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Let the Dead Bury Their Dead: Southern Short Stories – African American Folklore, Magic, and LGBTQ Themes
“Nothing short of a wonder-book.”— New York Times Book Review The story collection that hailed the arrival of an essential voice in southern literature — a sharp, rich exploration of what it means to poor, Black, and gay in the United States. A three-year-old boy begins to deliver messages from dead relatives. A zombie uprising is led by an evil preacher. A woman is haunted by a child her husband may have drowned. A pig talks. The stories in Let the Dead Bury Their Dead embody the type of fiction that defined Randall Kenan's set in the thinly veiled fictional Carolina town of Tims Creek, they follow a diverse cast of Southern folkways, and stare into a long shadow of history. A stunning mix of magic, myth, and folktales, Kenan masterfully portrays a world of varied voices, and in wondrous prose, brings to life the ghosts of our past and present.
336 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1992
35 people are currently reading
2818 people want to read
About the author
Randall Kenan
25 books272 followersRandall Kenan's first novel, A Visitation of Spirits was published by Grove Press in 1989; and a collection of stories, Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, was published in 1992 by Harcourt, Brace. That collection was nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Fiction, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was among The New York Times Notable Books of 1992. He was also the author of a young adult biography of James Baldwin (1993), and wrote the text for Norman Mauskoff=s book of photographs, A Time Not Here: The Mississippi Delta (1997). Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1999, and was nominated for the Southern Book Award.
He was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1963, and spent his childhood in Chinquapin, North Carolina. He attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he received a B.A. in English in 1985. From 1985 to 1989 he worked on the editorial staff of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc, publishers. In 1989 he began teaching writing at Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University. He was the first William Blackburn Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Duke University in the fall of 1994, and the Edourd Morot-Sir Visiting Professor of Creating Writing at his alma mater in 1995. He was the John and Renee Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi, Oxford (1997-98),Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Memphis, and held the Lehman-Brady Professorship at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. He has also taught urban literature at Vassar College.
He was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, the Sherwood Anderson Award, the John Dos Passos Prize, and was the 1997 Rome Prize winner from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Kenan passed away in August 2020, just after his short story collection "If I Had Two Wings" was published.
He was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1963, and spent his childhood in Chinquapin, North Carolina. He attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he received a B.A. in English in 1985. From 1985 to 1989 he worked on the editorial staff of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc, publishers. In 1989 he began teaching writing at Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University. He was the first William Blackburn Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Duke University in the fall of 1994, and the Edourd Morot-Sir Visiting Professor of Creating Writing at his alma mater in 1995. He was the John and Renee Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi, Oxford (1997-98),Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Memphis, and held the Lehman-Brady Professorship at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. He has also taught urban literature at Vassar College.
He was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, the Sherwood Anderson Award, the John Dos Passos Prize, and was the 1997 Rome Prize winner from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Kenan passed away in August 2020, just after his short story collection "If I Had Two Wings" was published.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 94 reviews
May 18, 2024
Time for a re-read of this, one of the best collections ever
July 18, 2013
This has become one of my favorite books of all time! "Let the Ded Bury Their Dead" by Randall Kenan is a collection of short stories that are set in a rural town in North Carolina.Issues of race, religion, family, and sexuality arise in the book and how relationships between each people have affected their past and their future.
I loved this book because of the well-developed characterization. All of Kenan's major characters were round, three dimensional and polarizing. Kenan also manipulates the writer's voice by constantly changing the POV and the format of the story...something within the same story. This book gives a writing student a broad spectrum of the uses of voice. He also relies on folksy, Southern language that emanates throughout the stories..no matter the character or plot. The lesson that I took away from this book in terms of writing is that a good writer explores the boundaries of voice. He or she crafts a story and tells it however they see fit...an independent writer. If I can get my students to value the independence in writing, then this book would be a great guide for their future writing.
