Mixed Race Studies

The Pain Tree

Cormorant Books
June 2015
320 pages
5.5″ x 8.5″
Paperback ISBN 9781770864344

Olive Senior

Olive Senior’s new collection of stories, The Pain Tree, is wide-ranging in scope, time period, theme, locale, and voice. There is — along with her characteristic “gossipy voice” — reverence, wit and wisdom, satire, humour, and even farce. The stories range over at most a hundred years, from around the time of the second world war to the present. Like her earlier stories, Jamaica is the setting but the range of characters presented are universally recognisable as people in crisis or on the cusp of transformation.

While most of the stories operate within a realist mode, Senior also exploits traditional motifs. Collected here are revenge stories (“The Goodness of my Heart”), a bargain with the Devil (“Boxed-in”), a Cinderella story (“The Country Cousin”), a magical realist interpretation of African spiritual beliefs (“Flying”) and a narrator’s belated acceptance of the healing power of traditional beliefs (“The Pain Tree”). “Coal” is a realist story set in the war years and depression that followed as folks try to find a new place in the world. Senior’s trademark children awakening to self-awareness and to the hypocrisy of adults are here too, from the heartbreaking “Moonlight” and “Silent” to the girls in “Lollipop” and “A Father Like That” who learn to confront loneliness and vulnerability with attitude.

The White Girl

Grosset & Dunlap
1929
305 pages

Vera Caspary

An African-American woman who moves north to Chicago where she passes as white.

Read the entire book here.

Among The Wild Mulattos and Other Tales

Texas Review Press
2015-07-23
192 pages
5.5 x 6.5
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-68003-018-1

Tom Williams, Professor of English
Morehead State University, Morehead, Kentucky

Set in the suburbs and cities of the Midwest, Mid-South, and Texas, these stories explore the lives of characters biracial, black, white, and all sorts of in-between. The intersections and collisions of contemporary life are in full effect here, where the distinctions between fast food and fine art, noble and naked ambitions, reality and reality shows have become impossible to distinguish. Read these stories and understand why Steve Yarbrough said Williams “writes like Paul Auster if he were funnier or like Stanley Elkin might have if he’d ever been able to stop laughing.”

The Spirit of London

Matador (an imprint of Troubador)
2015-09-28
198×127 mm
Paperback ISBN: 9781784624057

Rob Keeley

The spirits were at work here, somehow. But why?

On returning to London, Ellie investigates the mystery surrounding 47 Foster Square. Who is the sender of ghostly messages asking her for help? What is the secret of the Meadowes family? And what does Edward know about all this?

With her parents about to divorce, and her Mum acting very strangely, Ellie quickly discovers that a sinister force lies between her and the truth…

The Spirit of London is the second instalment in the thrilling and suspenseful ‘Spirits’ series and follows the success of The People’s Book Prize-nominated Childish Spirits. It focuses on slavery and a mixed-race family in Georgian times. Ellie finds herself facing a very dangerous foe and will need all her courage and humanity to get her through. The Spirit of London also sets up a story arc that will continue into future books in the series. The book will appeal to girls and boys of upper primary and lower secondary age – and to parents and teachers reading the book aloud!

Long Time No See: A memoir of fathers, daughters and games of chance

Periscope
2015-07-24
336 pages
204mm x 138mm
Paperback ISBN: 9781859643969

Hannah Lowe

Hannah Lowe’s father “Chick”, a half-Chinese, half-black Jamaican immigrant, worked long hours at night to support his family – except Chick was no ordinary working man. A legendary gambler, he would vanish into the shadows of East London to win at cards or dice, returning during the daylight hours to greet the daughter whose love and respect he courted.

In this poignant memoir, Lowe calls forth the unstable world of card sharps, confidence men and small-time criminals that eventually took its toll on Chick. She also evokes her father’s Jamaica, where he learned his formidable skills, and her own coming of age in a changing Britain.

Long Time No See speaks eloquently of love and its absence, regret and compassion, and the struggle to know oneself.

The Book of Colors: A Novel

Unbridled Books
280 pages
May 2015
5 1/2 x 8 1/4
ISBN: 978-1-60953-115-7
EISBN: 978-1-60953-116-4

Raymond Barfield, Associate Professor of Pediatrics and Christian Philosophy
Duke Divinity School, Durham, North Carolina

How can a 19-year-old, mixed-race girl who grew up in a crack house and is now pregnant be so innocent? Yslea is full of contradictions, though, seeming both young and old, innocent and wise. Her spirit is surprising, given all the pain she has endured, and that’s the counterpoint this story offers—while she sees pain and suffering all around her, Yslea overcomes in her own quiet way.

What Yslea struggles with is expressing her thoughts. And she wonders if she will have something of substance to say to her baby. It’s the baby growing inside her that begins to wake her up, that causes her to start thinking about things in a different way.

Yslea drifts into the lives of four people who occupy three dilapidated row houses along the train tracks outside of Memphis: “The way their three little row houses sort of leaned in toward each other and the way the paint peeled and some of the windows were covered with cardboard, the row might as easily have been empty.”

