Rails Under My Back: A Novel (Harvest Book) - Softcover

Allen, Jeffery Renard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0156014157 ISBN 13: 9780156014151

Publisher: Harvest Books, 2001

Synopsis

"Will put Allen in the company of writers such as James Joyce, August Wilson, and Ralph Ellison." --The Philadelphia Inquirer

When it was first published fifteen years ago, Jeffery Renard Allen's debut novel, Rails Under My Back, earned its author comparisons to some of the giants of twentieth-century modernism. The publication of Allen's equally ambitious second novel, Song of the Shank, cemented those lofty claims. Now, the book that established his reputation is being restored to print in its first Graywolf Press edition. Together, the two novels stand as significant achievements of twenty-first-century literature.
Rails Under My Back is an epic that tracks the interwoven lives of two brothers, Lucius and John Jones, who are married to two sisters, Gracie and Sheila McShan. For them, their parents, and their children, life is always full of departures; someone is always fleeing town and leaving the remaining family to suffer the often dramatic, sometimes tragic consequences. The multiple effects of the comings and goings are devastating: These are the almost mythic expression of the African American experience in the half century that followed the Second World War.
The story ranges, as the characters do, from the city, which is somewhat like both New York and Chicago, to Memphis, to the West, and to many "inner" and "outer" locales. Rails Under My Back is a multifaceted, brilliantly colored, intensely musical novel that pulses with urgency and originality.

About this title

Review

"A novel of immense power . . . A novel of big ambitions and intense achievements . . . If there is justice in the literary world, this book will make a large mark on the first decade of a new century in American letters."-Elle
"Big, ambitious, picaresque, and beautiful, a book that demands of the reader as much as it gives in return."-San Francisco Chronicle

"A tour de force." --"Chicago Tribune
""Besides Joyce and Faulkner, other twentieth-century novelists whose work Allen's calls to mind are Dos Passos, Ellison and Henry Roth--an indication of the remarkable literary company in which this novel may be seen to move." --"The New York Times Book Review"

A tour de force. "Chicago Tribune"

Besides Joyce and Faulkner, other twentieth-century novelists whose work Allen's calls to mind are Dos Passos, Ellison and Henry Roth--an indication of the remarkable literary company in which this novel may be seen to move. "The New York Times Book Review""

A tour de force. Chicago Tribune

Besides Joyce and Faulkner, other twentieth-century novelists whose work Allen's calls to mind are Dos Passos, Ellison and Henry Roth--an indication of the remarkable literary company in which this novel may be seen to move. The New York Times Book Review

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"A tour de force." --Chicago Tribune

"Besides Joyce and Faulkner, other twentieth-century novelists whose work Allen's calls to mind are Dos Passos, Ellison and Henry Roth--an indication of the remarkable literary company in which this novel may be seen to move." --The New York Times Book Review

About the Author

Jeffery Renard Allen is the author of two poetry collections, two novels, and a story collection. His essays, reviews, fiction, and poetry have appeared in many publications and anthologies. Born in Chicago, he holds a PhD in English from the University of Illinois at Chicago and is a professor of English at Queens College, as well as an instructor in the writing program at the New School and at New York University. He is the fiction director at the Norman Mailer Center Writers Colony and has also taught for Cave Canem, the Farafina Writers Workshop in Lagos, the VONA workshop for writers of color, the Summer Literary Seminars program in St. Petersburg, Russia, and Nairobi, Kenya, and in the writing program at Columbia University.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvest Books
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0156014157
• ISBN 13: 9780156014151
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 563