As an American Studies public scholar, I've read just about everything written from and about the world of American slavery, including a ton of great historical novels about that world. I've never read anything like Ward's novel. Experimental and vital in equal measure.
OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK • Instant New York Times Bestseller • Named one of the best books of 2023 by The Washington Post, Vanity Fair, The Boston Globe, Time, The New Yorker, and more.
“Nothing short of epic, magical, and intensely moving.” —Vogue • “A novel of triumph.” —The Washington Post • “Harrowing, immersive, and other-worldly.” —People
From “one of America’s finest living writers” (San Francisco Chronicle) and “heir apparent to Toni Morrison” (LitHub)—comes a haunting masterpiece about an enslaved girl in the years before the Civil War that’s destined to become a classic.
The single most original novel I've read in a long, long time. And yet at no point does the unique structure and style feel like a gimmick--quite the opposite, they open up seemingly familiar characters and themes in profoundly new ways.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • “A shattering and darkly comic send-up of racial stereotyping in Hollywood” (Vanity Fair) and adeeply personal novel about race, pop culture, immigration, assimilation, and escaping the roles we are forced to play.
Willis Wu doesn’t perceive himself as the protagonist in his own life: he’s merely Generic Asian Man. Sometimes he gets to be Background Oriental Making a Weird Face or even Disgraced Son, but always he is relegated to a prop. Yet every day, he leaves his tiny room in a Chinatown SRO and enters the Golden Palace restaurant,…
I'm biased here, as Heartwell was my favorite high school teacher and remains a friend. But this is a truly wonderful historical novel, capturing its 1920s moment pitch-perfectly and making us care deeply about all of its characters by its moving conclusion.
It is the summer of 1927 when freshly-minted college graduate Robert Martin moves to the small Southside Virginia town of Lawrenceville. There, he takes up residence in the boarding house operated by widow Louvenia Hicks with help from her teenage daughter, Laura. Over the course of the next year, Robert is emmeshed in the lives of the Hicks family and his fellow boarders, as well as those of the citizens—Black and white—of the broader community. With humor and pathos, The Boarding House explores the intricate fabric of life of an American town in the days just before the Great Depression.
When we talk about patriotism in America, we tend to mean one form: the version captured in shared celebrations like the national anthem and the Pledge of Allegiance. But as Ben Railton argues, that celebratory patriotism is just one of four distinct forms: celebratory, the communal expression of an idealized America; mythic, the creation of national myths that exclude certain communities; active, acts of service and sacrifice for the nation; and critical, arguments for how the nation has fallen short of its ideals that seek to move us toward that more perfect union.
In Of Thee I Sing, Railton defines those four forms of American patriotism, using the four verses of “America the Beautiful” as examples of each type, and traces them across our histories.
