Böcker av Randall Kenan

?Nothing short of a wonder-book.??New York Times Book Review The story collection that hailed the arrival of an essential voice in southern literature?a sharp, rich exploration of what it means to poor, Black, and gay in the United States.A three-year-old boy begins to deliver messages from dead relatives. A zombie uprising is led by an evil preacher. A woman is haunted by a child her husband may have drowned. A pig talks. The stories in Let the Dead Bury Their Dead embody the type of fiction that defined Randall Kenan's career: set in the thinly veiled fictional Carolina town of Tims Creek, they follow a diverse cast of Southern folkways, and stare into a long shadow of history. A stunning mix of magic, myth, and folktales, Kenan masterfully portrays a world of varied voices, and in wondrous prose, brings to life the ghosts of our past and present.

James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time was one of the essential books of the sixties, and one of the most galvanizing statements of the American civil rights movement.Now, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, with a new generation of Americans confronting what Baldwin called our "racial nightmare," acclaimed writer Randall Kenan asks: How far have we come?Combining elements of memoir and commentary, Kenan's critical eye ranges from his childhood to the present to observe that, while there have been dramatic advances, some old issues have combined with new ones to bedevil us: "Nigger” has become a hip usage; the African-Americans that have finally attained prominent political positions are, more often than not, arch-conservatives; the Christian and Muslim religions so central to the civil rights movement have become more intolerant, while the stirring spiritual music that inspired it has been replaced by an aggressive form of hip-hop.Starting with W. E. B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King, Jr., Kenan expands the discussion to include many of today's most powerful personalities, such as Oprah Winfrey, O. J. Simpson, Clarence Thomas, Rodney King, Sean "Puffy” Combs, George Foreman, and Barack Obama.Published to mark the forty-fifth anniversary of James Baldwin's epochal work, this homage by novelist, essayist, and Baldwin biographer Kenan is itself a piercing consideration of the times, and an impassioned call to transcend them.