I loved this book because of the well-developed characterization. All of Kenan's major characters were round, three dimensional and polarizing. Kenan also manipulates the writer's voice by constantly changing the POV and the format of the story...something within the same story. This book gives a writing student a broad spectrum of the uses of voice. He also relies on folksy, Southern language that emanates throughout the stories..no matter the character or plot. The lesson that I took away from this book in terms of writing is that a good writer explores the boundaries of voice. He or she crafts a story and tells it however they see fit...an independent writer. If I can get my students to value the independence in writing, then this book would be a great guide for their future writing.
August 15, 2008
The book (a collection of short stories) centers on the residents of Tims Creek, NC, and has me looking at people in the grocery store differently. I mean, EVERYONE has some freakishly interesting story in their life--yes?--and that's the rock Kenan flips & roots around beneath. A minister eulogizes at his mistresses' funeral, a kid interprets the "speech" of a pig, a 51 year old woman has an affair with a 19 year old, a boy spends time with his old Aunt Essie, and a woman of property is haunted by a youth from her past. There's more, and it's all good stuff.
February 8, 2015
Very edgy!!! Against the grain in every way possible and I loved it! Randall has a gem here
September 26, 2024
I read this novel (it is a collection of stories but so unified, even though each is unique and complete in itself, that it is wrong to call it anything else) in 2018 but, though I loved it, I didn't review it then so I have reread, loved it just as much on a second reading and will now give it the review I should have given years ago.
When this book came out it instantly drew, and still does, comparisons with Marquez and magic realism and Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha county but it is time to allow Randall Kenan to stand free of supportive comparisons because he casts as much credit on Gabriel Garcia Marquez and William Faulkner as they cast on him and before anything else I want to separate Kenan, I hope forever, from these cliched comparisons.
The easiest to dispose of is Marquez, poor old GGM is saddled for eternity with a writing 'style' that only really deserves to be applied to one of his novels but has become the definition of almost all writing from below the Rio Grande. Magic realism is now a market slogan and cliche - I wonder if it was ever anything more. I don't mean to come over all Edward Said but it does reek of the 'exotic', it is not the sort of term literary scholars like Edmund Wilson would have used. It does not preclude admiration but it suggests exceptionalism - like all those 'crazy' baroque churches of South America - admirable but not part of the mainstream story. Least I have confused anyone what I am saying is that Randall Kenan is no exotic exception - his writing and his stories are as American as Hemingway or Fitzgerald.
As for Faulkner (full disclosure - I haven't read any work by Faulkner since I read 'Absalom, Absalom'
over thirty years ago and I thought it wonderful, overwhelming and like encountering again a giant of literature like Mann, Tolstoy or Flaubert) he is a great writer but specifically he is 'one' of the great Southern USA writers. But he is not the only one and he laid no template that others must follow or be compared to. Kenan is not Faulkner and Tims Creek is not Yoknapatawpha county and in many ways it is invidious to compare the two places, you may say that Kenan's Tims Creek compliments or even completes Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha county but it is not dependent on it. Tims Creek would exist without Faulkner, its stories are of those of people not encompassed by Faulkner except in walk on roles. That the stories of places like Tims Creek have been seen for too long as, no matter how worthy, as somehow outside the mainstream says more then I have time or inclination to delineate. Tims Creek is not defined by its ability to measure up to Yoknapatawpha county but by its ability to stand alongside and even supersede it.
Finally I want to comment on one particular story in 'Let the Dead Bury Their Dead' - 'This Far; or, A Body in Motion'. Before anything else I want to be clear that I don't believe a great writer is limited in their ability to enter into any character but I do believe that only a Black American writer could have created this masterful, but subtlety devastating, portrait of Booker T. Washington. Kenan's portrayal of Booker T. in his lauded, praised and triumphant apotheosis as 'emperor' of his race is seen coming to terms with the eclipse that death will bring to his reputation and work. No one will deny what he did and accomplished, the story of his rise from poverty is inspiring but, and there it is that doleful but - somewhere he managed to lose? betray? forget? compromise? what it was for - that he had acquired prestige, power and influence by the sacrifice, or at least continual postponement of any immediate respite in the poverty and injustice Black Americans were kept in. He was lauded by the Whites, he became 'their' black man and maybe he was more comfortable with them.