She becomes an integral part of this little community, moving in with Rose who is old and dying. As her pregnancy progresses, everything changes within the three houses.

My Name is Cool: Stories from a Cuban-Irish-American Storyteller

Familius
2013-08-05
170 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9781938301568
eBook ISBN: 9781939629029

Antonio Sacre

“In 1960 my father got into a rowboat from Havana, Cuba and rowed 90 miles to the United States to start his new life. By the time I got into seventh grade, I was telling my friends that my father saved all of his family, all of his friends, piled everyone into that boat and rowed everybody over to America. By the time I got into high school, I was telling my friends that my father stole five boats from Castro’s navy, saved all of his friends, all of his family, all of his first, second, third, fourth, and fifth cousins, everyone on his block, all of the pets, and everybody on his baseball team. He piled them into the boat. There was no room for him in the boat, so he tied those boats together with a big rope, put that rope around his shoulders and he swam everybody over to the United States. . .”

Born in Boston to a Cuban father and an Irish-American mother, Antonio Sacre is one of the few leprecanos on the national speaking circuit. Using his own personal history and telling the stories that audiences across the nation have found so captivating and wonderful, this award-winning storyteller and author weaves the Spanish language, Cuban and Mexican customs, and Irish humor into an unforgettable book of humor, inspiration, tradition, and family.

My Name is Cool is a classic story sure to transcend, like the author himself, cultures and boundaries.

Oreo: Fiction by Fran Ross with a contribution by Danzy Senna and Harryette Mullen

New Directions Publishing
2015-07-07 (originally published in 1974)
240 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9780811223225
Ebook ISBN: 9780811223232

Fran Ross (1935–1985)

A pioneering, dazzling satire about a biracial black girl from Philadelphia searching for her Jewish father in New York City

Oreo is raised by her maternal grandparents in Philadelphia. Her black mother tours with a theatrical troupe, and her Jewish deadbeat dad disappeared when she was an infant, leaving behind a mysterious note that triggers her quest to find him. What ensues is a playful, modernized parody of the classical odyssey of Theseus with a feminist twist, immersed in seventies pop culture, and mixing standard English, black vernacular, and Yiddish with wisecracking aplomb. Oreo, our young hero, navigates the labyrinth of sound studios and brothels and subway tunnels in Manhattan, seeking to claim her birthright while unwittingly experiencing and triggering a mythic journey of self-discovery like no other.

Drum Dream Girl: How One Girl’s Courage Changed Music

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
2015-03-31
48 pages
Hardcover ISBN-13/ EAN: 9780544102293
eBook ISBN-13/ EAN: 9780544102286

Margarita Engle

Rafael López

In this picture book bursting with vibrance and rhythm, a girl dreams of playing the drums in 1930s Cuba, when the music-filled island had a taboo against female drummers.

Girls cannot be drummers. Long ago on an island filled with music, no one questioned that rule—until the drum dream girl. In her city of drumbeats, she dreamed of pounding tall congas and tapping small bongós. She had to keep quiet. She had to practice in secret. But when at last her dream-bright music was heard, everyone sang and danced and decided that both girls and boys should be free to drum and dream.

Inspired by the childhood of Millo Castro Zaldarriaga, a Chinese-African-Cuban girl who broke Cuba’s traditional taboo against female drummers, Drum Dream Girl tells an inspiring true story for dreamers everywhere.

Mislaid: A Novel

Ecco/HarperCollins
2015-05-19
256 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9780062364777
Trade Paperback ISBN: 9780062364784
E-book ISBN: 9780062364791
Trimsize: 6 in (w) x 9 in (h) x 0.89 in (d)

Nell Zink

A sharply observed, mordantly funny, and startlingly original novel from an exciting, unconventional new voice—the author of the acclaimed The Wallcreeper—about the making and unmaking of the American family that lays bare all of our assumptions about race and racism, sexuality and desire.

Stillwater College in Virginia, 1966. Freshman Peggy, an ingénue with literary pretensions, falls under the spell of Lee, a blue-blooded poet and professor, and they begin an ill-advised affair that results in an unplanned pregnancy and marriage. The two are mismatched from the start—she’s a lesbian, he’s gay—but it takes a decade of emotional erosion before Peggy runs off with their three-year-old daughter, leaving their nine-year-old son behind.

Worried that Lee will have her committed for her erratic behavior, Peggy goes underground, adopting an African American persona for her and her daughter. They squat in a house in an African-American settlement, eventually moving to a housing project where no one questions their true racial identities. As Peggy and Lee’s children grow up, they must contend with diverse emotional issues: Byrdie deals with his father’s compulsive honesty; while Karen struggles with her mother’s lies—she knows neither her real age, nor that she is “white,” nor that she has any other family.

Years later, a minority scholarship lands Karen at the University of Virginia, where Byrdie is in his senior year. Eventually the long lost siblings will meet, setting off a series of misunderstandings and culminating in a comedic finale worthy of Shakespeare.