In these five stories, Ernest Gaines returns to the cane fields, sharecroppers' shacks, and decaying plantation houses of Louisiana, the terrain of his great novels A Gathering of Old Men and A Lesson Before Dying. As rendered by Gaines, this country becomes as familiar, and as haunted by cruelty, suffering, and courage, as Ralph Ellison's Harlem or Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County.

Gaines introduces us to this world through the eyes of guileless children and wizened jailbirds, black tenants and white planters.  He shows his characters eking out a living and making love, breaking apart aand coming together.  And on every page he captures the soul of black community whose circumstances make even the slightest assertion of self-respect an act of majestic—and sometimes suicidal—heroism.  Bloodline is a miracle of storytelling.

STORIES INCLUDE:

A Long Day in November
The Sky Is Gray
Three Men
Bloodline
Just Like a Tree
© Steven Forster
Ernest Gaines was born on a plantation in Pointe Coupee Parish near New Roads, Louisiana, which is the Bayonne of all his fictional works. He is a writer-in-residence emeritus at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Gaines received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1993 for his lifetime achievements; was named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, one of France’s highest decorations, in 1996; and was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2004. He and his wife, Dianne, live in Oscar, Louisiana. View titles by Ernest J. Gaines

About

In these five stories, Ernest Gaines returns to the cane fields, sharecroppers' shacks, and decaying plantation houses of Louisiana, the terrain of his great novels A Gathering of Old Men and A Lesson Before Dying. As rendered by Gaines, this country becomes as familiar, and as haunted by cruelty, suffering, and courage, as Ralph Ellison's Harlem or Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County.

Gaines introduces us to this world through the eyes of guileless children and wizened jailbirds, black tenants and white planters.  He shows his characters eking out a living and making love, breaking apart aand coming together.  And on every page he captures the soul of black community whose circumstances make even the slightest assertion of self-respect an act of majestic—and sometimes suicidal—heroism.  Bloodline is a miracle of storytelling.

STORIES INCLUDE:

A Long Day in November
The Sky Is Gray
Three Men
Bloodline
Just Like a Tree

Author

© Steven Forster
Ernest Gaines was born on a plantation in Pointe Coupee Parish near New Roads, Louisiana, which is the Bayonne of all his fictional works. He is a writer-in-residence emeritus at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Gaines received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1993 for his lifetime achievements; was named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, one of France’s highest decorations, in 1996; and was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2004. He and his wife, Dianne, live in Oscar, Louisiana. View titles by Ernest J. Gaines