In these five stories, Ernest Gaines returns to the cane fields, sharecroppers' shacks, and decaying plantation houses of Louisiana, the terrain of his great novels A Gathering of Old Men and A Lesson Before Dying. As rendered by Gaines, this country becomes as familiar, and as haunted by cruelty, suffering, and courage, as Ralph Ellison's Harlem or Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County.
Gaines introduces us to this world through the eyes of guileless children and wizened jailbirds, black tenants and white planters. He shows his characters eking out a living and making love, breaking apart aand coming together. And on every page he captures the soul of black community whose circumstances make even the slightest assertion of self-respect an act of majestic—and sometimes suicidal—heroism. Bloodline is a miracle of storytelling.
STORIES INCLUDE:
A Long Day in November The Sky Is Gray Three Men Bloodline Just Like a Tree
“Mr. Gaines writes with notable control, a superb ear for speech. . . . Brilliantly subtle and complex.” —The New York Times Book Review
“[Gaines] unerrringly evokes the time and place about which he writes.” —Los Angeles Times
“Gaines knows how to tell a story—[He writes] with humor, a strong sense of drama and a compassioinate understanding of people who find themselves in opposing positions.” —Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post
Ernest Gaines was born on a plantation in Pointe Coupee Parish near New Roads, Louisiana, which is the Bayonne of all his fictional works. He is a writer-in-residence emeritus at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Gaines received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1993 for his lifetime achievements; was named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, one of France’s highest decorations, in 1996; and was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2004. He and his wife, Dianne, live in Oscar, Louisiana.
View titles by Ernest J. Gaines
In these five stories, Ernest Gaines returns to the cane fields, sharecroppers' shacks, and decaying plantation houses of Louisiana, the terrain of his great novels A Gathering of Old Men and A Lesson Before Dying. As rendered by Gaines, this country becomes as familiar, and as haunted by cruelty, suffering, and courage, as Ralph Ellison's Harlem or Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County.
Gaines introduces us to this world through the eyes of guileless children and wizened jailbirds, black tenants and white planters. He shows his characters eking out a living and making love, breaking apart aand coming together. And on every page he captures the soul of black community whose circumstances make even the slightest assertion of self-respect an act of majestic—and sometimes suicidal—heroism. Bloodline is a miracle of storytelling.
STORIES INCLUDE:
A Long Day in November The Sky Is Gray Three Men Bloodline Just Like a Tree
Praise
“Mr. Gaines writes with notable control, a superb ear for speech. . . . Brilliantly subtle and complex.” —The New York Times Book Review
“[Gaines] unerrringly evokes the time and place about which he writes.” —Los Angeles Times
“Gaines knows how to tell a story—[He writes] with humor, a strong sense of drama and a compassioinate understanding of people who find themselves in opposing positions.” —Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post
Ernest Gaines was born on a plantation in Pointe Coupee Parish near New Roads, Louisiana, which is the Bayonne of all his fictional works. He is a writer-in-residence emeritus at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Gaines received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1993 for his lifetime achievements; was named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, one of France’s highest decorations, in 1996; and was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2004. He and his wife, Dianne, live in Oscar, Louisiana.
View titles by Ernest J. Gaines
