Nine bar blues : stories from an ancient future / Sheree Renée Thomas.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Thomas, Sheree R., author.

Contributor:

Christine Hikawa Fund.

Series:

TMB ; 031.

TMB ; 031

Standardized Title:

Short stories. Selections

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American fiction--African American authors.

American fiction.

Short stories, American.

Genre:

Short stories, American.

Short stories.

Physical Description:

315 pages ; 22 cm.

Edition:

First USA edition.

Other Title:

9 bar blues

Place of Publication:

Nashville, Tennessee : Third Man Books, [2020]

Summary:

"Sheree Renée Thomas is a two-headed woman, one crown, earthbound, rooted in the Mississippi Delta and the New Weird South, the other spinning far off into space. And if music is the embedded memory of a culture, then her remarkable fiction collection is its excavated soul. Individually, these tales explore nearly every genre of music that has formed the heart of American culture, but their shared song is the story of the blues. Thomas's writing haunts and mesmerizes you. Her imagination takes you down through it like the best traditional blues song, then opens you up again, delivering you into that mysterious, transcendental space that is the ninth bar. Haunting and evocative, Nine Bar Blues carries the soul's songbook, from the dark laughter of strange sisters forced to make a perilous journey into a land their mothers have never known, to the fortified funk of extraterrestrial mixtapes. Sheree Renée Thomas imagines stories that are sonic rituals, works that cultivate and affirm the magical and the mystical in everyday living. Nine Bar Blues explores the multitudinous forms of music and the people who make it and appreciate it--the body's music, the spirit's music, and what moves a soul forward in the crossroads journey of life. Her stories travel from haunted West African and Middle Eastern forests to the mysterious back roads in the Mississippi Delta, from the ancestral realms of the afterlife to the alien sounds beyond. And throughout the journey, Nine Bar Blues heralds the arrival of a unique writer whose voice carries the hope and the past-future-present of a people."--Publisher's webpage.

Contents:

Machine generated contents note: Ancestries

Thirteen Year Long Song

Aunt Dissy's Policy Dream Book

Nightflight

River Clap Your Hands

Stars Come Down

Child's Play

Head Static

The Parts That Make Us Monsters

The Dragon Can't Dance

Who Needs the Stars If the Full Moon Loves You?

310 Lucy

Shanequa's Blues-or Another Shotgun Lullaby

Madame and the Map: A Journey in Five Movements

Teddy Bump.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Christine Hikawa Fund.

ISBN:

9780997457896

0997457899

OCLC:

1119467437

Publisher Number:

99990296489