It is a superb story and vastly more accomplished than my gross simplifications. But at its heart is the story of a man who realises he somehow has strayed into cul-de-sac, and that rather than making history he has, perhaps betrayed it, but certainly whose future is no better than what Shelley saw in 'Ozymandias':
"I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away"
If you like Marquez or Faulkner read Kenan - not because he is like them, but because he is as unique and brilliant as they are. As a writer I think Kenan is someone who will be read long after almost every current author that regularly fills the few remaining bookstore shelves is as forgotten as the 'three decker' best sellers of Victorian times. He is the real thing.
When this book came out it instantly drew, and still does, comparisons with Marquez and magic realism and Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha county but it is time to allow Randall Kenan to stand free of supportive comparisons because he casts as much credit on Gabriel Garcia Marquez and William Faulkner as they cast on him and before anything else I want to separate Kenan, I hope forever, from these cliched comparisons.
The easiest to dispose of is Marquez, poor old GGM is saddled for eternity with a writing 'style' that only really deserves to be applied to one of his novels but has become the definition of almost all writing from below the Rio Grande. Magic realism is now a market slogan and cliche - I wonder if it was ever anything more. I don't mean to come over all Edward Said but it does reek of the 'exotic', it is not the sort of term literary scholars like Edmund Wilson would have used. It does not preclude admiration but it suggests exceptionalism - like all those 'crazy' baroque churches of South America - admirable but not part of the mainstream story. Least I have confused anyone what I am saying is that Randall Kenan is no exotic exception - his writing and his stories are as American as Hemingway or Fitzgerald.
As for Faulkner (full disclosure - I haven't read any work by Faulkner since I read 'Absalom, Absalom'
over thirty years ago and I thought it wonderful, overwhelming and like encountering again a giant of literature like Mann, Tolstoy or Flaubert) he is a great writer but specifically he is 'one' of the great Southern USA writers. But he is not the only one and he laid no template that others must follow or be compared to. Kenan is not Faulkner and Tims Creek is not Yoknapatawpha county and in many ways it is invidious to compare the two places, you may say that Kenan's Tims Creek compliments or even completes Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha county but it is not dependent on it. Tims Creek would exist without Faulkner, its stories are of those of people not encompassed by Faulkner except in walk on roles. That the stories of places like Tims Creek have been seen for too long as, no matter how worthy, as somehow outside the mainstream says more then I have time or inclination to delineate. Tims Creek is not defined by its ability to measure up to Yoknapatawpha county but by its ability to stand alongside and even supersede it.
Finally I want to comment on one particular story in 'Let the Dead Bury Their Dead' - 'This Far; or, A Body in Motion'. Before anything else I want to be clear that I don't believe a great writer is limited in their ability to enter into any character but I do believe that only a Black American writer could have created this masterful, but subtlety devastating, portrait of Booker T. Washington. Kenan's portrayal of Booker T. in his lauded, praised and triumphant apotheosis as 'emperor' of his race is seen coming to terms with the eclipse that death will bring to his reputation and work. No one will deny what he did and accomplished, the story of his rise from poverty is inspiring but, and there it is that doleful but - somewhere he managed to lose? betray? forget? compromise? what it was for - that he had acquired prestige, power and influence by the sacrifice, or at least continual postponement of any immediate respite in the poverty and injustice Black Americans were kept in. He was lauded by the Whites, he became 'their' black man and maybe he was more comfortable with them.
It is a superb story and vastly more accomplished than my gross simplifications. But at its heart is the story of a man who realises he somehow has strayed into cul-de-sac, and that rather than making history he has, perhaps betrayed it, but certainly whose future is no better than what Shelley saw in 'Ozymandias':
"I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away"
If you like Marquez or Faulkner read Kenan - not because he is like them, but because he is as unique and brilliant as they are. As a writer I think Kenan is someone who will be read long after almost every current author that regularly fills the few remaining bookstore shelves is as forgotten as the 'three decker' best sellers of Victorian times. He is the real thing.
