African Americans - Fiction & Literature

Blacker Than a Thousand Midnights

Name: Blacker Than a Thousand Midnights
Author: Susan Straight
ISBN: 9780385474344

by Susan Straight

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Overview

Named one of the outstanding novels of 1992 by Publishers Weekly, The New York Times Book Review, and USA Today, I Been in Sorrow's Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots established Susan Straight as one of America's foremost chroniclers of African-American life. In Blacker Than a Thousand Midnights, she fulfills the promise of the earlier book, and reintroduces readers to the inhabitants of fictional Rio Seco, California. This is the story of Darnell Tucker, and black firefighter and workingman trying to work the toughest turf of all: the straight and narrow. As his friends disappear around him - victims of the streets, of police dogs, of drugs, of an addiction to cheap thrills and guns - Darnell struggles to establish his own business, facing a thousand midnights before he's home free, with a job that supports his young family. Yet even as he gains a tentative sense of self, Darnell Tucker is drawn to the destructive beauty of fires, and to the wilder, untamed forces beyond the structure of domesticity. This search for balance in a dangerous world propels the quiet heroism of a beautifully evoked and very moving story.

I Been in Sorrow's Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots established Straight as one of America's foremost chroniclers of African American life. Now, with this novel, she becomes one of the first novelists to write about the dangers and complexities facing young African American men today.

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

A young man in East L.A. tries to carve out a place for his family and find a sense of self in this novel by the author of I Been in Sorrow's Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots. (July)