Pow-Wow: Charting the Fault Lines in the American Experience - Short Fiction from Then to Now - Softcover

3.83

12 ratings by Goodreads

9781568583426: Pow-Wow: Charting the Fault Lines in the American Experience - Short Fiction from Then to Now

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1568583427 ISBN 13: 9781568583426

Publisher: Da Capo Press, 2009

Using the yardstick that a short story is any fiction under 15,000 words, Ishmael Reed—with the assistance of Carla Blank—has assembled an anthology that includes work ranging from animal stories of the Northwest Coast Eyaks to African-American folklore to reflections on the American Muslim experience. Pow-Wow is the sequel to Reed’s From Totems to Hip-Hop: A Multicultural Anthology of Poetry Across the Americas, 1900 –2002, a volume that included both Tupac Shakur and T. S. Eliot, and was named one of the best poetry anthologies of 2003 by Library Journal. Its fiction-focused follow-up once again demonstrates the broad range of American writing, from such stellar names as Langston Hughes, Gertrude Stein, Russell Banks, and Alejandro Murgu�a to newly discovered writers of all races, genders, and backgrounds.

This landmark collection features: Zora Neale Hurston, Chester Himes, Robert Coover, Bharati Mukherjee, Benjamin Franklin, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Ntozake Shange, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Mark Twain, Grace Paley, Russell Charles Leong, Charles Wright, James Alan McPherson, and more.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

About the Author:

Ishmael Reed is a novelist, poet, playwright, and essayist who has published nine critically acclaimed novels and more than a dozen other books of poetry and essays. In additional to being nominated for a National Book Award for Poetry, recent awards have included the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Award, a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, and 2008 Blues Songwriter of the Year from the West Coast Blues Hall of Fame. He is Professor Emeritus at University of California at Berkeley.

Carla Blank is a writer, editor, teacher, and performance artist. She is author and editor of the historical reference Rediscovering America: The Making of Multicultural America, 1900-2000, and co-author, with Jody Roberts, of the performance arts handbook Live On Stage! Her collaboration with Robert Wilson, entitled Kool, will premiere at the Guggenheim Museum in 2009. She lives in Oakland, California.

From Publishers Weekly:

With help from writers such as Benjamin Franklin, Grace Paley and Wanda Coleman, novelist/poet/essayist Reed puts together a captivating, multifarious look at the American experience through its short fiction (a "cousin" to his lauded poetry anthology From Totems to Hip-Hop). From the ins and outs of a young Latino's struggle in an Anglo-dominated Catholic school (Nash Candelaria's "The Day the Cisco Kid Shot John Wayne") to Haight Street during the Summer of Love ("Wormwood" by Conyus), Reed's selections will draw readers into American cities, suburbs, prairies and mountains with vivid, precise, at times documentary description and bold, personal questions of American identity and purpose. At the same time, the overwhelming role of love, loss, and growth can render them almost allegorical; a perfect example is Wajahat Ali's "Ramadan Blues," in which a young boy is first introduced to the traditional holiday fast. The boy's fear and self-deprecation over his meager battle with hunger balance the personal detail and honesty of the autobiographical with the sweep of America's religious legacy. A "gathering of voices from the different American tribes," this highly varied collection doesn't neglect important works from the likes of Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, George S. Schuyler, Gertrude Stein and Mark Twain.
Copyright � Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.