The Professor's Daughter - Softcover

Raboteau, Emily

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312425686 ISBN 13: 9780312425685

Publisher: Picador, 2006

Synopsis

"My father is black and my mother is white and my brother is a vegetable." When Emma Boudreaux's older brother winds up in a coma after a freak accident, she loses her compass: only Bernie was able to navigate--if not always diplomatically--the terrain of their biracial identity. And although her father and brother are bound by a haunting past that Emma slowly uncovers, she sees that she might just escape.

In exhilarating prose, The Professor's Daughter traces the borderlands of race and family, contested territory that gives rise to rage, confusion, madness, and invisibility. This astonishingly original voice surges with energy and purpose.

About this title

About the Author

Emily Raboteau writes at the intersection of social and environmental justice, race, climate change, and parenthood. Her books include Searching for Zion (2013), winner of an American Book Award and finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the cult classic novel, The Professor's Daughter (2005). Since the release of the 2018 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, she has focused on writing about the climate crisis. A contributing editor at Orion Magazine and a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, Raboteau's essays have appeared and been anthologized in the New Yorker, the New York Times, New York Magazine, The Nation, Best American Science Writing, Best American Travel Writing, and elsewhere. Her distinctions include an inaugural Climate Narratives Prize from Arizona State University, the Deadline Club Award in Feature Reporting from the Society of Professional Journalists' New York chapter, and grants and fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Bronx Council on the Arts, the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, the Lannan Foundation and Yaddo. She serves regularly as nonfiction faculty at the Bread Loaf Environmental Writing Conference and is a full professor at the City College of New York (CUNY) in Harlem, once known as "the poor man's Harvard." She lives in the Bronx with her husband, the novelist Victor LaValle, and their two children.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Professor's Daughter

By Emily Raboteau

Picador USA

Copyright © 2006 Emily Raboteau
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780312425685
From The Professor's Daughter:
We are lying in the wet grass staring at the moon. It is summer and there is a golf course spread out like the train of a bridal gown down at the bottom of the hill. There are old people down there, dancing between the sand traps under paper lanterns. It is their reunion and they have an orchestra and the orchestra is playing a waltz and the violins trill out strings of sound that fly like kites up to us on the hill.
My brother looks like an Arabian prince. His saxophone is dismembered. The pieces are shining laid out in a circle around us. Bernie is pulling on a joint and holding the smoke in his lungs so long I worry he's not breathing. The moon is watching us. I touch his face and he lets go the smoke and it rolls away slowly.

"I found out what happened to Bernard Number One," he tells me. Our dad's dad is a secret.

"Did Dad tell you?"

"No."

Bernie and our dad don't talk anymore. They made our dad the first black dean and he moved us to this castle overlooking a golf course and he looked around and said what the hell am I doing here, my life is halfway over and look where I am. He told us, "I may be gone for one month, I may be gone for two months, I may be gone forever."



Continues...

Excerpted from The Professor's Daughterby Emily Raboteau Copyright © 2006 by Emily Raboteau. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0312425686
• ISBN 13: 9780312425685
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288