August 30, 2020
A phenomenal short story collection by a writer whom I have admired and read with respect and admiration since I first encountered him. Randall Kenan died a couple of days ago, after publishing a new book of stories that I have not read yet. But reviewing this book feels like a way to find some solace in his passing. Randall's writing was exquisite; the world of his stories is beautiful; the last story in this volume is a transcendent piece of short fiction. He was a child of eastern North Carolina, as I am. As a writer he reminded me of Toni Morrison and Faulkner, though Faulkner is someone of whom I am not so fond any more. Maybe also of Nordan in the way his writing blends reality and extra-reality. He will be greatly missed. But his work will always be with us.
July 19, 2017
SIX WORD REVIEW: "Clarence and the Dead"-whoo boy.
April 28, 2022
This was a real mixed bag of some sensational short stories along with a few really bad ones. The best story in the book was "The Foundations of the Earth" about a very religious Black grandmother whose beloved grown grandson is killed in an accident. She finds out that her grandson had been gay when she meets his white partner at the funeral and is in a state of shock. Kenan beautifully told the story of her slow transition from shock to acceptance to a complete revision of her world outlook after getting to know the young white man. Another very good story was "Things of this world" about an eighty-six year old man who gets revenge after his dog is killed by a racist family. "The Strange and Tragic Ballad of Mabel Pearsall" was another very good but disturbing tale of a woman going insane. Other good stories were "What are Days" about a fifty one year old woman and a nineteen year old boy and "Tell Me, Tell Me" about a woman who kept imagining a young black boy in her upstairs. The worst story was the title story "Let the Dead Bury Their Dead". It was a confusing mess about a slave named Pharaoh who escaped and attained supernatural powers that was written in a way that, I guess, could be described as experimental. Overall, though, the book was excellent, there were just a few stories I didn't care for.
March 5, 2023
"You will die on November 15 of this year, at a quarter to five in the morning. You will become more tired, sicker; you will try to rest, but It will continue to spur you on, to cajole you to move. Even now in the darkness you hear Its voice - river-deep, soft, soothing. Soon, It says, soon and very soon. And you will keep moving moving moving moving moving to finish to finish to finish - what? Do you know?"
Have you ever loved a book so much you have wanted to eat it?
It's strange to call something as dark as this book, full of the mystic, at the same time full of harsh social realities, as comforting. But somehow it was. It was comforting in ways that books can give you a perspective on the larger global and social context, of how people universally have struggled, continue to struggle, how they fail, how they exhibit vulnerability, how they strive, how there is a history beneath history... saying that people have gone through certain things time and again. All I can say is that I needed this book right now, or that this book happened to me at the right time (just like War & Peace happened to me years ago when I needed a metaphorical shake to buck up and move move move).
In 'Let the Dead Bury Their Dead', we meet the people of Tim's Creek, North Carolina. Through stories of its people, Kenan takes us through the history and evolution of this town across the twentieth century. A child with the power to see the future and the past... misunderstood and ostracized. An elderly black man making his last stand against a racist landowner. A woman coming to terms with her dead grandson's homosexuality, trying to understand, trying to reframe everything she has been taught. A young poverty-stricken man duped into deceiving a man he may love. The wife of a racist judge seeing the ghost of a young black child her husband might have brutally killed.
Stories of individuals, but also societal failures. Stories of guilt, desperation, loneliness, brutality, but also of hope, humour, kindness, of the joy of living and loving.
The writing is so lush, so magical, so delicious! There were passages that might have made me shed a tear or two with their indescribably relevant insight into the human condition, passages that horrified me with the reality of human atrocities, and passages that left me in awe.
Have I said I loved this? Well, I did, so so much. I recommend this super hard.
Have you ever loved a book so much you have wanted to eat it?
It's strange to call something as dark as this book, full of the mystic, at the same time full of harsh social realities, as comforting. But somehow it was. It was comforting in ways that books can give you a perspective on the larger global and social context, of how people universally have struggled, continue to struggle, how they fail, how they exhibit vulnerability, how they strive, how there is a history beneath history... saying that people have gone through certain things time and again. All I can say is that I needed this book right now, or that this book happened to me at the right time (just like War & Peace happened to me years ago when I needed a metaphorical shake to buck up and move move move).
