High Cotton
A work of literature depicting the African American community, poignantly depicting issues of family, cultural conflict, and self-identification.
Work Information
A work of literature depicting the African American community, poignantly depicting issues of family, cultural conflict…
American writer and critic. He is known for his essays and novels that focus on race and culture.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Picador USA
- Published
- 2017-02-07
- Pages
- 307 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 13.84 x 1.8 x 20.98 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780312420222
- ISBN-10
- 0312420226
- Price
- 4599 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/United States/Black & African American
No one sat me down and told me I was a Negro. That was something I figured out on the sly... So begins acclaimed critic and novelist Darryl Pinckney’s debut novel, High Cotton , an elegant and insightful look into the world of upper-middle-class black elite, or, in a term popularized by W. E. B. Du Bois, “the talented tenth.” The story follows an unnamed narrator as he moves from his safe childhood in conservative Indianapolis to a brief tenure as minister of information for a local radical organization, to eventually settling into the life as an expatriate in Paris. Through it all, his imagination is increasingly dominated by his elderly African American relations and the lessons of their experiences in the “Old Country” of the South. Challenging the traditional form of the novel in its use of both fiction and autobiography, High Cotton , winner of the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, signaled the arrival of a powerful literary force in American letters.
DARRYL PINCKNEY , a longtime contributor to The New York Review of Books , is the author of Black Deutschland ,and two works of nonfiction, Blackballed: The Black Vote and US Democracy and Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature . He has also collaborated with Robert Wilson on theater projects, most recently an adaption of Daniil Kharm's The Old Woman . He lives in New York.
Reviews
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This is a remarkable elegant and fascinating story of a young upper-middle-class African American as he graduates from Columbia and starts to make his way in New York's literary world. In beautiful and irresistible prose Pickney takes us inside the mind of a young man as he discovers his identity as a writer, and explores the bohemian city that still existed downtown in the eighties. A great read, by one of the great prose stylists, whose work may be more familiar to readers from his work in The New York Review of Books.
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Great. I am so happy to have this book. It is iconic.
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I looked forward to dipping into this book because I came across a clipping of a review that I had kept from years ago. At first I thought, this is going to be fun, but ultimately I felt like this is an unconnected stream of consciousness experience or the narrating character. There are a lot of inside jokes that speak to the middle class black experience and also serious moments of "yes that's exactly how it is or how it feels." Nevertheless, in the long run I disengaged from being involved in the narrative.
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Interesting read...
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Beautifully written