by Ernest Gaines
It’s the mid-1960s, but in the rural Southern setting of this novel, the remnants of slavery are still evident; the aging white landowners occupy the plantation house, while the ten or fifteen black families live down in the old quarters. Racial issues come to the fore, but are anything but cut and dried, [...]
by Zora Neale Hurston
I enjoyed this much-maligned last novel by Hurston best of all. In a turn that many critics have denounced, she sets this one among white people and focuses much more on the marriage relationship than on racism, or self-actualization, or any of the things that preoccupied her in her other novels. However, [...]
by Zora Neale Hurston
Or, Exodus According to Zora Neale Hurston. Thing number one: Hurston was a religious skeptic. Thing number two: Hurston was an anthropologist, especially interested in folk culture (all folk cultures). Thing number three: Hurston liked to deal with racism and slavery obliquely. Thing number four: She hoped that Moses, Man of the [...]
This is Zora Neale Hurston’s best-known book, and the one with the most critical literature on it. I know this is true because I almost wrote about it myself but got bogged down in all the criticism I would’ve had to read first. *shudder* I did enjoy it, once I learned to read the dialect [...]
by Katherine Neville
Computer expert Catherine is hired to go to Morocco to work for OPEC (it’s set in the early 1970s); little does she know that her presence there has actually been orchestrated as part of a huge, on-going game of chess that has been going on since the reign of Charlemagne – a game [...]
