Black Girl / White Girl - Hardcover

Oates, Joyce Carol

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0061125644 ISBN 13: 9780061125645

Publisher: Ecco, 2006

Synopsis

Fifteen years ago, in 1975, Genna Hewett-Meade's college roommate died a mysterious, violent, terrible death. Minette Swift had been a fiercely individualistic scholarship student, an assertive—even prickly—personality, and one of the few black girls at an exclusive women's liberal arts college near Philadelphia. By contrast, Genna was a quiet, self-effacing teenager from a privileged upper-class home, self-consciously struggling to make amends for her own elite upbringing. When, partway through their freshman year, Minette suddenly fell victim to an increasing torrent of racist harassment and vicious slurs—from within the apparent safety of their tolerant, "enlightened" campus—Genna felt it her duty to protect her roommate at all costs.

Now, as Genna reconstructs the months, weeks, and hours leading up to Minette's tragic death, she is also forced to confront her own identity within the social framework of that time. Her father was a prominent civil defense lawyer whose radical politics—including defending anti-war terrorists wanted by the FBI—would deeply affect his daughter's outlook on life, and later challenge her deepest beliefs about social obligation in a morally gray world.

Black Girl / White Girl is a searing double portrait of "black" and "white," of race and civil rights in post-Vietnam America, captured by one of the most important literary voices of our time.

About this title

About the Author:

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, and has been several times nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys, Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award, and the New York Times bestseller The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. Her most recent novel is A Book of American Martyrs. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.

From AudioFile:

A white woman recalls her prickly black college roommate of 15 years previous, who died under mysterious circumstances. In the 1970s, Genna, the well-to-do daughter of a "radiclib" attorney and a former hippie, championed and endured the underprivileged preacher's daughter at a predominantly white institution, where racial tensions ran high. Not a murder mystery this, but the kind of social and psychological probing one expects from this provocative author. Anna Fields reads with the same sort of intelligence and precision that Oates gives her writing. But the first-person narrative seems to demand personalization, a deep immersion into the character and her emotions. Fields only reads--sounding accurate but detached. Y.R. © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

About this edition

• Publisher: Ecco
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0061125644
• ISBN 13: 9780061125645
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 272