In 'Let the Dead Bury Their Dead', we meet the people of Tim's Creek, North Carolina. Through stories of its people, Kenan takes us through the history and evolution of this town across the twentieth century. A child with the power to see the future and the past... misunderstood and ostracized. An elderly black man making his last stand against a racist landowner. A woman coming to terms with her dead grandson's homosexuality, trying to understand, trying to reframe everything she has been taught. A young poverty-stricken man duped into deceiving a man he may love. The wife of a racist judge seeing the ghost of a young black child her husband might have brutally killed.
Stories of individuals, but also societal failures. Stories of guilt, desperation, loneliness, brutality, but also of hope, humour, kindness, of the joy of living and loving.
The writing is so lush, so magical, so delicious! There were passages that might have made me shed a tear or two with their indescribably relevant insight into the human condition, passages that horrified me with the reality of human atrocities, and passages that left me in awe.
Have I said I loved this? Well, I did, so so much. I recommend this super hard.
January 29, 2017
One of my favorite short story collections. Funny, sexy, twisted, sad, or completely free from the bounds of classification. Loved it.
September 19, 2007
All of the short stories in this book are very carefully crafted, and all center the experiences of people, usually black people, in or from the fictional small town of Tims Creek, North Carolina. Different narrative forms are used in different stories, some extremely interesting, but some distract from the narrativity of the stories. For example, one that didn't work for me in this way is "Ragnarok! The Day the Gods Die," in which a preacher's recollections of his illicit affair with Louise Tate are juxtaposed with his sermon at her funeral. I was fascinated, however, by how Kenan interwined narrativity and form in the title story, "Let the Dead Bury Their Dead": it is written as an oral history interview, complete with extensive footnotes, some of which reference actual historical literature. "This Far" is a tremendously scathing fictional portrayal of Booker T. Washington. In "Clarence and the Dead" and "Things of This World" the characterizations are tremendously compelling. This book is definitely worth reading -- even the stories that didn't completely win me over contain little gems.
June 5, 2020
Magnetic and intoxicating. Mystical, sensual, warmly southern, and eerie. One of my favorite books I have ever read.
How I would imagine the lovechild of Edgar Allen Poe's stories, Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, Harper Lee's TKAM, Mary Reufle's Trances of the Blast, and Vonnegut's early books. I am completely immersed in Tims Creek, NC. It exists. There is some magic there, the lingering magic of a powerful past, and people with their eyes open enough to acknowledge it. Kenan addresses homophobia, racism, and incest without once breaking the tone of the work. He has created a real town full of real people with a deep and rich history. This book carries both folklore and truth.
I am inspired. I am in love. I am ashamed. I am proudly rooted in my southernness.
Read it. For your own soul, read it.
How I would imagine the lovechild of Edgar Allen Poe's stories, Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, Harper Lee's TKAM, Mary Reufle's Trances of the Blast, and Vonnegut's early books. I am completely immersed in Tims Creek, NC. It exists. There is some magic there, the lingering magic of a powerful past, and people with their eyes open enough to acknowledge it. Kenan addresses homophobia, racism, and incest without once breaking the tone of the work. He has created a real town full of real people with a deep and rich history. This book carries both folklore and truth.
I am inspired. I am in love. I am ashamed. I am proudly rooted in my southernness.
Read it. For your own soul, read it.
March 3, 2017
This book emanates a wild energy; even though some stories are weaker than others all has an excellent flow and a personality. The way Kenan uses Tims Creek, detached in a way in time and space and has its own existence, is beautiful. The best story in the collection is the namesake Let the dead Bury Their Dead; its inventiveness and endless quirkiness was a joy to read. The story with Mabel left the biggest visual imprint on me and all stories talked to me in some way or another. It is an exemplary short story collection.
