Howling Frog Books

 Quicksand, by Nella Larsen    Some time ago I read Nella Larsen's 1929 novel, Passing, and I also wanted to read her earlier novel from the year before, which is semi-autobiographical.   Helga Crane is mixed-race, the daughter of a Danish immigrant woman and a man from the Danish West Indies.*  She is a teacher at Naxos, a (fictional) school in the South built along the lines of Booker T. Washington's ideas, and she hates it.  Helga drops everything and goes to Chicago, where she was raised by her mother's white relatives, and eventually ends up in New York City.  Here she discovers Harlem and Black culture for the first time. Helga is a mercurial woman who falls in love with one way of life, is sure it will be permanent, and eventually feels an absolute need to escape.**  After a couple of years in Harlem, she flees to Copenhagen, where she lives with an aunt and uncle, and loves that until she absolutely must flee.  Back in Harlem, s...

 Plum Bun, by Jessie Redmon Hughes (1928) Jessie Redmon Fauset Jessie Redmon Fauset (1882 – 1961) was a prominent writer, editor, educator, and poet in African-American letters.  She edited the NAACP's magazine, The Crisis , from 1919 - 1926, and mentored many eminent writers, including Langston Hughes.  She then taught French and published four novels, Plum Bun being the second, and usually wrote about discrimination, passing, and feminism.  She wanted to portray African-Americans in a realistic and positive manner, celebrating Black culture and family.  While she was celebrated in her day, she was quickly forgotten as literary fashion moved on,  and she remained obscure for several decades until feminists revived her writing in the early 80s.  She's now recognized as an important part of the Harlem Renaissance.  The subtitle of this novel is -- intriguingly -- A Novel Without A Moral .  The title itself is based on a nursery rhyme...

Passing, by Nella Larsen It took me a while to get to one of the great Harlem Renaissance women writers, and I got there kind of backwards, but here I am at last.  Nella Larsen was born in the US, but her mother was Danish and her father was from the Danish Virgin Islands (Denmark had a colony there from 1754 - 1917, at which point it sold out to the US).  She worked as a librarian (yay!) and then as a nurse, and also wrote works which weren't as appreciated at the time as they are now.  She's now considered one of the major writers of the Harlem Renaissance (or so says my book). I first heard of Larsen because she was the person who circulated a copy of the Danish author J. P. Jacobsen's first novel, Marie Grubbe , around her literary circle, which wound up sparking a truly great novel.  (See my post for details on the story, which I think is really neat.)    And so I've been wanting to read Larsen's own work for a while.  Passing has been on my ...

Walls of Jericho , by Rudolph Fisher A few years back I really enjoyed The Conjure-Man Dies , a 1932 mystery by Harlem Renaissance writer Rudolph Fisher.  This novel was written a few years earlier; it was published in 1928.  Fisher paints a portrait of a Harlem preoccupied with both race and class. Fisher has a cast of characters that are enormously disparate, but that intertwine in intriguing ways.  We have a team of moving men, led by Shine, an Ajax of a man; Ralph Merritt, a successful lawyer; Linda, an ambitious working girl, and several others. Merritt is buying a home just outside the edge of Harlem in a white neighborhood -- mostly to annoy his neighbors.  At first, the story might seem to be about the 'walls of Jericho' of white society, but there are other walls that turn out to be more central.  Shine (whose actual name is Joshua) comes to realize that in order to have the life he wants, he must tear down his own inner walls, and the same is true ...

My mojo is still lost, but I really miss my blogging.  I think it's just tiredness; homeschoolers mostly get really tired around about February, and I've been pulling back on online/bloggy stuff to conserve energy, I guess.  Anyway, I'm going to borrow a strategy from Ekaterina and throw out some mini-reviews, or I will never get out from under the pile of books I have!  Come to think of it, I'm pretty sure I have forgotten some by now.  I gave one to my daughter to read and now I don't know what it was. Not Without Laughter , by Langston Hughes -- I started this near the end of February, actually.  It's a great novel about a boy growing up in Kansas, and all his family members.  I enjoyed it very much and still want to read more Harlem Renaissance books, but I had to return the volumes to the library.  (That has been happening to a lot of my library books lately.) Call the Midwife , by Jennifer Worth -- The BBC series was based on the memoir, ...

The Conjure-Man Dies , by Rudolph Fisher  The Classics Club theme for February just happens to be the Harlem Renaissance (plus more) , which gave me a good chance to start working on the challenge I signed up for too.  I decided to start with The Conjure-Man Dies , which is a mystery set in early 1930s Harlem. Dr. John Archer has his medical office across the street from an undertaker and a "psychist" who claims to be able to read faces so well that he can tell you all about yourself and your future.  When the conjure-man is murdered in the middle of a reading, Dr. Archer and the NYPD detective assigned to the case, Perry Dart, team up to solve the mystery.  Then the corpse disappears from a guarded room and walks in, claiming to have revived himself with his special powers--so the two men will need all their expertise to figure out the puzzle. I enjoyed this mystery so much!  I love a good mystery.  Here we have a seriously excellent puzzle and a c...

I know I said I wouldn't join any more challenges, but Deseree at Dusky Literati posted one I just can't ignore.  I can't post the whole thing here, so go take a look.  Deseree says: The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned the 1920s. At the time, it was known as the “New Negro Movement”, named after the 1925 anthology by Alain Locke. The Movement also included the new African-American cultural expressions across the urban areas in the Northeast and Midwest United States affected by the Great Migration (African American), of which Harlem was the largest. Though it was centered in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City, in addition, many francophone black writers from African and Caribbean colonies who lived in Paris were also influenced by the Harlem Renaissance. The Harlem Renaissance is generally considered to have spanned from about 1919 until the early or mid-1930s. (Source: Wikipedia ) Last year I read quite a few books by author...