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Jeffrey Renard Allen
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A
graduate of the doctorate program in creative writing at
the University of Illinois at Chicago, Dr.
Jeffrey Renard Allen is the author of Harbors and
Spirits (Moyer Bell, 1999), a collection of poems,
and the novel Rails Under My Back (Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 2000), which won the Chicago Tribune's
Heartland Prize for Fiction. His other writing awards
include: The 21st Century Award Chicago
Public Library, The John Farrar Fellow - Bread Loaf
Writer’s Conference 2001 and The P.E.N Discovery
Prize-1989. A writer who believes in the power of
teaching, he works at Queens College, the New School for
Social Research, and is presently a fellow at the New
York Public Library's Center for Scholars and Writers.
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The New York Times Book
Review, Stephen Donadio
Allen's prose is intense, concentrated. His language,
which ranges from the delicately lyrical to the
aggressively vulgar, demonstrates extraordinary poise.
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San Francisco Chronicle
"Big, ambitious, picaresque, and beautiful, a book that
demands of the reader as much as it gives in return."
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From Kirkus Reviews
A powerful first novel that uses the railroad as a
complex metaphorof hopeful reunion but also of
separation and dispersalin telling the
multi-generational stories of two closely related black
American families. Brothers John and Lucius
(``Lucifer'') Jones marry sisters Gracie and Sheila
McShan, and both couples settle in an unnamed fictional
big city that's an imaginative amalgam of New York and
Chicago. In a vigorous, jazzy, stop-and-start style that
deftly mixes crisp declarative sentences with fragmented
dialogue and vigorous expostulations (and that intercuts
present and past scenes with brief spasmodic
flashbacks), Allen dramatizes both the sources (their
families' histories) and the consequences (their
children's fates) of the separate paths the Jones
brothers follow (``Lucifer and John, brothers in the
skin, but no closeness''). The novel both begins and
comes to a climax with the streetwise ``business'' that
engulfs Gracie and John's embittered teenaged son Jesus,
whose temperament contrasts (as do his father's and
uncle's) revealingly with that of his cousin Hatch, a
soulful youngster bent on becoming a blues musician. The
bulk of the story stretches forward and backward (often
without helpful transitions, but always bursting quickly
into vivid clarity) to focus on various members of the
two families' several generations. Most compelling are:
stern matriarch Lulu Mae McShan; hardworking, stoical
Sheila and religion-bound Gracie; Sheila's daughter
``Porsha'' (Portia), who seeks escape from the city's
snares and delusions in a commercial world of ``beauty''
and in her headlong affair with a handsome stud
significantly nicknamed ``Deathrow''; and the flickering
figure of John Jones, a troubled Vietnam vet and
wanderer who cannot remain faithful to his wife or their
kinwith devastating results memorably shown in a long,
harrowing denouement. An exciting and rewarding
successor to the legacy of James Baldwin and Ralph
Ellison. Allen worked eight years on this novel, and the
result is a very impressive creation: the work of an
unusually gifted, disciplined, and more than promising
writer.
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