February 7, 2021
There were many artistic creations done in the 90’s which I greatly enjoyed and at around the halfway point of this I knew it was officially another. Besides the stories being entertaining, the author showed his writing skills in differentiating the voices & personalities of the characters in each one, so much so that I occasionally wondered if Kenan was indeed the sole composer of the book. Whereas this is something I’m hoping to improve on as a writer myself, it was one of the main things that stood out to me as being impressive, although I think having each story be so individualized, it possibly slowed me down a bit, having to snap out of the zone an entry put me in at its conclusion and acclimate to another once beginning it, which occasionally for me was a process. Overall I still liked each story though, albeit some more than others, but I would still recommend. Heads up to anyone who might want to check it out, (not a spoiler I THINK) a couple of the stories reference Booker T. Washington so it may make the read more enjoyable to familiarize yourself with him first if you’re not already including reading his book “Up From Slavery”.
February 7, 2022
An excellent short story collection, which is outside my comfort zone on many levels (starting with it being a collection and including the many CWs) and has definitely taken root in my brain. The first and the last story are well-chosen bookends, easing you in with a darkly humorous tale and leaving you with the postmodern, footnoted craziness of the history of Tims Creek. As for the rest, "Tell Me, Tell Me" and "The Strange and Tragic Ballad of Mabel Pearsall" stick out to me on the horror side, while "Things of this World" and "The Foundations of the Earth" have a softer, more melancholic beauty... but all of it is neither tragic nor gratuitous (except possibly "Cornsilk"), just very real.
April 18, 2024
Fantastic!!!!!! Read a short story from this in my freshman year of college and have been meaning to read the whole thing. I’ve always felt like NC has a supernatural, unique setting and geography that is deserving of many more magical realism stories, and is like the Pacific Northwest in its connection to ancient American history/the supernatural. Like Twin Peaks, Kenan crafts Tim’s Creek into a rich, mystical, troubled, powerful home. This book just makes me love my Carolina home even more :) Rest in peace, Kenan 🩷
February 6, 2022
4.5/5, an amazing read with so much literary range and humanity within each of the stories. A must read for someone interested in North Carolina writers & fiction more generally.
Would have been 5 stars for me, but I found the final story to be really difficult to get through because of the addition of the long footnotes breaking up the text. It was a way of writing fiction I hadn’t seen before, but it did slow me down significantly and made it more difficult to follow.
Would have been 5 stars for me, but I found the final story to be really difficult to get through because of the addition of the long footnotes breaking up the text. It was a way of writing fiction I hadn’t seen before, but it did slow me down significantly and made it more difficult to follow.
January 21, 2021
Wow wow wowwww. An absolute Southern Gothic masterpiece. Kenan writes about Tims Creek in a way that is reminiscent of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County....only better. Early contender for fave of the year.
February 15, 2025
I can definitely see why this won all the awards it did when published in the 90s; happy black history month!
February 20, 2021
Holy crap! This collection of short stories written by Randall Kenan ranges from the supernatural, to the scandalous all in its 300-odd pages. Prior to reading this, I read A Visitation of Spirits by Kenan and honestly, I wasn’t sold on the story. But this!!! THIS collection reminds me of why I write and and what kind of writer I want to become. Top #5 faves of all time.
October 4, 2025
Excellent collection of stories. Consistent, visceral, unexpected. I was unprepared. I was wowed. I am quite thrilled to have read it.
July 16, 2015
In short - I read it cause I guy I thought was hot said it was his favorite book. I liked the first story. The rest I thought were empty and directionless. It won some awards, I think, but none from me, and I lost interest in the guy, too. He's straight. Figures.
January 22, 2009
Randall Kenan's story-telling is off-the-chain! Is it fantasy? Is it reality? Are the characters crazy? It keeps you guessing, and I like it! Dude is fearless, which can be a pro or con, depending on your perspective. I want to write like him when I grow up!
November 4, 2013
moving, charming, but dated
October 14, 2014
Brilliant stories. That's all. Brilliant stories. Kenan is amazing.
