Product Description

Fierce, tender stories reminiscent of Richard Wright and James Baldwin.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #606953 in Books
• Published on: 2001-01-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 264 pages

Review
"...an extraordinary stylist, whose rare insight, boundless courage, and fierce imagination make these stories resound long after you turn the last page." -- The Village Voice

"A fiercely imagined debut — intensely lyric, driven by the desire, in the face of everything, for truth, justice, beauty." -- Carole Maso

"His story snapped my head back. I knew within a few sentences that here was the real thing." -- David Lynn, editor Kenyon Review

"This collection of short stories is heartstopping... It may be as important to this century’s body of literature as Kafka’s Metamorphosis was to the last." -- Harry Belafonte

"What a writer! What a book! [Glave's] stories are intricate tapestries of life rendered through a triumphant act of the imagination." -- Clarence Major

Thomas Glave... has that essential writer's ear for the way different people speak within their cultures... -- Nadine Gordimer

From the Publisher
Whose Song? And Other Stories is the literary debut of a talented young writer, Thomas Glave. His writing is marked by an energy, an ambition, and a fearlessness that are all too rare.

Threads of African American and gay experience, as well as Caribbean and Caribbean-American culture and history connect these stories, set in the Bronx and other parts of New York City, Boston, the American South, and the Caribbean. "Commitment" takes place on the day before a wedding in the rural South. Two young black men are forced to end their clandestine relationship as the father of one of them threatens to kill them both. In "Their Story," two elderly men, one from Jamaica and the other from the South, lose their wives and find comfort with each other. "—And Love Them?" is the one-sided dialogue of a white woman, an office worker who tries to communicate her conflicted feelings toward "them," that is, the black people she encounters at her job, on the streets of New York, and in her imagination. And "The Pit" is a haunting, harrowing tale about a young Caribbean boy who visits the site of an enormous killing field and returns to his terrorized village endowed with prop! hetic powers.

Thomas Glave is a deft stylist, and each of the nine stories in this collection reveals yet another of his successful technical experiments.

About the Author
City Lights is thrilled to present Thomas Glave’s Whose Song?, his first collection of short stories. Recently voted a "Writer on the Verge" by The Village Voice Literary Supplement (June 2000), Glave has received many awards for his work, among them the prestigious O. Henry Prize. He is only the second gay black writer, after James Baldwin, to claim that honor.

Thomas Glave was born in the Bronx and grew up there and in Kingston, Jamaica. A 1993 Honors graduate of Bowdoin College and a graduate of Brown University, he traveled as a Fulbright Scholar in 1998-99 to Jamaica, where he studied Jamaican historiography and Jamaican-Caribbean intellectual and literary traditions. While in Jamaica, Glave worked on issues of social justice, and helped found the Jamaica Forum of Lesbians, All-Sexuals, and Gays (J-FLAG) of which he says, "I felt that I was not only working in a true spirit of struggle with fellow Jamaicans as a human rights activist — all of us risking our lives with this work each day, in a virulently homophobic country — but also contributing to the inevitable moving forward of my country."

Glave has been published and praised in many prestigious literary journals including Callaloo, Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire, The Massachusetts Review, and The Kenyon Review, whose editor David Lynn recalls that when first reading Glave’s work, "his story snapped my head back. I knew within a few sentences that here was the real thing."

Glave’s work has also appeared in various anthologies including Ancestral House: The Black Short Story in The Americas and Europe, Children Of The Night: The Best Short Stories By Black Writers 1967-Present, His 2: Brilliant New Fiction By Gay Writers, Soulfires: Young Black Men On Love And Violence, Best American Gay Fiction 3, Prize Stories 1997: The O. Henry Awards, Gay Fiction at the Millennium and Men On Men 6: Best New Gay Fiction, whose editor David Bergman exclaims, "He is one of the most exciting writers it has been my privilege to read and include in these volumes."

Among Glave’s awards and honors are two New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships (1995, 2000), a Fine Arts Center in Provincetown Fellowship (1995), two Fellowships from the Bronx Council on the Arts (1992, 1994), and a traveling fellowship from the NEA/Travel Grants Fund for Artists (1994). Glave has been a James Michener Scholar of the University of Miami's Caribbean Writers' Institute and a writer-in-residence at Altos de Chavon in the Dominican Republic. He is assistant professor of English at the State University of New York, Binghamton.

Customer Reviews

The Transformation of Silences
Thomas Glave's Whose Song and Other Stories is a triumphant short story collection that articulates the sounds and shouts of otherwise marginal figures. Moving back and forth from the Caribbean to the American South to the Northern metropolises, Glave captures the fluidity and undecidability of what it means to be "Black," "Caribbean," "queer," "straight," and "gendered" in our society. Glave skillfuly crafts narratives which are beautiful and disturbing and forces us, as readers, to enter the never written before, but often lived, reality of characters. An amazing first book and a definite read!!!

A Gifted Author
I had the pleasure of interviewing Thomas Glave for a local paper, and read his book in order to prepare for the interview. I'm reminded of something Toni Morrison said about her practice as a writer, and that is that she writes the kind of stories she would want to read. Thomas Glave writes the kind of stories I want to read, and gives voice through his writing to people and experience not often heard above the din of the rest of humanity. His writing is highly readable, and he tackles his subject matter with compassion for his characters and his reader, but without attempting to find pat answers to the challenges and choices his characters face. I highly recommend this book, and hope to see much more from Glave in the future.

Glave brings a new level of intensity to his work
Thomas Glave forces us, through his work, to confront an intensity which often lies buried in our consciousness. The work is at times overwhelming due to the images conjured up such as the erotic and in some cases, the violent undertones (See stories on "Accidents" and "Whose Song"). The reader has to, in the process of reading, face these images and dwell on them as the stories progress. It can either be a comfortable, "inhibition-lowering experience" or totally uncomfortable. The reader's mind has to expand to accomodate the content and the scope of the stories.

Glave also deals readily with issues which many would chose not to address, homosexuality, rape, depression, gruesome accidents etc. which in the final analylis are all part of daily exisitence. He also deals with issues of commitment and the dilemma of sexulaity. He tenacious and unapologetic in his approach to the subject matter and one has to admire this quality in the work.

Glave also weaves his Jamaican-American upbringing and perspective into the work which is clearly a foundation of his identity. As a fellow West Indian, there is far more than just the ring of authenticity to the work, one can relate to it.

Glave's work is therefore a clear indication of an expansive and an intensely imaginative mind. In addition, he writes with an authority which draws the reader in to the work, whatever the end feeling, comfort or discomfort. One perspective which is hard,at times, to swallow is Glave's construction of reality/the final outcome which veers towards the unfulfilled and which I do not necessarily see as the outcome perhaps fifty percent of the time.

Thumbs up to Glave! The book is strongly recommended! We also look forward to his future work.