This volume brings together twenty-nine pieces dating from before 1932, none of which appeared in Porter's collected works and many of which are published here for the first time. Both fiction and essays are covered. All these pieces belong to Porter's apprenticeship as a creative writer. Thus, they offer new insights into her artistic development and her relationship with Mexico, a place that, as she later said, "influenced everything I did afterward."
The work and times of the Black writer, editor, and intellectual
John Cullen Gruesser edits essays that explore the literary and journalistic career of Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins. A Black woman writer at the turn of the twentieth century, Hopkins worked as the unacknowledged editor-in-chief of the Colored American Magazine but also wrote short fiction, novels, nonfiction articles, and a play believed to be the first by a Black woman. Versatile and politically committed, she was fired when her strong editorial stands and non-conciliatory politics offended the new owner of Colored American Magazine.
A rare examination of an overlooked figure in Black letters, The Unruly Voice explores Hopkins’s writing and her significance for contemporary readers.
Contributors: Elizabeth Ammons; Kristina Brooks; Lois Lamphere Brown; C. K. Doreski; John Cullen Gruesser; Jennie A. Kassanoff; Kate McCullough; Nelly Y. McKay; and Cynthia D. Schrager
An award-winning author presents a portrait of Black America in the nineteenth century
Over the course of two decades, award-winning poet Patricia Smith has amassed a collection of rare nineteenth-century photographs of Black men, women, and children who, in these pages, regard us from the staggering distance of time.
Unshuttered is a vessel for the voices of their incendiary and critical era. Smith’s searing stanzas and revelatory language imbue the subjects of the photos with dynamism and revived urgency while she explores how her own past of triumphs and losses is linked inextricably to their long-ago lives:
We ache for fiction etched in black and white. Our eyes never touch. These tragic grays and bustles, mourners’
hats plopped high upon our tamed but tangled crowns, strain to disguise what yearning does with us.
The poet’s unrivaled dexterity with dramatic monologue and poetic form reanimates these countenances, staring back from such yesterdays, and the stories they may have told. This is one of American literature’s finest wordsmiths doing what she does best—unreeling history to find its fierce and formidable lyric.
The volume begins with a new translation of the 1945 play The Useless Mouths, written in Paris during the Nazi occupation. Other pieces were discovered after Beauvoir's death in 1986, such as the 1965 short novel "Misunderstanding in Moscow," involving an elderly French couple who confront their fears of aging. Two additional previously unknown texts include the fragmentary "Notes for a Novel," which contains the seed of what she later would call "the problem of the Other," and a lecture on postwar French theater titled Existentialist Theater. The collection notably includes the eagerly awaited translation of Beauvoir's contribution to a 1965 debate among Jean-Paul Sartre and other French writers and intellectuals, "What Can Literature Do?"
Prefaces to well-known works such as Bluebeard and Other Fairy Tales,La Bâtarde, and James Joyce in Paris: His Final Years are also available in English for the first time, alongside essays and other short articles. A landmark contribution to Beauvoir studies and French literary studies, the volume includes informative and engaging introductory essays by prominent and rising scholars.
Contributors are Meryl Altman, Elizabeth Fallaize, Alison S. Fell, Sarah Gendron, Dennis A. Gilbert, Laura Hengehold, Eleanore Holveck, Terry Keefe, J. Debbie Mann, Frederick M. Morrison, Catherine Naji, Justine Sarrot, Liz Stanley, Ursula Tidd, and Veronique Zaytzeff.
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