queen Candace's glittering palace, surrounded by diamonds, rubies, sapphires—wealth beyond his wildest dreams—Reuel discovers his true Blackness and the painful truth about blood, race and the "other half" of his history which has never been told. Relevant, thought-provoking, and entertaining, Hopkins’s novel is intended, in her own words, to “raise the stigma of degradation from [the Black] race” and its title, Of One Blood, refers to the biological kinship of all human beings.
A 2006 Edgar Award Nominee for Best Fact Crime. With intimate access to the families, award-winning journalist Diane Fanning's Written in Blood spins a heart-wrenching true crime tale that's been the subject of an acclaimed documentary, "The Staircase", and an HBO TV miniseries starring Colin Firth. An army brat-turned-marine, Michael Peterson saw combat in Vietnam, and returned a decorated soldier. An avid reader, his dreams of being an acclaimed novelist came true. His desire to find love was fulfilled when he married brilliant executive Kathleen Atwater, the first female student accepted at Duke University's School of Engineering. The Petersons seemed the ideal academic couple- well-respected, prosperous, and happy. All that came crashing down in December of 2001, when Kathleen apparently fell to her death in their secluded home in an exclusive area of Durham, North Carolina. But blood-spattered evidence and a missing fireplace poker suggested calculated, cold-blooded murder. Her trusted husband stood accused. Prosecutors introduced evidence at trial that sixteen years earlier, Peterson was one of the last people to see his neighbor alive before she was found dead at the bottom of a staircase in her home in Germany. A dramatic trial followed in the explosive final chapter of a life that no novelist could ever have conceived...
After her ex-husband dies unexpectedly, Nora García travels to the funeral, back to a Mexican village from her past and the art and music of their life together. The way you hold a cello, the way light lands on a Caravaggio, the way the castrati hit notes like no one else could—a lifetime of conversations about art and music and history unfolds for Nora García as she and a crowd of friends and fans send off her recently deceased ex-husband, Juan. Like any good symphony, there are themes and repetitions and contrapuntal notes. We pingpong back and forth between Nora’s life with Juan (a renowned pianist and composer, and just as accomplished a raconteur) and the present day (the presentness of the past), where she sits among his familiar things, next to his coffin, breathing in the particular mix of mildew and lilies that overwhelm this day and her thoughts. In Glantz’s hands, music and art access our most intimate selves, illustrating and creating our identities, and offering us ways to express love and loss and bewilderment when words cannot suffice. As Nora says, “Life is an absurd wound: I think I deserve to be given condolences.”
Décio Torres Cruz approaches connections between literature and cinema partly through issues of gender and identity, and partly through issues of reality and representation. In doing so, he looks at the various ways in which people have thought of the so-called cinematic novel, tracing the development of that genre concept not only in the French ciné-roman and film scenarios but also in novels from the United States, England, France, and Latin America. The main tendency he identifies is the blending of the cinematic novel with pop literature, through allusions to Pop Art and other postmodern cultural trends. His prime exhibits are a number of novels by the Argentinian writer Manuel Puig: Betrayed by Rita Hayworth; Heartbreak Tango; The Buenos Aires Affair; Kiss of the Spider Woman; and Pubis angelical. Bringing in suggestive sociocultural and psychoanalytical considerations, Cruz shows how, in Puig’s hands, the cinematic novel resulted in a pop collage of different texts, films, discourses, and narrative devices which fused reality and imagination into dream and desire.
Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins (1859 – August 13, 1930) was an American novelist, journalist, playwright, historian, and editor. She is considered a pioneer in her use of the romantic novel to explore social and racial themes. She is also known to have prominent connections to other influential African-American figures of the time, such as Booker T. Washington and William Wells Brown.
Manuel Puig & The Spider Woman tells the life story of the innovative and flamboyant novelist and playwright himself. Suzanne Jill Levine, his principal English translator, draws upon years of friendship as well as copious research and interviews in her remarkable book, the first biography of the inimitable writer. Manuel Puig (1932-1990), Argentinian author of Kiss of the Spider Woman and pioneer of high camp, stands alone in the pantheon of contemporary Latin American literature. Strongly influenced by Hollywood films of the thirties and forties, his many-layered novels and plays integrate serious fiction and popular culture, mixing political and sexual themes with B-movie scenarios. When his first two novels were published in the late 1960s, they delighted the public but were dismissed as frivolous by the leftist intellectuals of the Boom; his third novel was banned by the Peronist government for irreverence. His influence was already felt, though-even by writers who had dismissed him-and by the time the film version of Kiss of the Spider Woman became a worldwide hit, he was a renowned literary figure. Puig's way of life was as unconventional as his fiction: he spoke of himself in the female form in Spanish, renamed his friends for his favorite movie stars, referred to his young male devotees as "daughters," and, as a perennial expatriate, lived (often with his mother) everywhere from Rome to Rio de Janeiro.