A community of Black faith healers witness an event that will change their lives forever in this "hard-nosed, wise, funny" novel (Los Angeles Times). One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years Set in a fictional city in the American South, the novel also "inhabits the nonlinear, sacred space and sacred time of traditional African religion” (The New York Times Book Review). Though they all united in their search for the healing properties of salt, some of them are centered, some are off-balance; some are frightened, and some are daring. From the men who live off welfare women to the mud mothers who carry their children in their hides, the novel brilliantly explores the narcissistic aspect of despair and the tremendous responsibility that comes with physical, spiritual, and mental well-being.
A Study Guide for Toni Cade Bambara's "The Salt Eaters," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.
"Examines the literature of black Caribbean emigrant and island women including Dorothea Smartt, Edwidge Danticat, Paule Marshall, and others, who use the terminology and imagery of "sucking salt" as an articulation of a New World voice connoting adaptation, improvisation, and creativity, offering a new understanding of diaspora, literature, and feminism"--Provided by publisher.
Edited and with a Preface by Toni Morrison, this posthumous collection of short stories, essays, and interviews offers lasting evidence of Bambara's passion, lyricism, and tough critical intelligence. Included are tales of mothers and daughters, rebels and seeresses, community activists and aging gangbangers, as well as essays on film and literature, politics and race, and on the difficulties and necessities of forging an identity as an artist, activist, and black woman. It is a treasure trove not only for those familiar with Bambara's work, but for a new generation of readers who will recognize her contribution to contemporary American letters.
This book is a scholarly collection of interdisciplinary perspectives and practices that examine the positive potential of attending to the voices and stories of those who live and work with illness in real world settings. Its international contributors offer case studies and research projects illustrating how illness can disrupt, highlight and transform themes in personal narratives, forcing the creation of new biographies. As exercises in narrative development and autonomy, the evolving content and expression of illness stories are crucial to our understanding of the lived experience of those confronting life changes. The international contributors to this volume demonstrate the importance of hearing, understanding and effectively liberating voices impacted by illness and change. Contributors include Tineke Abma, Peter Bray, Verusca Calabria, Agnes Elling, Deborah Freedman, Alexandra Fidyk, Justyna Jajszczok, Naomi Krüger, Annie McGregor, Pam Morrison, Miranda Quinney, Yomna Saber, Elena Sharratt, Victorria Simpson-Gervin, Hans T. Sternudd, Mirjam Stuij, Anja Tramper, Alison Ward and Jane Youell.
'A magnum opus... Puts the reader at the heart of the horror that came to be called the Atlanta child murders' Toni Morrison Zala Spencer is barely surviving on the margins of Atlanta's booming economy when she awakens one summer's morning in 1980 to find her teenage son, Sonny, has disappeared. As uneasy hours turn into desperate days, Zala realizes that Sonny is among the many cases of missing children beginning to attract national attention. Growing increasingly disillusioned with the authorities, who respond to Sonny's disappearance with cold indifference, Zala and her estranged husband embark on an epic search. Through the eyes of a family seized by anguish and terror, we watch a city roiling with political, racial, and class tensions. Written over a span of twelve years, and edited by Toni Morrison, who called Those Bones Are Not My Child the author's magnum opus, Toni Cade Bambara's last novel leaves us with an enduring and revelatory chronicle of an American nightmare.
Fifteen unforgettable short stories from an essential author of African American fiction gives us compelling portraits of a wide range of unforgettable characters, from sassy children to cunning old men, from uptown New York to rural North Carolina. "Bambara grabs you by the throat ... she dazzles, she charms." —Chicago Daily News A young girl suffers her first betrayal. A widow flirts with an elderly blind man against the wishes of her grown-up children. A neighborhood loan shark teaches a white social worker a lesson in responsibility. And there is more. Sharing the world of Toni Cade Bambara's "straight-up fiction" is a stunning experience.
The Depths of Anima is an introspective look at Black girlhood and the transition into womanhood. It challenges Carl Jung's concept of "anima" by introducing an interpretation of the feminine-spirit living in all of us. This poetry collection takes a look at our inner worlds as 'Anima' seeks to remind readers that your inner sanctum is worthy of protection and your place in the world is no accident.
A breathtaking free fall into the long-buried (and fictional) history of a utopian era in American lighter-than-air travel, as told by its death-defying, aero-acrobatic heroes. "Foster and Romo's 'real fake dream' of the future-past history of the East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines is a superb and loving phantasmagoria that gobbles up real histories for breakfast and spits out the seeds."—Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn In the early years of the twentieth-century, the use of airships known as dirigibles—some as large as one thousand feet long—was being promulgated in Southern California by a semi-clandestine lighter-than-air movement. Groups like the East LA Balloon Club and the Bessie Coleman Aero Club were hard at work to revolutionize travel, with an aim to literally lift oppressed people out of racism and poverty. ELADATL tells the story of this little-known period of American air travel in a series of overlapping narratives told by key figures, accompanied by a number of historic photographs and recently discovered artifacts, with appendices provided to fill in the missing links. The story of the rise and fall of this ill-fated airship movement investigates its long-buried history, replete with heroes, villains, and moments of astonishing derring-do and terrifying disaster. Written and presented as an “actual history of a fictional company,” this surrealist, experimental novel is a tour de force of politicized fantastic fiction, a work of hybrid art-making distilled into a truly original literary form. Developed over a ten-year period of collaborations, community interventions, and staged performances, ELADATL is a furiously hilarious send-up of academic histories, mainstream narratives, and any traditional notions of the time-space continuum. "Poet Foster (Atomik Aztex) and artist Romo deliver a maddeningly accomplished inquiry into the secret history of East Los Angeles. . . . This is as much fun to read as it must have been to make."—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review "One of the wildest, most creative and deeply-cutting novels I’ve read in years, a genuine piece of newness in both content and form. To wade through this surreal narrative archeology is to experience, in the finest sense, literature as fever dream."—Omar El Akkad, author of American War: A Novel "Visionary, hilarious, anarchic, this assemblage of breakneck dialog, blisteringly brilliant film criticism, bureaucratic documents, revolutionary chatter, mass transit, and fake dreams of the secret police, is the counterfactual novel to beat all counterfactual novels."—Mark Doten, author of Trump Sky Alpha "Hilarious and prophetic and profound, truer than truth, and realer than all realities currently available for purchase, ELADATL is strong medicine against the erasures of history, a mega-vitamin for struggles yet to come. This book combats despair."—Ben Ehrenreich, author of Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time
