Bøger af 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.

At the intersection of food and story, The Carolina Table: North Carolina Writers on Food will offer a collection of essays about the best meal, food and memory, the best family tradition, a cherished food ritual, a dreaded food ritual, a favorite recipe, the worst recipe, the worst meal, the funniest meal. These food-related stories are set in North Carolina, though geography is sometimes secondary to the main theme, which is food in any form: meals and manners, cooking and ingredients, recipes and recollections. The pieces include a humorous story by Michael Parker about his mother's soup disaster; a tour of Duplin County barbeque joints by Celia Rivenbark; Hal Crowther's evening as a reluctant carnivore at a ribfest; chef Cathy Cleary's favorite tomato pie. Writer and goat farmer Tom Rankin writes about taking his goats to be slaughtered by a halal butcher from Afghanistan in Sanford. John McElwee takes us to the annual celebratory Blue Monday shad fry along the Cape Fear River. Some of North Carolina's favorite writers and chefs regale us with stories: Lee Smith, Frances Mayes, Daniel Wallace, Marianne Gingher, Wiley Cash, Bland Simpson, Jill McCorkle, Jaki Shelton Green, Michael Malone, and Wilton Barnhardt. It also includes stories by chefs Vivian Howard (of PBS's "A Chef's Life") and Crook's Corner's popular chef Bill Smith, and noted cookbook authors Marcie Cohen Ferris and Nancie McDermott.

...with an introduction by Tarell Alvin McCraney [cover].

"A meaningful panoramic view of what it means to be human...Cause for celebration." --Times-PicayuneFrom the author of the National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Let the Dead Bury Their Dead comes a moving, cliché-shattering group portrait of African Americans at the turn of the twenty-first century.In a hypnotic blend of oral history and travel writing, Randall Kenan sets out to answer a question that has has long fascinated him: What does it mean to be black in America today? To find the answers, Kenan traveled America--from Alaska to Louisiana, from Maine to Las Vegas--over the course of six years, interviewing nearly two hundred African Americans from every conceivable walk of life. We meet a Republican congressman and an AIDS activist; a Baptist minister in Mormon Utah and an ambitious public-relations major in North Dakota; militant activists in Atlanta and movie folks in Los Angeles. The result is a marvellously sharp, full picture of contemporary African American lives and experiences.

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.

Author of Go Tell it on the Mountain, Baldwin was a minority within a minority as a gay black man. This series examines the lives of gay and lesbian writers and the struggles many of them have endured.