Naylor, Gloria

Mama Day

The Women of Brewster Place (Penguin Contemporary American Fiction Series)

Bailey's Cafe

Set in a diner where the food isn't very good and the ambience veers between heaven and hell, this bestselling novel from the author of Mama Day and The Women of Brewster Place is a feast for the senses and the spirit. "A virtuoso orchestration of survival, suffering, courage and humor."--New York Times Book Review.

Linden Hills (Contemporary American Fiction Series)

1996

Children of the Night: The Best Short Stories by Black Writers, 1967 to the Present

The Men of Brewster Place: A Novel

Gloria Naylor revisits the dilapidated brick walls, sagging ceilings, and decrepit plumbing of Brewster Place, a feeble fortress that jealously guards the hell, heartache, and hope of its tenants. Ben, the kind, alcoholic janitor from The Women of Brewster Place returns as a mythical minstrel of sorts, wandering in and out of the lives of Brewster's male denizens, introducing their stories, each a quest for the meaning of manhood.

For autistic Brother Jerome, masculine identity comes in the form of a rickety upright piano whose missing keys and wobbly wires burst to life when he plays. Jerome plays so well (better than Count Basie, mind you) that his hedonistic mother decides not to institutionalize him so she can charge for his performances. Eugene, however, has a more difficult act to shore: he's married, he's a father, and he's gay. Ceil, his wife, doesn't know that's why he keeps leaving, so she takes family matters into her own hands and sends Eugene into a bottomless pit of guilt and self-loathing. Basil looks for his redemption in a contemptuous trash bag named Keisha and her two beautiful, neglected sons, Jason and Eddie. Will Basil find atonement for his sins against his mother if he gives those boys what he never received as a child? The men of Brewster Place continue to stream into the story in raw, biting vignettes until the stage is full and the future of their community is threatened. Can these men come together and reclaim what's theirs? The answer lies at the root of self-worth and sexual identity. Or, in the words of Ben, "Brewster Place is a small street but it seems there's an endless supply of I coulda, I shoulda, but didn't. Can you call it any man's blues? I don't know, but you can definitely call it the black man's blues." --Rebekah Warren

Gloria Naylor Reads: The Women of Brewster Place and Mama Day

The Best American Essays of the Century (The Best American Series (TM))

The title The Best American Essays of the Century seems transparent enough, but don't be deceived. What Joyce Carol Oates has assembled is not so much a diverse collection as a sonorous march through what keeps getting called the American century. Read this not as a collection to dip into but as a history--a history of race in America. Oates says it best herself in her introduction: "It can't be an accident that essays in this volume by men and women of ethnic minority backgrounds are outstanding; to paraphrase Melville, to write a 'mighty' work of prose you must have a 'mighty' theme." The mighty pens at work here belong to, among others, Zora Neale Hurston ("How It Feels to Be Colored Me"), Langston Hughes ("Bop"), and James Baldwin ("Notes of a Native Son"). Oates has opted not for the most unexpected but for the most important and stirring essays of our time.

Other chords sound repeatedly as well: the problem of our relationship with nature (Annie Dillard, John Muir, and Gretel Ehrlich); the difficulty of identity in disrupted times (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Joan Didion, and Michael Herr). In her essay "The White Album," Didion famously declares: "We tell ourselves stories in order to live." The stories Oates has collected are not easy. Here is the hard-won truth, from writers unwilling to forgive even themselves. Even Martin Luther King Jr. doesn't let himself off the hook, as he writes in his "Letter from Birmingham Jail": "If I have said anything in this letter that is an overstatement of the truth and is indicative of an unreasonable impatience, I beg you to forgive me. If I have said anything in this letter that is an understatement of the truth and is indicative of my having a patience that makes me patient with anything less than brotherhood, I beg God to forgive me." --Claire Dederer

For this singular collection, Joyce Carol Oates selected fifty-five unforgettable essays by the finest American writers of the twentieth century. Here is a sampling -- twelve unabridged essays -- featuring a wide variety of contemporary writers reading classics of the genre, along with authors reading their own work. Nothing less than a political, spiritual, and intensely personal record of America's tumultuous modern age, THE BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS OF THE CENTURY is "an outstanding, galvanic collection" (Entertainment Weekly).

Conversations With Gloria Naylor (Literary Conversations Series)

In 1982, one year after graduating from Brooklyn College, Gloria Naylor (b. 1950) made her debut on the literary scene with The Women of Brewster Place. The novel was critically acclaimed, filmed as a made-for-television movie, and turned into a television mini-series. Naylor's output now includes five novels, an edited collection of short stories, two theater projects, and a series of articles, essays, notes, and an unpublished work that combines fiction and nonfiction.

Conversations with Gloria Naylor collects her interviews and shows her to be one of the most talented novelists to emerge in the past twenty years. The twenty-four that are included range from 1983, soon after the publication of her first novel, to 2000, following the publication of The Men of Brewster Place. Altogether they shed light on Naylor in all her wit, wisdom, and candor. She is the first among the current generation of African American women novelists to have made a study of her literary predecessors. Interviews with her are compelling in their revelation of the evolutionary journey of a self-professed introvert and dreamer who is as indebted to the English classics as she is to blues, jazz, or Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye.

An indispensable resource for a study of Naylor's life and art, Conversations with Gloria Naylor offers rare insight into works that are in the vanguard of contemporary American literature.