Understanding Randall Kenan

Author : Randall Kenan
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 1324005475
Total Pages : 145 pages
Book Rating : 4.76/5 ( download)

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Download or read book If I Had Two Wings: Stories written by Randall Kenan and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2020-08-04 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction Longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction Finalist for the 2021 Aspen Words Literary Prize Mingling the earthy with the otherworldly, these ten stories chronicle ineffable events in ordinary lives. In Kenan’s fictional territory of Tims Creek, North Carolina, an old man rages in his nursing home, a parson beats up an adulterer, a rich man is haunted by a hog, and an elderly woman turns unwitting miracle worker. A retired plumber travels to Manhattan, where Billy Idol sweeps him into his entourage. An architect who lost his famous lover to AIDS reconnects with a high-school fling. Howard Hughes seeks out the woman who once cooked him butter beans. Shot through with humor and seasoned by inventiveness and maturity, Kenan riffs on appetites of all kinds, on the eerie persistence of history, and on unstoppable lovers and unexpected salvations. If I Had Two Wings is a rich chorus of voices and visions, dreams and prophecies, marked by physicality and spirit. Kenan’s prose is nothing short of wondrous.

Author : James A. Crank
Publisher : Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN 13 : 1611179599
Total Pages : 157 pages
Book Rating : 4.90/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Understanding Randall Kenan written by James A. Crank and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2019-03-28 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book-length study of the life and writings of the critically acclaimed Southern writer Randall Kenan is an American author best known for his novel A Visitation of Spirits and his collection of stories Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, was a nominee for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction, and named a New York Times Notable Book. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as the Whiting Writers Award, Sherwood Anderson Award, John Dos Passos Award, Rome Prize, and North Carolina Award for Literature. Understanding Randall Kenan is the first book-length critical study of Kenan, offering a brief biography and an exploration of his considerable oeuvre—memoir, short stories, novels, journalism, folklore, and essays. Kenan's writing can be complex and sometimes highly stylized while covering a broad range of topics, though he often explores African Americans' complicated relationships, specifically as they struggle to make connections along other axes of class, gender, and sexual identity. Crank explores these themes and how they influence Kenan's work through a personal interview with the author.

Author : Randall Kenan
Publisher : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN 13 : 9780156505154
Total Pages : 364 pages
Book Rating : 4.50/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Let the Dead Bury Their Dead and Other Stories written by Randall Kenan and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 1992 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This remarkable collection of twelve short stories is about the diverse folk--black and white, young and old, rich and poor, rural and sophisticated--who live in the eastern North Carolina town of Tims Creek. Among the memorable characters are Clarence Pickett, who at age three began receiving messages from beyond the grave and whose gift seems tied to a hog's ability to talk; matronly Ida Perry, haunted by a boy her judge husband may have drowned years before; Dean Williams, hired to seduce the richest black man in Times Creek, yearning after innocence while he betrays love.

Author : Randall Kenan
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 0393882179
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.79/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Black Folk Could Fly: Selected Writings by Randall Kenan written by Randall Kenan and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2022-08-09 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A personal, social, and intellectual self-portrait of the beloved and enormously influential late Randall Kenan, a master of both fiction and nonfiction. Virtuosic in his use of literary forms, nurtured and unbounded by his identities as a Black man, a gay man, an intellectual, and a Southerner, Randall Kenan was known for his groundbreaking fiction. Less visible were his extraordinary nonfiction essays, published as introductions to anthologies and in small journals, revealing countless facets of Kenan’s life and work. Flying under the radar, these writings were his most personal and autobiographical: memories of the three women who raised him—a grandmother, a schoolteacher great-aunt, and the great-aunt’s best friend; recollections of his boyhood fear of snakes and his rapturous discoveries in books; sensual evocations of the land, seasons, and crops—the labor of tobacco picking and hog killing—of the eastern North Carolina lowlands where he grew up; and the food (oh the deliriously delectable Southern foods!) that sustained him. Here too is his intellectual coming of age; his passionate appreciations of kindred spirits as far-flung as Eartha Kitt, Gordon Parks, Ingmar Bergman, and James Baldwin. This powerful collection is a testament to a great mind, a great soul, and a great writer from whom readers will always wish to have more to read.

Author : Randall Kenan
Publisher : Melville House
ISBN 13 : 1685890024
Total Pages : 161 pages
Book Rating : 4.25/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Fire This Time written by Randall Kenan and published by Melville House. This book was released on 2022-07-12 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Kenan continues Baldwin’s legendary tradition of ‘telling it on the mountain’ by giving a voice to the unvarnished truth.”—The San Francisco Chronicle 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. In The Fire This Time, inspired by Baldwin, Kenan combines elements of memoir and commentary, casting a critical eye from his childhood to the present to observe that, while there have been dramatic advances since the sixties, some issues continue to bedevil us. Starting with W. E. B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King, Jr., Kenan expands the discussion to include many powerful Aamerican 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, The Fire This Time is itself a piercing consideration of the times, and an impassioned call to transcend them.

Author : Randall Kenan
Publisher : Facts On File
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 152 pages
Book Rating : 4.30/5 ( download)

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Download or read book James Baldwin written by Randall Kenan and published by Facts On File. This book was released on 1994 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Describes the life of the writer James Baldwin, focusing on his experiences as an African-American civil rights worker and as a gay man.

