num_pages: 592
description: In 1969, Little, Brown and Company published The Best Short Stories by Black Writers, edited by Langston Hughes - the classic compendium of African-American short fiction from 1897 to 1967. Now, a quarter of a century later, Gloria Naylor has compiled an encore volume, Children of the Night, bringing this extraordinary series up to date. Gathering together the most gifted black writers of our time - from 1967 to the present - Naylor has assembled a rich and varied collection of stories. The portrait that emerges of the African-American experience in the post-Civil Rights era is stirring, compelling, sometimes disturbing, and certainly provocative. Naylor has arranged the stories thematically so the reader focuses on a particular subject - slavery, for example, or the family. In the hands of different writers, these themes provide a wealth and variety of human experience. The stories are more than testimonies of the long battle for survival. From a young woman's struggles with her barren faith in Alice Walker's lyrical "The Diary of an African Nun" to an innocent man's involvement in a horrifying act of violence in Ann Petry's "The Witness", they are, as Naylor states in her introduction, "examples of affirmation: of memory, of history, of family, of being". They are stories for all of us "at the beginning: of mankind as a species; of America as a nation; of the African-American as a full citizen".The tale of Gorgik / Samuel Delaney --Meditations on history / Sherley Anne Williams --Damballah / John Edgar Wideman --Louisiana: 1850 / Jewelle Gomez --Remember him a outlaw / Alexis DeVeaux --Mother / Andrea Lee --Long distances / Jewell Parker Rhodes --After dreaming of President Johnson / Howard Gordon --Neighbors / Diane Oliver --The witness / Ann Petry --Steady going up / Maya Angelou --The lesson / Toni Cade Bambara --Kiswana Browne / Gloria Naylor --Second-hand man / Rita Dove --Crusader Rabbit / Jess Mowry --Silences / Helen Elaine Lee --Proper library / Carolyn Ferrell --Diary of an African nun / Alice Walker --In a house of wooden monkeys / Shay Youngblood --Young Reverend Zelma Lee Moses / Joyce Carol Thomas --Tell me how long the train's been gone / James Baldwin --By the way of morning fire / Michael Weaver --China / Charles Johnson --Blackness / Jamaica Kincaid --Lost in the city / Edward P. Jones --Run, mourner, run / Randall Kenan --Blues for Little Prez / Sam Greenlee --Ma'Dear / Terry McMillan --Transaction / Kelvin Christopher James --A loaf of bread / James Alan McPherson --Backwacking, a plea to the senator / Ralph Ellison --The woman who would eat flowers / Colleen McElroy --And love them? / Thonmas Glave --An area in the cerebral hemisphere / Clarence Major --Oh she gotta head fulla hair / Ntozake Shange --That place / Carolivia Herron --New York day women / Edwidge Danticat
language: English
title: Children of the Night: The Best Short Stories by Black Writers, 1967 to the Present
titlecomplete: Children of the Night: The Best Short Stories by Black Writers, 1967 to the Present
genres: Collections, African American, Historical Fiction, Fiction, Short Stories, Anthologies
ratings_count: 71
publisher: Little, Brown and Company