Book picks similar to
Quality by Cid Ricketts Sumner


fiction
race
southern-history
feminism

Negroland


Margo Jefferson - 2015
      Born in upper-crust black Chicago—her father was for years head of pediatrics at Provident, at the time the nation’s oldest black hospital; her mother was a socialite—Margo Jefferson has spent most of her life among (call them what you will) the colored aristocracy, the colored elite, the blue-vein society. Since the nineteenth century they have stood apart, these inhabitants of Negroland, “a small region of Negro America where residents were sheltered by a certain amount of privilege and plenty.”   Reckoning with the strictures and demands of Negroland at crucial historical moments—the civil rights movement, the dawn of feminism, the fallacy of postracial America—Jefferson brilliantly charts the twists and turns of a life informed by psychological and moral contradictions. Aware as it is of heart-wrenching despair and depression, this book is a triumphant paean to the grace of perseverance.

Trilogy: The Walls Do Not Fall / Tribute to the Angels / The Flowering of the Rod


H.D. - 1973
    Trilogy's three long poems rank with T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets" and Ezra Pound's "Pisan Cantos." The first book of the Trilogy, "The Walls Do Not Fall," published in the midst of the "fifty thousand incidents" of the London blitz, maintains the hope that though "we have no map; / possibly we will reach haven,/ heaven." "Tribute to Angels" describes new life springing from the ruins, and finally, in "The Flowering of the Rod"—with its epigram "...pause to give/ thanks that we rise again from death and live."—faith in love and resurrection is realized in lyric and strongly Biblical imagery.

Dessa Rose


Sherley Anne Williams - 1986
    “Having this treasure of a book available again for new and more readers is not only necessary, it is imperative.” —Toni MorrisonExpanding the canon of African American literature, alongside Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Sherley Anne Williams’ critically acclaimed and unforgettable Dessa Rose is a novel of two powerfully conceived female protagonists forging a vital friendship in the face of racial divides in the antebellum South.

A Rage in Harlem


Chester Himes - 1957
    Luckily for him, he can turn to his savvy twin brother, Goldy, who earns a living—disguised as a Sister of Mercy—by selling tickets to Heaven in Harlem.  With Goldy on his side, Jackson is ready for payback.

The Heart of a Broken Story


J.D. Salinger - 1941
    

Selected Writings


Gertrude Stein - 1962
    It includes The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in its entirety; selected passages from The Making of Americans; "Melanctha"from Three Lives; portraits of the painters Cezanne, Matisse, and Picasso; Tender Buttons; the opera Four Saints in Three Acts; and poem, plays, lectures, articles, sketches, and a generous portion of her famous book on the Occupation of France, Wars I Have Seen.

The Saddest Words: William Faulkner's Civil War


Michael Gorra - 2020
    Born in 1897 in Mississippi, Faulkner wrote such iconic novels as Absalom, Absalom! and The Sound and the Fury, creating in Yoknapatawpha County the richest gallery of characters in American fiction, his achievements culminating in the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature. But given his works’ echo of “Lost Cause” romanticism, his depiction of black characters and black speech, and his rendering of race relations in a largely unreconstructed South, Faulkner demands a sobering reevaluation. Interweaving biography, absorbing literary criticism, and rich travelogue, The Saddest Words recontextualizes Faulkner, revealing a civil war within him, while examining the most plangent cultural issues facing American literature today.

Doris Lessing: Short Stories


Doris Lessing - 1976
    

Iola Leroy


Frances Ellen Watkins Harper - 1892
    After she is freed by the Union army, she works to reunify her family and embrace her heritage, committing herself to improving the conditions for blacks in America. Through her fascinating characters-including Iola's brother, who fights at the front in a colored regiment-Harper weaves a vibrant and provocative chronicle of the Civil War and its consequences through African American eyes in this critical contribution to the nation's literature.

Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers


Tom Wolfe - 1970
    The white liberal establishment encounters the newly emerging art of confrontation in two devastatingly funny essays exploring political stances and social styles in a status-minded world.

The Staggerford Murders and Nancy Clancy's Nephew


Jon Hassler - 2004
    Hassler’s wry humor is in full force as this wonderful tale unfolds. In the more poignant and bittersweetThe Life and Death of Nancy Clancy’s Nephew, elderly W.D. Nestor finds his loneliness dispelled by his friendship with a young Staggerford boy, but it is a sudden visit to his one hundred-year-old Aunt Nancy that provides the peace he has always been looking for.

Wild Freedom: Two Classic Westerns


Max Brand - 1922
    The Long, Long Trail (1922)Jess is a gunslinger, an outlaw on the run trying to elude the sheriff. When a woman enters his life, he reconsiders his future.About The AuthorSeattle-born Frederick Schiller Faust (1892 –1944) was a western author who wrote under pen names including Max Brand. He grew up working on a ranch in California's San Joaquin Valley. His books inspired Hollywood films and he created popular characters including Dr. Kildare.

So Far from God


Ana Castillo - 1993
    Sofia and her fated daughters, Fe, Esperanza, Caridad, and la Loca, endure hardship and enjoy love in the sleepy New Mexico hamlet of Tome, a town teeming with marvels where the comic and the horrific, the real and the supernatural, reside.

The Curlew's Cry


Mildred Walker - 1994
    Descended from pioneers and the daughter of a rancher, Pamela lives according to her own script, and nothing seems to happen as expected. The world beats on—World War I, the influenza epidemic of 1917, the Great Depression—and local fortune rise and fall with the price of beef. For Pamela the fight that counts is defined by a sense of independence and pervasive loneliness, by the twists and turns of love and friendship.

The Sexes


Dorothy Parker - 1944
    Includes such stories as: 'The Sexes', 'The Lovely Leave', 'The Little Hours', 'Glory in the Daytime' and 'Lolita'.