Stumbling Blocks
Stumbling Blocks

Author: Delores Phillips

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2023

Total Pages: 403

ISBN-13: 0820364959

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"Stumbling Blocks expands and contextualizes the unpublished works of the late African American writer Delores Phillips. Born in Cartersville, Georgia in 1950, Delores Faye Phillips spent much of her childhood in Georgia before moving to Cleveland, Ohio. Best known for her 2004 novel The Darkest Child, which follows the Quinn family as they attempt to survive and escape racism, lynchings, and poverty in Jim Crow Georgia during the 1950s, Phillips wrote much more than that. While the novel was met with critical acclaim (won Black Caucus of the ALA Award and was a nominee for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, Phillips), little is known about Phillips herself or about her other writings. In fact, in the 2018 reissue of The Darkest Child, Tayari Jones remarks in the introduction that when she heard Phillips had passed away in 2014, she was "weighted down with longing for the other books that she would never write." This volume, then, corrects the misconception that The Darkest Child was Phillips's only published work. Rather, it establishes her as an experienced and prolific writer who created multi-genre literature throughout her life. It paints a broader picture of Phillips, who was not just a novelist, but also a poet and short story writer as well. Much like Alice Walker's recovery work on Zora Neale Hurston in the 1970s was critical to a revival and appreciation of Hurston as "a genius of the South," Stumbling Blocks expands the legacy and illuminates an under-represented writer who is uniquely situated at the intersections of multiple identities including race, gender, disability, and region. In addition to the sequel to The Darkest Child, this collection also includes an unfinished third novel (No Ordinary Rain), ten poems, seven short stories, contextualizing essays, and an in-depth biography of Phillips. It is also bookended by a foreword from Phillips sister, Linda Miller, and an afterword from Trudier Harris"--

Stumbling Blocks and Other Unfinished Work
Stumbling Blocks and Other Unfinished Work

Author: Delores Phillips

Publisher:

Published: 2023

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780820364933

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"Stumbling Blocks expands and contextualizes the unpublished works of the late African American writer Delores Phillips. Born in Cartersville, Georgia in 1950, Delores Faye Phillips spent much of her childhood in Georgia before moving to Cleveland, Ohio. Best known for her 2004 novel The Darkest Child, which follows the Quinn family as they attempt to survive and escape racism, lynchings, and poverty in Jim Crow Georgia during the 1950s, Phillips wrote much more than that. While the novel was met with critical acclaim (won Black Caucus of the ALA Award and was a nominee for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, Phillips), little is known about Phillips herself or about her other writings. In fact, in the 2018 reissue of The Darkest Child, Tayari Jones remarks in the introduction that when she heard Phillips had passed away in 2014, she was "weighted down with longing for the other books that she would never write." This volume, then, corrects the misconception that The Darkest Child was Phillips's only published work. Rather, it establishes her as an experienced and prolific writer who created multi-genre literature throughout her life. It paints a broader picture of Phillips, who was not just a novelist, but also a poet and short story writer as well. Much like Alice Walker's recovery work on Zora Neale Hurston in the 1970s was critical to a revival and appreciation of Hurston as "a genius of the South," Stumbling Blocks expands the legacy and illuminates an under-represented writer who is uniquely situated at the intersections of multiple identities including race, gender, disability, and region. In addition to the sequel to The Darkest Child, this collection also includes an unfinished third novel (No Ordinary Rain), ten poems, seven short stories, contextualizing essays, and an in-depth biography of Phillips. It is also bookended by a foreword from Phillips sister, Linda Miller, and an afterword from Trudier Harris"--

The Darkest Child
The Darkest Child

Author: Delores Phillips

Publisher: Soho Press

Published: 2018-01-30

Total Pages: 433

ISBN-13: 1616958723

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A new edition of this award-winning modern classic, with an introduction by Tayari Jones (An American Marriage), an excerpt from the never before seen follow-up, and discussion guide. Pakersfield, Georgia, 1958: Thirteen-year-old Tangy Mae Quinn is the sixth of ten fatherless siblings. She is the darkest-skinned among them and therefore the ugliest in her mother, Rozelle’s, estimation, but she’s also the brightest. Rozelle—beautiful, charismatic, and light-skinned—exercises a violent hold over her children. Fearing abandonment, she pulls them from school at the age of twelve and sends them to earn their keep for the household, whether in domestic service, in the fields, or at “the farmhouse” on the edge of town, where Rozelle beds local men for money. But Tangy Mae has been selected to be part of the first integrated class at a nearby white high school. She has a chance to change her life, but can she break from Rozelle’s grasp without ruinous—even fatal—consequences?

