Reading at the Beach is hosting A-Z Wednesday where bloggers take the time to highlight one book that starts with the letter of the day. This week is the letter W.
I have had The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories by Charles Chestnutt on my shelves for almost twenty years now. It's even still in the original shrink-wrap. I have no excuse for not getting to it. So I'm finally going to read it as my contribution to the Classics Circuit for the Harlem Renaissance next month. I sure hope it's been worth the wait!Amazon writes the ever unhelpful: Chesnutt writes of the black search for identity in the period between the Civil War and the turn of the century and a customer wrote the only marginally better: I enjoyed all of the stories in this collection, and shared them with my teenagers. They depict with wit, tenderness and irony identity crises of African Americans during and after Reconstruction, and the racism that persisted in both North and South. They read like a mixture of Mark Twain and Harriet Beecher Stowe with a touch of Jane Austen. With luck I'll have a more in depth review than this come my date on the tour (Feb. 4).
This sounds really interesting! I'll be looking for your review to see what you think about it!
ReplyDeleteThanks for playing!
I have all of Chestnutt's stories in one collection. I enjoyed them very much although it's been years since I've read them. I really look forward to your thoughts on them. Perhaps I should do the Harlem Renaissance Challenge. There may be things they've published since I bought all the books I could find from the period twenty years ago.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the reminder, and for visiting my blog.
I'll be looking forward to your review.
ReplyDeleteThese stories sound interesting. I'll have to check back for your review.
ReplyDeleteThese sound interesting. I read Chestnutt's novel The House Behind the Cedars not long ago, and really enjoyed it. I'll have to look at some of his stories.
ReplyDeleteI like the civil war stuff, so looking forward to your review of this. I'm not sure why I like historical fiction, my kids have a theory that one of them built a time travel machine when he grew up and we are stuck here before that time. go figure, boys and their imaginations.
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