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The Portable Promised Land: Stories - Hardcover

Touré

 
9780316666435: The Portable Promised Land: Stories
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0316666432 ISBN 13: 9780316666435
Verlag: Little, Brown, 2002

Inhaltsangabe

This inspired collection of stories is cause for celebration. With stunning language and dazzling characters, Touré introduces Soul City-a wholly imagined utopia where magic happens and black is beautiful. In a broad range of characterization and styles, The Portable Promised Land is filled with lighthearted humor and heavyhearted issues. Touré challenges form and what's considered politically correct in stories like The Sad, Sweet Story of Sugar Lips Shinehot and Afrolexicolgy Today's Bi-Annual List of the Top 50 Words in African America.

The Portable Promised Land marks the entrance of a new and wildly compelling voice to fiction.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Toure is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone. His fiction has appeared in The Source, Callaloo, and Zoetrope: All Story, where he won the Sam Adams Short Story Contest. His essays have been in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, Tennis Magazine, Essence, George, and Playboy. He has been anthologized in the Best American Essays of 1999 and the Best American Sports Writing 2001. He attended Columbia's MFA program and lives in Brooklyn.

Rezensionen

This collection of stories, vignettes, and essays is a sharp celebration of black urban life, filled with characters at once surreal and familiar. Tour 's Soul City includes people like Huggy Bear and his Steviewondermobile, an automotive expression of his love of Stevie Wonder's music; Reverend Daddy Love, a preacher who loves some of his congregation more than others; and the Jacksons, whose son has been possessed by every black stereotype imaginable. But this book is more than a collection of stories about eccentric residents. There are commentaries on black language (Afrolexicology), rituals for couples breaking up, jazzy tone poems about one-night stands, and tough-love therapy for black men who insist on dating blondes. In this debut collection, Rolling Stone contributing editor Tour has given life in Soul City a comic edge, revealing the humor and absurdities behind the seriousness of race. Even the author's note and acknowledgments are fun to read. Highly recommended.
- Ellen Flexman, Indianapolis-Marion Cty. P.L., Indianapolis, IN
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Tour‚ takes a measured yet whimsical look at the ups and (more often) downs of modern African-American life and culture in his successful debut collection of stories, lists and essays, most of which use racial stereotypes as their jumping-off point. He gets things off to a funny start with "The Steviewondermobile," a snappy yarn about a resident of the mythical Soul City named Huggy Bear Jackson, who installs in his Cadillac a state-of-the-art sound system that will play only the blind soul singer's tunes. "Attack of the Love Dogma" takes a pointedly satiric tack as it portrays a detox center where black men are slowly weaned of their "Blonde Obsession," while "A Hot Time at the Church of Kentucky Fried Souls..." finds one Daddy Love setting up a chapel in an abandoned restaurant formerly run by "that good ol neo-massa Colonel Sanders." Tour‚ displays a fine eye and ear for language in a pair of word-based conceits, "Afrolexicology Today's Bi-Annual List of the Top 50 Words in African-America" and "The African-American Aesthetics Hall of Fame." His over-the-top sense of humor serves him well, although occasionally his sharp but somewhat hyperactive style gets away from him, most notably in a trilogy of stories about a female hip-hopper-cum-ghetto guerrilla named the Black Widow that degenerate into facile diatribes on racial politics. A few missteps aside, this respected essayist and Rolling Stone editor should find an enthusiastic audience for his lively brand of social commentary.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Soul City is a colorful place, with a flying reverend, a black man who can't see white people, basketball players with voodoo shoes, and a militant hip-hop star who, deep down, thinks she's an "Oreo." Perhaps staking out new ground for magical realism, Toure creates in his short stories a vibrant African American metropolis where stereotypes are reclaimed and transformed to artfully address the politics and construction of race. "A Hot Time at the Church of Kentucky Fried Souls and the Spectacular Final Sunday Sermon of the Right Revren Daddy Love" fondly tweaks religion through a minister with enormous appetites; the brief, touching "Blackmanwalkin" shares a small boy's reverie at watching the way his father struts down the street; "The Sambomorphosis" is a daring, funny parable with a shout-out to Kafka. Although these delightful works practically beg to be read aloud, several must work better on stage than on the page. "My History," a revisionist chronology, brings tears to the eyes; "We Words," a torrent of slang, makes them glaze over. Still, Toure is a talent to watch. Keir Graff
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Verlag
Little, Brown
Erscheinungsdatum
2002
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0316666432
ISBN 13 
9780316666435
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
272
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Giunti Editore
n.pederzini@terminaldistribuzione.com

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