June 19, 2020
heavy, witty, complex, captivating
October 29, 2020
I found the prose in this set of stories to be luminous. Kenan (whom I learned from other reviews here died recently) truly had a gift. I have to admit I did not like all of the stories, but I loved several, and admired the ones which did not work for me. Kenan took risks; there is no consistent approach to writing short stories visible in this volume, and that experimentation really impresses me. I also like the fact that the generally substantial (2o or more pages), which allows more time for plot and character development. stories are
Two other aspects of this book struck me as memorable. (1) Kenan has an eye for detail, and especially for dialogue. Having once lived in the South for a number of years, the characters in these stories come through as real. (2) Even more important, the humanity he displays is deeply moving. Even the "bad" people have some redeeming qualities (well, maybe I am stretching this a bit concerning Percy Terrell. While this is a book largely about the lives of Black people, the White characters seem fairly depicted.
A tribute to a writer is when you find yourself believing that what is written in a work of fiction is something that actually happened. The characters and the stories are for the most part believable. even the clearly impossible opening story in the volume, "Clarence and the Dead."
While the book is not perfect, it is a remarkable reading experience. Both the writing ability and the spirit of the author are moving and memorable.
Two other aspects of this book struck me as memorable. (1) Kenan has an eye for detail, and especially for dialogue. Having once lived in the South for a number of years, the characters in these stories come through as real. (2) Even more important, the humanity he displays is deeply moving. Even the "bad" people have some redeeming qualities (well, maybe I am stretching this a bit concerning Percy Terrell. While this is a book largely about the lives of Black people, the White characters seem fairly depicted.
A tribute to a writer is when you find yourself believing that what is written in a work of fiction is something that actually happened. The characters and the stories are for the most part believable. even the clearly impossible opening story in the volume, "Clarence and the Dead."
While the book is not perfect, it is a remarkable reading experience. Both the writing ability and the spirit of the author are moving and memorable.
September 25, 2023
A solid collection of stories set in a fictional settlement that one surmises is very like Kenan's hometown. I'd have like to have seem more connections between the events in the individual stories rather than just mentions of characters featured in other stories, but that's just me.
The story that the collection takes its title from must really have been quite a labor to write. The "oral history" being, perhaps, easy enough but all the "references" that had to be invented must have been labor intensive. I'm not sure whether any of these references were real (A.M. Homes is attributed as the editor of a collection of letters written by one of Kenan's characters and I'm sure I must have missed other little jokes) but the author must surely have drawn from some actual literature to compose, say, the non-historical bits. The longish footnote about the biology of the persimmon tree, for example.
The story that the collection takes its title from must really have been quite a labor to write. The "oral history" being, perhaps, easy enough but all the "references" that had to be invented must have been labor intensive. I'm not sure whether any of these references were real (A.M. Homes is attributed as the editor of a collection of letters written by one of Kenan's characters and I'm sure I must have missed other little jokes) but the author must surely have drawn from some actual literature to compose, say, the non-historical bits. The longish footnote about the biology of the persimmon tree, for example.
February 18, 2021
Reading this collection almost felt like listening to good concept album. The format is especially compelling - I loved that the stories range drastically in style, yet they are united in that they explore the lives of people living in the same small town.
I've never gotten into Flannery O'Connor, but what I loved about these stories seems similar to what those who love O'Connor say about her stories. Maybe with the caveat that Kenan seems to care about his characters, even his most flawed ones, in a way I haven't seen in O'Connor. But they both explore questions of spirituality and morality in similar ways.
Thematically, I think I'd shelve this next to The Fire Next Time; Let the Great World Spin; A Good Man is hard to Find; There, There, and A Hundred Years of Solitude.
I've never gotten into Flannery O'Connor, but what I loved about these stories seems similar to what those who love O'Connor say about her stories. Maybe with the caveat that Kenan seems to care about his characters, even his most flawed ones, in a way I haven't seen in O'Connor. But they both explore questions of spirituality and morality in similar ways.
Thematically, I think I'd shelve this next to The Fire Next Time; Let the Great World Spin; A Good Man is hard to Find; There, There, and A Hundred Years of Solitude.
February 23, 2021
While I felt that the book didn't quite compare to Kenan's previous book, the novel "A Visitation of Spirits," these stories are consistently affecting and always complex. Would certainly reward re-reading, and the strongest moments (which are many) are worth the few that don't perfectly hit their marks (often due to a tendency towards narrative experimentation that can distract from the meat of the story).
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