Ralph Ellison
Ralph Ellison

Author: Lawrence Patrick Jackson

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 524

ISBN-13: 9780820329932

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Author, intellectual, and social critic, Ralph Ellison (1914-94) was a pivotal figure in American literature and history and arguably the father of African American modernism. Universally acclaimed for his first novel, Invisible Man, a masterpiece of modern fiction, Ellison was recognized with a stunning succession of honors, including the 1953 National Book Award. Despite his literary accomplishments and political activism, however, Ellison has received surprisingly sparse treatment from biographers. Lawrence Jackson’s biography of Ellison, the first when it was published in 2002, focuses on the author’s early life. Powerfully enhanced by rare photographs, this work draws from archives, literary correspondence, and interviews with Ellison’s relatives, friends, and associates. Tracing the writer’s path from poverty in dust bowl Oklahoma to his rise among the literary elite, Jackson explores Ellison’s important relationships with other stars, particularly Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, and examines his previously undocumented involvement in the Socialist Left of the 1930s and 1940s, the black radical rights movement of the same period, and the League of American Writers. The result is a fascinating portrait of a fraternal cadre of important black writers and critics--and the singularly complex and intriguing man at its center.

The Library of the Unwritten
The Library of the Unwritten

Author: A. J. Hackwith

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2019-10-01

Total Pages: 386

ISBN-13: 1984806386

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In the first book in a brilliant new fantasy series, books that aren't finished by their authors reside in the Library of the Unwritten in Hell, and it is up to the Librarian to track down any restless characters who emerge from those unfinished stories. Many years ago, Claire was named Head Librarian of the Unwritten Wing-- a neutral space in Hell where all the stories unfinished by their authors reside. Her job consists mainly of repairing and organizing books, but also of keeping an eye on restless stories that risk materializing as characters and escaping the library. When a Hero escapes from his book and goes in search of his author, Claire must track and capture him with the help of former muse and current assistant Brevity and nervous demon courier Leto. But what should have been a simple retrieval goes horrifyingly wrong when the terrifyingly angelic Ramiel attacks them, convinced that they hold the Devil's Bible. The text of the Devil's Bible is a powerful weapon in the power struggle between Heaven and Hell, so it falls to the librarians to find a book with the power to reshape the boundaries between Heaven, Hell….and Earth.

Conrad Aiken
Conrad Aiken

Author: Edward Butscher

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2010-06-01

Total Pages: 546

ISBN-13: 0820336203

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The first of a planned two-volume biography, Conrad Aiken: Poet of White Horse Vale follows Aiken's early life from his birth in 1889 to 1925 when he stood on the threshold of both nervous breakdown and poetic success. It was then that Aiken began to face his paradoxically idyllic and tragic Savannah childhood and to confront the events of February 27, 1901. On that day, the eleven-year-old Aiken heard gunshots punctuate a nightlong argument between his mother and father. Running into the next room, he discovered his mother murdered and his father dead by suicide. Sounding the deep reverberations of those events in Aiken's mind, Edward Butscher follows the poet's life and work as he sought to regain, in some permanent form, the idyll he had lost as a child. Butscher tells of Aiken's determined efforts to gain recognition for his verse in the fevered cultural circuits of the early twentieth century—from his friendship, begun at Harvard, with T. S. Eliot, through frustrating excursions into the literary society of England and repeated trips on the poetic “trade route” from his home in Boston to Chicago and New York, to often sharp encounters with such powerful cultural barons as Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, and Harriet Monroe. Hoping to build his reputation on a series of detached poetic “symphonies,” to keep depression from boiling over into madness and suicide, Aiken skirted the border of his deepest memories and fears—a border he would cross in the works that lay ahead.

Mark Twain's Aquarium
Mark Twain's Aquarium

Author: Samuel Langhorne Clemens

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2009-09-01

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 0820334987

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"What I lacked and what I needed," confessed Samuel Clemens in 1908, "was grandchildren." Near the end of his life, Clemens became the doting friend and correspondent of twelve schoolgirls ranging in age from ten to sixteen. For Clemens, "collecting" these surrogate granddaughters was a way of overcoming his loneliness, a respite from the pessimism, illness, and depression that dominated his later years. In Mark Twain's Aquarium, John Cooley brings together virtually every known communication exchanged between the writer and the girls he called his "angelfish." Cooley also includes a number of Clemens's notebook entries, autobiographical dictations, short manuscripts, and other relevant materials that further illuminate this fascinating story. Clemens relished the attention of these girls, orchestrating chaperoned visits to his homes and creating an elaborate set of rules and emblems for the Aquarium Club. He hung their portraits in his billiard room and invented games and plays for their amusement. For much of 1908, he was sending and receiving a letter a week from his angelfish. Cooley argues that Clemens saw cheerfulness and laughter as his only defenses against the despair of his late years. His enchantment with children, years before, had given birth to such characters as Tom Sawyer, Becky Thatcher, and Huck Finn. In the frivolities of the Aquarium Club, it found its final expression. Cooley finds no evidence of impropriety in Clemens behavior with the girls. Perhaps his greatest crime, the editor suggests, was in idealizing them, in regarding them as precious collectibles. "He tried to trap them in the amber of endless adolescence," Cooley writes. "By pleading that they stay young and innocent, he was perhaps attempting to deny that, as they and the world continued to change, so must he."

