Children of the night
Subtitle: the best short stories by Black writers, 1967 to the present
By: edited by Gloria Naylor.
Contributors: Naylor, Gloria.
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: Little, Brown and Co.
Published: 1995
Place of publication: Boston
Language: eng
Number of pages: 569
Subjects: Short stories, American -- African American authors; African Americans -- Fiction; American fiction -- 20th century
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."