Author : Randall Kenan
Publisher : Grove Press
ISBN 13 : 080215932X
Total Pages : 259 pages
Book Rating : 4.28/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Visitation of Spirits written by Randall Kenan and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 2022-05-17 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “With A Visitation of Spirits, Randall Kenan continues James Baldwin’s legendary tradition of ‘telling it on the mountain.’”—San Francisco Chronicle When A Visitation of Spirits was published, Randall Kenan (1963-2020) was instantly recognized as a writer of significance, and one who brought into literary fiction the southern Black, gay experience, one of the first such writers to achieve mainstream success. His groundbreaking first novel, A Visitation of Spirits, is the powerful story of Horace Cross, a popular and high-achieving sixteen-year-old boy, who wrestles with the guilt of discovering who he is, a young man attracted to other men and yearning to escape the narrow confines of the small town of Tims Creek, North Carolina, where he grew up. Raised on stories of prophets, revelations, and dreams, his internal struggles take shape in his mind as demons and angels battling for his soul, culminating in one night of horrible and tragic transformation. A Visitation of Spirits established Randall Kenan as a literary master, and his influence continues to be felt. Now in Grove paperback and with an introduction by Tarell Alvin McCraney, Oscar-winning writer of Moonlight, A Visitation of Spirits is a classic novel of growing up from a literary giant.

Author : James A. Crank
Publisher : Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN 13 : 1611171873
Total Pages : 174 pages
Book Rating : 4.77/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Understanding Sam Shepard written by James A. Crank and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2012-10-31 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An ideal introduction into the complex and compelling dramas of the acclaimed playwright Understanding Sam Shepard investigates the notoriously complex and confusing dramatic world of Sam Shepard, one of America's most prolific, thoughtful, and challenging contemporary playwrights. During his nearly fifty-year career as a writer, actor, director, and producer, Shepard has consistently focused his work on the ever-changing American cultural landscape. James A. Crank's comprehensive study of Shepard offers scholars and students of the dramatist a means of understanding Shephard's frequent experimentation with language, setting, characters, and theme. Beginning with a brief biography of Shepard, Crank shows how experiences in Shepard's life eventually resonate in his work by exploring the major themes, unique style, and history of Shepard's productions. Focusing first on Shepard's early plays, which showcase highly experimental, frenetic explorations of fractured worlds, Crank discusses how the techniques from these works evolve and translate into the major works in his "family trilogy": Curse of the Starving Class, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Buried Child, and True West. Shepard often uses elements from his past—his relationship with his father, his struggle for control within the family, and the breakdown of the suburban American dream—as major starting points in his plays. Shepard is a recipient of a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, eleven Obie Awards, and a Chicago Tribune Literary Prize for Lifetime Achievement. Augmented with an extensive bibliography, Understanding Sam Shepard is an ideal point of entrance into complex and compelling dramas of this acclaimed playwright.

Author : Donna M. Bickford
Publisher : Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN 13 : 1643364502
Total Pages : 136 pages
Book Rating : 4.06/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Understanding Margaret Atwood written by Donna M. Bickford and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2023-08-31 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A timely, accessible introduction to Margaret Atwood's most recent novels and enduring themes In 2017, the Hulu adaptation of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale introduced the acclaimed and bestselling Canadian author to a new generation and reminded Atwood's long-established readers of her uncanny prescience. Understanding Margaret Atwood provides an overview of the author's life, descriptions and analyses of the key themes present in her most recent novels, signposts to the connections and intertextual references between them, and attention to their critical reception. Following a biographical overview, author Donna M. Bickford studies The Handmaid's Tale (1985) and its sequel The Testaments (2019), retellings of The Odyssey in The Penelopiad (2005) and The Tempest in Hag Seed (2016), the MaddAddam trilogy (2003, 2009, 2013), and The Heart Goes Last (2015). Written in clear language and a style appropriate both for scholars and for new students of Atwood, Bickford locates Atwood's recent works in the literary, political, and social context. Atwood is the author of more than fifty books of fiction, essays, and poetry, which have collectively sold more than eight million copies worldwide; has received numerous awards and accolades, including multiple Booker Prizes and a PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Award; and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

Author : María DeGuzmán
Publisher : Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN 13 : 1643360078
Total Pages : 193 pages
Book Rating : 4.72/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Understanding John Rechy written by María DeGuzmán and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2019-09-19 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this first book-length monograph on the Mexican American novelist, essayist, and playwright John Rechy, best known for his debut novel City of Night, María DeGuzmán offers a conceptually clear yet aesthetically, philosophically, and socio-politically fine-grained analysis of the spectrum of his writing. Recipient of PEN Center USA's Lifetime Achievement Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, ONE Magazine's National Gay and Lesbian Cultural Hero Award, the William Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement, the Luis Leal Award for Excellence in Chicano/Latino Literature, and the Robert Kirsch Award for Lifetime Achievement, Rechy is the author of fifteen novels, at least three plays, and several volumes of nonfiction. He has written for the Nation, the New York Review of Books, the Los Angeles Times, the Village Voice, the New York Times, and Saturday Review. In Understanding John Rechy, María DeGuzmán offers a brief biographical overview and then traces the development of Rechy's craft through his major works by calling attention to central issues, recurring situations and characters, styles, and special techniques. She examines the complexities of his representation of identity, the subjectivity in his male homosexual odyssey and identity quest novels, and his experimentation with genre. She offers a concise yet intricate analysis of the major organizing paradigms and themes, genres, modes, styles, and handling of the gay Chicano's oeuvre. The book's guiding analysis pays particular attention to the ways in which Rechy's works function as cultural critique challenging mainstream values in a deep-structure manner.