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More
like Wrestling
By Danyel Smith
About the Book
More
like Wrestling is the story of two sisters, Page and Pinch. It is
a coming-of-age
story with its setting in Oakland, California, in the
1980s, at a
time when the beautiful, crumbling city is being transformed by
the dark temptations of its underworld. The
sisters are confronted with a series of surprising
reversals—death, disaster, and, maybe, love—that forces them
to come to grips with the truth about their choices and their
tangled roots.
Smart, stubborn Paige and her silent little
sister, Pinch, enjoy an idyllic if lopsided childhood as
children of a single mother, with visits to the library, ballet
lessons, and Black Panther day care.
But when Paige is 14 and Pinch is 12, their
mother's boyfriend attacks Paige in public, and Paige persuades
their mother to rent the girls their own apartment. Making house
for each other, they begin to attract a circle of friends:
Maynard, Donnell and LaNell, Teeara, Oscar. Through high school
it is all (or mostly) innocent, just microwave dinners together
and trips to Mexicali Rose for burritos.
Then the boys begin to have more money—too
much money. Paige's best friend, Maynard, marries an uptown girl
named Jess and has a baby; Paige drops out of college and starts
dating Oscar. Oscar and Maynard begin dealing drugs; then Jess
is shot and killed, and Paige thinks she knows who's
responsible.
Fiercely independent and sharp as she has
always seemed, she begins to lose her bearings and lean on
Pinch, who is still quiet but surprisingly resilient.
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Lyrical and original . . . Smith
has created vivid characters, a palpable sense of place, and a
wholly absorbing story.—New
York Times Book Review
a promising newcomer—Evette
Porter, Black Issues Book Review
Lyrical and
engaging . . . Smith’s light, sinewy prose sings with
precision. —Washington
Post Bookworld
A wildly intelligent coming-of-age story [and] a morally complex
take on the devastating costs of poverty and racism—a tale
that deals in hard truths and, ultimately, forgiveness.—Elle
Smith’s supple language and the generosity she shows toward
her own imagination and memory allows something new and real to
emerge—a grittier, muckier story, full of the uncertainty of
life.—Africana
I
know and love Danyel as a music writer. Now she writes with
music in her language—and hits all the right notes.—Quincy
Jones
More Like
Wrestling is a work of beauty and moral complexity about
love in its resplendent and damaging incarnations. A brilliant
and bracing debut from a supremely gifted writer.
—Michael
Eric Dyson, author of Why I Love Black Women
Her second novel,
Bliss
will be published July 2005.
More
like Wrestling
(Three Rivers), by Danyel Smith is in paperback. . Read an excerpt
at california authors,
naked cartwheels
pamie.com
coloredgirls
Danyel Smith, author, editor, and critic, is an MFA candidate. She lives in Manhattan, but was
born and brought up in California. Smith is the author of the San
Francisco Chronicle- best-selling novel,
More
like Wrestling, and she wrote the introduction for
the New York Times-bestseller Tupac Shakur. Danyel
is also a former ed-at-large for Time Inc. and a former editor-in-chief
of Vibe. She writes around for Elle,
Cosmo, O, Essence, wrote once (!) for the New
Yorker, still will show up in Rolling Stone sometimes,
still reps in spirit for the San Francisco Bay Guardian,
and wrote concert reviews for the New York Times back in
the day.
posted 7 May 2005
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Life on Mars
By Tracy K. Smith
Tracy K. Smith, author of Life on Mars has been selected as the winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. In its review of the book, Publishers Weekly noted the collection's "lyric brilliance" and "political impulses [that] never falter." A New York Times review stated, "Smith is quick to suggest that the important thing is not to discover whether or not we're alone in the universe; it's to accept—or at least endure—the universe's mystery. . . . Religion, science, art: we turn to them for answers, but the questions persist, especially in times of grief. Smith's pairing of the philosophically minded poems in the book’s first section with the long elegy for her father in the second is brilliant." Life on Mars follows Smith's 2007 collection, Duende, which won the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, the only award for poetry in the United States given to support a poet's second book, and the first Essence Literary Award for poetry, which recognizes the literary achievements of African Americans. The Body’s Question (2003) was her first published collection.
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. . . . .— WashingtonPost
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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If you like this page consider making a donation
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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ChickenBones Store
(Books, DVDs, Music, and more)
update
5 May 2012
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