A Lesson Before Dying

Author: Ernest J. Gaines
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1400077702
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Book Description
NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • A deep and compassionate novel about a young man who returns to 1940s Cajun country to visit a Black youth on death row for a crime he didn't commit. Together they come to understand the heroism of resisting. "An instant classic." —Chicago Tribune A “majestic, moving novel...an instant classic, a book that will be read, discussed and taught beyond the rest of our lives" (Chicago Tribune), from the critically acclaimed author of A Gathering of Old Men and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. "A Lesson Before Dying reconfirms Ernest J. Gaines's position as an important American writer." —Boston Globe "Enormously moving.... Gaines unerringly evokes the place and time about which he writes." —Los Angeles Times “A quietly moving novel [that] takes us back to a place we've been before to impart a lesson for living.” —San Francisco Chronicle

A Lesson Before Dying

Author: Ernest J. Gaines
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0375702709
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Book Description
NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • A deep and compassionate novel about a young man who returns to 1940s Cajun country to visit a black youth on death row for a crime he didn't commit. Together they come to understand the heroism of resisting. A “majestic, moving novel ... an instant classic, a book that will be read, discussed and taught beyond the rest of our lives" (Chicago Tribune), from the critically acclaimed author of A Gathering of Old Men and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman.

A Lesson in Dying

Author: Ann Cleeves
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 1447253183
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 188

Book Description
Ann Cleeves Classic Crime - engaging mysteries to savour, beloved characters to meet again. A Lesson in Dying is the first mystery novel in the Inspector Ramsay series by Ann Cleeves, author of the Shetland and Vera Stanhope crime series. Who hung the headmaster in the playground on the night of the school Halloween Party? Almost everyone in Heppleburn either hated or feared the viper-tongued Harold Medburn. Inspector Ramsay is convinced it was the headmaster’s enigmatic wife but Jack Robson, school governor and caretaker, is determined to prove her innocence. With the help of his restless daughter Patty, Jack digs into the secrets of Heppleburn, and uncovers a cesspit of lies, adultery, blackmail and madness . . . Continue the classic whodunit series with Murder in My Backyard.

A Lesson Before Dying

Author: Ernest J. Gaines
Publisher: Spark Notes
ISBN: 9781586634766
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 84

Book Description
"I was not there, yet I was there. No, I did not go to the trial, I did not hear the verdict, because I knew all the time what it would be ..." So begins Grant Wiggins, the narrator of Ernest J. Gaines's powerful exploration of race, injustice, and resistance, "A Lesson Before Dying."

Catherine Carmier

Author: Ernest J. Gaines
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0679738916
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Book Description
A compelling debut love story set in a deceptively bucolic Louisiana countryside, where blacks, Cajuns, and whites maintain an uneasy coexistence--by the award-winning author of A Lesson Before Dying and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. After living in San Francisco for ten years, Jackson returns home to his benefactor, Aunt Charlotte. Surrounded by family and old friends, he discovers that his bonds to them have been irreparably rent by his absence. In the midst of his alienation from those around him, he falls in love with Catherine Carmier, setting the stage for conflicts and confrontations which are complex, tortuous, and universal in their implications.

The Tragedy of Brady Sims

Author: Ernest J. Gaines
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 052543447X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 130

Book Description
A courthouse shooting leads a young reporter to uncover the long story of race and power in his small town and the relationship between the white sheriff and the black man who "whipped children" to keep order—in the final novella by the beloved Ernest J. Gaines. After Brady Sims pulls out a gun in a courtroom and shoots his own son, who has just been convicted of robbery and murder, he asks only to be allowed two hours before he'll give himself up to the sheriff. When the editor of the local newspaper asks his cub reporter to dig up a "human interest" story about Brady, he heads for the town's barbershop. It is the barbers and the regulars who hang out there who narrate with empathy, sadness, humor, and a profound understanding the life story of Brady Sims—an honorable, just, and unsparing man who with his tough love had been handed the task of keeping the black children of Bayonne, Louisiana in line to protect them from the unjust world in which they lived. And when his own son makes a fateful mistake, it is up to Brady to carry out the necessary reckoning. In the telling, we learn the story of a small southern town, divided by race, and the black community struggling to survive even as many of its inhabitants head off northwards during the Great Migration.

The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman

Author: Ernest J. Gaines
Publisher: Bantam
ISBN: 030783025X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Book Description
“Grand, robust, a rich and big novel.”—Alice Walker, The New York Times Book Review “In [Jane Pittman], Ernest Gaines has created a legendary figure. . . . Gaines’s novel brings to mind other great works: The Odyssey, for the way his heroine’s travels manage to summarize the American history of her race, and Huckleberry Finn, for the clarity of [Pittman’s] voice, for her rare capacity to sort through the mess of years and things to find the one true story of it all.”—Newsweek Miss Jane Pittman. She is one of the most unforgettable heroines in American fiction, a woman whose life has come to symbolize the struggle for freedom, dignity, and justice. Ernest J. Gaines’s now-classic novel—written as an autobiography—spans one hundred years of Miss Jane’s remarkable life, from her childhood as a slave on a Louisiana plantation to the Civil Rights era of the 1960s. It is a story of courage and survival, history, bigotry, and hope—as seen through the eyes of a woman who lived through it all. A historical tour de force, a triumph of fiction, Miss Jane’s eloquent narrative brings to life an important story of race in America—and stands as a landmark work for our time.

A Gathering of Old Men

Author: Ernest J. Gaines
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307830381
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 226

Book Description
A powerful depiction of racial tensions arising over the death of a Cajun farmer at the hands of a black man--set on a Louisiana sugarcane plantation in the 1970s. The Village Voice called A Gathering of Old Men “the best-written novel on Southern race relations in over a decade.”

King Lear

Author: Jeffrey Kahan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135973652
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 385

Book Description
Is King Lear an autonomous text, or a rewrite of the earlier and anonymous play King Leir? Should we refer to Shakespeare’s original quarto when discussing the play, the revised folio text, or the popular composite version, stitched together by Alexander Pope in 1725? What of its stage variations? When turning from page to stage, the critical view on King Lear is skewed by the fact that for almost half of the four hundred years the play has been performed, audiences preferred Naham Tate's optimistic adaptation, in which Lear and Cordelia live happily ever after. When discussing King Lear, the question of what comprises ‘the play’ is both complex and fragmentary. These issues of identity and authenticity across time and across mediums are outlined, debated, and considered critically by the contributors to this volume. Using a variety of approaches, from postcolonialism and New Historicism to psychoanalysis and gender studies, the leading international contributors to King Lear: New Critical Essays offer major new interpretations on the conception and writing, editing, and cultural productions of King Lear. This book is an up-to-date and comprehensive anthology of textual scholarship, performance research, and critical writing on one of Shakespeare's most important and perplexing tragedies. Contributors Include: R.A. Foakes, Richard Knowles, Tom Clayton, Cynthia Clegg, Edward L. Rocklin, Christy Desmet, Paul Cantor, Robert V. Young, Stanley Stewart and Jean R. Brink

The Sky is Gray

Author: Ernest J. Gaines
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : African Americans
Languages : en
Pages : 32

Book Description
A poor African American boy and his mother experience both discrimination and kindness during a trip to town to see the dentist.