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Summary:

"A searing and profound Southern odyssey by National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward. In Jesmyn Ward's first novel since her National Book Award-winning Salvage the Bones, this singular American writer brings the archetypal road novel into rural twenty-first-century America. Drawing on Morrison and Faulkner, The Odyssey and the Old Testament, Ward gives us an epochal story, a journey through Mississippi's past and present that is both an intimate portrait of a family and an epic tale of hope and struggle. Ward is a major American writer, multiply awarded and universally lauded, and in Sing, Unburied, Sing she is at the height of her powers. Jojo and his toddler sister, Kayla, live with their grandparents, Mam and Pop, and the occasional presence of their drug-addicted mother, Leonie, on a farm on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. Leonie is simultaneously tormented and comforted by visions of her dead brother, which only come to her when she's high; Mam is dying of cancer; and quiet, steady Pop tries to run the household and teach Jojo how to be a man. When the white father of Leonie's children is released from prison, she packs her kids and a friend into her car and sets out across the state for Parchman farm, the Mississippi State Penitentiary, on a journey rife with danger and promise. Sing, Unburied, Sing grapples with the ugly truths at the heart of the American story and the power, and limitations, of the bonds of family. Rich with Ward's distinctive, musical language, Sing, Unburied, Sing is a majestic new work and an essential contribution to American literature"-- [Provided by publisher]

Author/Creator:

Ward, Jesmyn , author

Contributors:

Pat Warde Memorial Collection of Southern Letters

Languages:

English

Language Notes:

Item content: English

Main Work:

Sing, unburied, sing: a novel [by Ward, J.]

Subjects:

African American families — Mississippi — Fiction

Multiracial families — Fiction

Drug abuse — Fiction

African American families

Racially mixed families

Drug abuse

United States

Mississippi

Genres:

Thrillers (Fiction)

Road fiction

Ghost stories

Domestic fiction

Fiction

General Notes:

(Special Collections copy, copy 3) Purchase : Funded by the Pat Warde Endowment for Southern Letters.
(Special Collections copy, copy 3) Bound in publisher's red paper-covered boards with blue spine titles, retaining original decorated dust jacket, and housed in publisher's matching slipcase.
(Special Collections copy, copy 3) Signed by author on 2nd page. Accompanied by small booklet about the volume, naming it IndieSpensable #69, by Powell's Books.
(Special Collections copy, copy 3) Purchased with funds provided by the Pat Warde Endowment for Southern Letters.

Physical Description:

289 pages ; 22 cm

Call Numbers:

PS3623.A7323 S56 2017
JFic W259si

ISBNs:

9781501126062 (hardback)
1501126067 (hardback)
9781501126079 (trade paper)
1501126075 (trade paper)
9781501176661
1501176668
9781501126093 (ebook) [Invalid]

Library of Congress Control Numbers:

2017039315

OCLC Numbers:

1001340693