Memoirs of Laetitia Pilkington
Memoirs of Laetitia Pilkington

Author: Laetitia Pilkington

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 932

ISBN-13: 9780820317199

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This is the first scholarly edition of the Memoirs of Laetitia Van Lewen Pilkington (1709?-1750), a poet, ghostwriter, and protégée of Jonathan Swift and the playwright/stage manager Colley Cibber. Swift's first biographer by virtue of her lively portrayals of him, Pilkington remains the best chronicler of the great satirist's private life while he was at the height of his influence and creativity. Offering as well an account of Pilkington's own tumultuous and unconventional life, the Memoirs caused a scandal when they first appeared, owing to their details about her divorce and the many would-be Lotharios (most of them married) who subsequently pestered her with their attentions. Originally appearing in three volumes between 1748 and 1754, the Memoirs have been periodically reprinted and are often quoted by scholars in different disciplines. Until now, however, the work has not received serious editorial attention. In this edition, A. C. Elias Jr. has established for the first time a critical text based on the earliest and most definitive printings, which Pilkington and her son oversaw. For the first time there are explanatory notes that identify the many veiled or anonymous figures in the text and establish the reliability of each anecdote about them. Other new features include an index, a census of early editions, a full bibliography, and a chronology. This edition is produced in a two-volume format, the first comprising the actual Memoirs, and the second the commentary. Readers are at last in a position to understand exactly what Pilkington is saying in her Memoirs--and what she may be suppressing in the process. They can now approach Pilkington's Swift with confidence at each step, and appreciate her rendering of the many other real-life personages who populate her disarmingly breezy narrative: bishops, scientists, and statesmen; authors, artists, and printers; and assorted rogues, wits, bawds, and eccentrics. More than any other early-eighteenth-century woman writing in English, says Elias, Pilkington remains accessible to readers today. As a portrayal of Swift, as the recollections of a woman making her way in the male-dominated world of letters, as a source of Irish and English cultural and historical minutiae, and as a delightfully gossipy poke at social pretense, Pilkington's Memoirs are a classic of her era.

Visible Man
Visible Man

Author: Jeffrey B. Leak

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2014-04-15

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 0820347108

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Henry Dumas (1934–1968) was a writer who did not live to see most of his fiction and poetry in print. A son of Sweet Home, Arkansas, and Harlem, he devoted himself to the creation of a black literary cosmos, one in which black literature and culture were windows into the human condition. While he certainly should be understood in the context of the cultural and political movements of the 1960s—Black Arts, Black Power, and Civil Rights—his writing, and ultimately his life, were filled with ambiguities and contradictions. Dumas was shot and killed in 1968 in Harlem months before his thirty-fourth birthday by a white transit policeman under circumstances never fully explained. After his death he became a kind of literary legend, but one whose full story was unknown. A devoted cadre of friends and later admirers from the 1970s to the present pushed for the publication of his work. Toni Morrison championed him as “an absolute genius.” Amiri Baraka, a writer not quick to praise others, claimed that Dumas produced “actual art, real, man, and stunning.” Eugene Redmond and Quincy Troupe heralded Dumas's poetry, short stories, and work as an editor of “little” magazines. With Visible Man, Jeffrey B. Leak offers a full examination of both Dumas's life and his creative development. Given unprecedented access to the Dumas archival materials and numerous interviews with family, friends, and writers who knew him in various contexts, Leak opens the door to Dumas's rich and at times frustrating life, giving us a layered portrait of an African American writer and his coming of age during one of the most volatile and transformative decades in American history.

The Underground Stream
The Underground Stream

Author: Nancylee Novell Jonza

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2010-06-01

Total Pages: 504

ISBN-13: 0820336262

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A biography of Caroline Gordon examines her artistic vision, individuality, and "underground stream" of feminist concerns and reveals the ability behind the contrived persona of a traditional southern lady-turned-artist through the guidance of her brilliant husband, Allen Tate. UP.