The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois
by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
Buy on AmazonThe great scholar, W. E. B. Du Bois, once wrote about the Problem of race in America, and what he called “Double Consciousness,” a sensitivity that every African American possesses in order to survive. Since childhood, Ailey Pearl Garfield has understood Du Bois’s words all too well. Bearing the names of two formidable Black Americans—the revered choreographer Alvin Ailey and her great grandmother Pearl, the descendant of enslaved Georgians and tenant farmers—Ailey carries Du Bois’s Problem on her shoulders. Ailey is reared in the north in the City but spends summers in the small Georgia town of Chicasetta, where her mother’s family has lived since their ancestors arrived from Africa in bondage.…
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"The National Book Critics Circle Awards are organised by some of America’s most respected arbiters of taste. In 2022, the NBCC fiction prize was won by the noted poet Honorée Fanonne Jeffers for her first novel The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois , a book that has won near-universal acclaim since its release in May. As Joshunda Sanders explained in The Boston Globe, it’s “a sweeping matriarchal epic that leads readers through a majestic tour of race, family, and love in America… the Great American Novel at its finest.” In Canada, Sheila Heti won the Governor General’s Literary Award for her wildly imaginative Pure Colour , in which she contrasts the wonder and joy of creation with our daily experience of frustration and disappointment. She’s one of my favourite writers—erudite, funny, intelligent, unpretentious. This latest work is unmissable. Jennifer Down won Australia’s prestigious Miles Franklin Award for Bodies of Light, which was praised for its “ethical precision” in its portrait of a young girl in care who is forced to reinvent herself again and again. Nicolas Rothwell has also just been announced the winner of the Australian Prime Minister’s award for his novel Red Heaven , set in 1960s eastern Europe. At the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, Whiti Hereaka won the 2022 fiction prize for Kurangaituku , a subversion of the traditional Māori story of Hatupatu—as seen through the eyes of the monster."
Award-Winning Novels of 2022 · fivebooks.com
"I will admit up front that Honorée Fannone Jeffers’ debut novel is intimidating. For one thing, it’s almost 800 pages long. For another, it is stupendously good. Rooted in the South, this is a very American tale: Jeffers’ heroine, Ailey Pearl Garfield, is a blend of her family’s ethnicities (African, Native, white) and circumstances (enslaved, free, indentured). Readers follow Ailey’s life as she comes of age, becomes a historian and begins to research her family’s accomplishments and traumas over generations. Jeffers’ renditions of Black family traditions and the burden of respectability politics are spot-on, and made me wish the book was even longer."
NPR Books We Love — 2021 · apps.npr.org
The Atlantic's The Great American Novels · theatlantic.com
"I'm drawn to big epic novels, and this was all that at over 800 pages."
By the Book: Abraham Verghese · nytimes.com
"Oh my goodness, it blew me away. It was devastating, but I couldn't stop reading it. It still haunts me."
By the Book: Erika L Sánchez · nytimes.com