Blacker Than a Thousand Midnights: A Novel - Softcover

Straight, Susan

4.08

161 ratings by Goodreads

9781497679962: Blacker Than a Thousand Midnights: A Novel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1497679966 ISBN 13: 9781497679962

Publisher: Open Road Media, 2014

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The acclaimed author returns to her fictional East L.A. community with a “nuanced, unsentimental portrait” of a young black man’s coming of age (Los Angeles Times).

Unlike most of Darnell Tucker’s friends, he grew up with a father. But at twenty, he finds that following in his father’s footsteps is no easy road. Living in the East Los Angeles neighborhood of Rio Seco, Darnell and his wife, Brenda, will soon have a new daughter to raise. But Darnell’s job at the California Department of Forestry, where he is the lone black firefighter at station 42, is being cut due to a shortage in funding.

As Darnell moves on to endless nights as a security guard, he dreams of setting up his own landscaping business—but the path he’s chosen will lead him to fight the sorts of fires any young black man must face in contemporary America.

In this moving novel, “Susan Straight opens up a whole world . . . where the language is often not lush but hard and rough as concrete” (Los Angeles Times). With Blacker Than a Thousand Midnights, the National Book Award finalist reaffirms her reputation as “a writer of exceptional gifts and grace” (Joyce Carol Oates).

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About the Author:

Susan Straight has published eight novels. Her most recent, Between Heaven and Here, is the final book in the Rio Seco trilogy. Take One Candle Light a Room was named one of the best books of 2010 by the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and Kirkus Reviews, and A Million Nightingales was a finalist for the 2006 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her novel Highwire Moon was a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award. “The Golden Gopher” won the 2008 Edgar Award for Best Mystery Story. Her stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Salon, Harper’s, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, the Believer, Zoetrope: All-Story, Black Clock, and elsewhere. Straight has been awarded the Lannan Prize for Fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Gold Medal for Fiction from the Commonwealth Club of California. She is distinguished professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside. She was born in Riverside, California, where she lives with her family, whose history is featured on susanstraight.com.

From Booklist:

Straight's splendid first novel, I Been in Sorrow's Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots , portrayed a strong and courageous black woman coming of age during the 1950s. In her second book, Straight moves into the present and tells the story of a strong and courageous young black man. Once again, she charts the currents of fear, love, and determination that shape a life lived in the face of great adversity. Darnell, called Nature Boy by his baffled city friends, is a firefighter, trained to battle the great wildfires that ravage California's kindling-dry hill country. But he's only a seasonal firefighter, and when his girlfriend Brenda gets pregnant, he knows he has to secure steady work to help support her and their child. The quest for a decent job, however, is damn near quixotic. A gig as a parking lot security guard ends in violence, and an interlude running drugs snaps Darnell out of his deep depression: You have got to stay alive and out of jail to support a family. Ultimately, Darnell realizes that he has to be as skillful and decisive in all aspects of life as he is when he battles forest fires. Straight has a great ear for the music of conversation, and her prose is potent, dignified, and lyrical, elevating the challenges of existence to a level of universal significance. And she writes under the banner of hope. Donna Seaman

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