Counternarratives - Hardcover

Keene, John

4.2

644 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0811224341 ISBN 13: 9780811224345

Publisher: New Directions, 2015

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Ranging from the 17th century to our current moment, and crossing multiple continents, Counternarratives' stories and novellas draw upon memoirs, newspaper accounts, detective stories, interrogation transcripts, and speculative fiction to create new and strange perspectives on our past and present. "An Outtake" chronicles an escaped slave's take on liberty and the American Revolution;"The Strange History of Our Lady of the Sorrows" presents a bizarre series of events that unfold in a nineteenth-century Kentucky convent; "The Aeronauts" soars between bustling Philadelphia, still-rustic Washington, and the theater of the U.S. Civil War; "Rivers," presents a free Jim meeting up decades later with his former raftmate Huckleberry Finn; and in "Acrobatique," the subject of a famous Edgar Degas painting talks back.

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Review:

Suspenseful, thought provoking, mystical, and haunting. Keene's confident writing doesn't aim for easy description or evaluation; it approaches (and defies) literature on its own terms.

Keene finds inspiration in newspaper clippings, memoirs, and history, and anchors them in the eternal, universal, and mystical.

Keene opens up the spaces between words and their objects, to create room where fresh meanings can play.--Ben Ehrenreich

Keene exerts superb control over his stories, costuming them in the style of Jorge Luis Borges...Yet he preserves the undercurrent of excitement and pathos that accompanies his characters' persecution and their groping toward freedom.--Sam Sacks

Queering the script, defying the imperative to be silent, however, does not require confidence or a vision of what progress means. It is, rather, in all its uncertainty and risk, the most basic stuff of--the very matter of--life. It is also the crowning achievement of one of the year's very best books.--Brad Johnson

Keene's collection of short and longer historical fictions are formally varied, mold-breaking, and deeply political. He's a radical artist working in the most conservative genres, and any search for innovation in this year's U.S. fiction should start here.--Christian Lorentzen

Practically every sentence in the book perforates, stretches out, or pries open literary modes designed to be airtight, restrictive, and racially exclusionary...An expert generator of suspense, Keene also turns out to be a skilled humorist, a mischievous ironist, a deft, seductive storyteller and a studied historian.--Max Nelson

We have become accustomed in recent years to the revisionary spirit of much postcolonial fiction, but the ambition, erudition and epic sweep of John Keene's remarkable new collection of stories, travelling from the beginnings of modernity to modernism, place it in a class of its own. His book achieves no less than an imaginative repositioning of the history of the Americas ... Keene is that rarest of things today, a writer whose radicalism connects the politics of history to the politics of fiction.--Kate Webb

Exquisite, and unlike anything I've ever read.--Eula Biss

Genius - brilliant, polished and of considerable depth.--Ishmael Reed

About the Author:

John Keene is a former member of the Dark Room Writers Collective, a graduate fellow of Cave Canem, and the recipient of many awards and fellowships--including a MacArthur Genius Award, the Windham-Campbell Prize, and the Whiting Foundation Prize for fiction. Keene teaches at Rutgers.

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