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Children of the Night: The Best Short Stories by Black Writers, 1967 to the Present
Children of the Night The Best Short Stories by Black Writers 1967 to the Present Author:Gloria Naylor (Editor) In 1969, Little, Brown and Company published The Best Short Stories by Black Writers, edited by Langston Hughes - the classic compendium of African-American short fiction from 1897 to 1967. Now, a quarter of a century later, Gloria Naylor has compiled an encore volume, Children of the Night, bringing this extraordinar... more »y series up to date.
Gathering together the most gifted black writers of our time - from 1967 to the present - Naylor has assembled a rich and varied collection of stories. The portrait that emerges of the African-American experience in the post-Civil Rights era is stirring, compelling, sometimes disturbing, and certainly provocative. Naylor has arranged the stories thematically so the reader focuses on a particular subject - slavery, for example, or the family. In the hands of different writers, these themes provide a wealth and variety of human experience.
The stories are more than testimonies of the long battle for survival. From a young woman's struggles with her barren faith in Alice Walker's lyrical "The Diary of an African Nun" to an innocent man's involvement in a horrifying act of violence in Ann Petry's "The Witness", they are, as Naylor states in her introduction, "examples of affirmation: of memory, of history, of family, of being". They are stories for all of us "at the beginning: of mankind as a species; of America as a nation; of the African-American as a full citizen".
The tale of Gorgik / Samuel Delaney --
Meditations on history / Sherley Anne Williams --
Damballah / John Edgar Wideman --
Louisiana: 1850 / Jewelle Gomez --
Remember him a outlaw / Alexis DeVeaux --
Mother / Andrea Lee --
Long distances / Jewell Parker Rhodes --
After dreaming of President Johnson / Howard Gordon --
Neighbors / Diane Oliver --
The witness / Ann Petry --
Steady going up / Maya Angelou --
The lesson / Toni Cade Bambara --
Kiswana Browne / Gloria Naylor --
Second-hand man / Rita Dove --
Crusader Rabbit / Jess Mowry --
Silences / Helen Elaine Lee --
Proper library / Carolyn Ferrell --
Diary of an African nun / Alice Walker --
In a house of wooden monkeys / Shay Youngblood --
Young Reverend Zelma Lee Moses / Joyce Carol Thomas --
Tell me how long the train's been gone / James Baldwin --
By the way of morning fire / Michael Weaver --
China / Charles Johnson --
Blackness / Jamaica Kincaid --
Lost in the city / Edward P. Jones --
Run, mourner, run / Randall Kenan --
Blues for Little Prez / Sam Greenlee --
Ma'Dear / Terry McMillan --
Transaction / Kelvin Christopher James --
A loaf of bread / James Alan McPherson --
Backwacking, a plea to the senator / Ralph Ellison --
The woman who would eat flowers / Colleen McElroy --
And love them? / Thonmas Glave --
An area in the cerebral hemisphere / Clarence Major --