{"title":"Books by Randall Kenan","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9781685890025","title":"The Fire This Time","description":"“Kenan continues Baldwin’s legendary tradition of ‘telling it on the mountain’ by giving a voice to the unvarnished truth.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe San Francisco Chronicle\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJames Baldwin's \u003ci\u003eThe Fire Next Time\u003c\/i\u003e was one of the essential books of the sixties,  and one of the most galvanizing statements of the American civil rights movement. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn \u003ci\u003eThe Fire This Time\u003c\/i\u003e, inspired by Baldwin, Kenan combines elements of memoir and commentary, casting a critical eye from his childhood to the present to observe that, while there have been  dramatic advances since the sixties, some issues continue to bedevil us. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eStarting with W. E. B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King, Jr., Kenan  expands the discussion to include many powerful Aamerican personalities, such  as Oprah Winfrey, O. J. Simpson, Clarence Thomas, Rodney King, Sean “Puffy” Combs,  George Foreman, and Barack Obama.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePublished to mark the forty-fifth anniversary  of James Baldwin’s epochal work, \u003ci\u003eThe Fire This Time\u003c\/i\u003e is itself a piercing consideration of the times, and an impassioned call to  transcend them.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56303714107765,"sku":"9781685890025","price":16.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781685890025_53a88f39-11a2-417e-adf3-ef4b004dcd7e.jpg?v=1786024510"},{"product_id":"9781917792042","title":"A Visitation of Spirits","description":"Outsider Classics is Dead Ink's resurrection ground for the strange, the silenced, and the outcasts. This series exhumes lost literary voices that were ahead of their time to restore them to the cult status they always deserved. From forgotten masterpieces to once-censored provocations, each title is a reaction against the canon curated for readers who want to stray into the margins and away from the mainstream. A VISITATION OF SPIRITS, is the powerful story of Horace Cross, a popular and high-achieving sixteen-year-old boy, who wrestles with the guilt of discovering who he is, a young man attracted to other men and yearning to escape the narrow confines of Tims Creek. Raised on stories of prophets, revelations, and dreams, his internal struggles take shape in his mind as demons and angels battling for his soul, culminating in one night of horrible and tragic transformation. Horace seeks help from his cousin, Reverend James 'Jimmy' Greene, but he finds himself ill-prepared to help the boy, plagued by demons of his own. And as Horace spirals out of control, Jimmy must ask himself what it says about him and his community that they cannot reconcile the spirits of the past with those of the future. Weaving the mythos and the hard realities of rural Black life and easily gliding between past and present, A Visitation of Spirits is a classic novel of growing up from a literary giant.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56369393238389,"sku":"9781917792042","price":10.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781917792042_1be38cc8-770c-4117-819c-1a5535b0fb97.jpg?v=1786030581"},{"product_id":"let-the-dead-bury-the-dead","title":"Let the Dead Bury the Dead","description":"In Tim's Creek, Kenan's imagined eastern Carolina hamlet, the past lingers as a constant beneath the surface and, on occasion, breaks through to assert itself upon the present. Founded by runaway slaves, Tim's Creek exists somewhere between rural idyll and forgotten backwater, but through Kenan's deft excavation of Southern life it becomes a place of myth and national reckoning. A three-year-old child becomes a vessel for the voices of the dead; A demagogue preacher raises an army from the grave; A mother is undone by a drowning that may have been no accident; A pig speaks. Moving with grace and traditional folk cadence, scholarly oral history and lyric realism, Randal Kenan's LET THE DEAD BURY THE DEAD gathers an unforgettable chorus of Black and white, rich and poor, the living and the long-departed. By turns mythic, comic and devastating, Kenan's prose summons a community where the supernatural is simply another fact of life, and where the past presses ceaselessly against the present.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57510131630453,"sku":"9781917792448","price":10.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}]}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/author-randall-kenan.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}