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"Perfect Peace is a morality tale of the consequences of letting our selfish needs trap the ones we love into roles they weren't born to play. The characters here are as flawed, their sins numerous, as any living human being held under the lens, but the author brings a compassion and understanding to their plights.” Mat Johnson, author of the award-winning Hunting in Harlem and Incognegro Craft is not the word for this joyfully inscribed novel. The proper word is art. The book is a brave and complicated story perfectly told. Mr. Black offers a cultural gift to be welcomed. Houston A. Baker, Jr. Distinguished University Professor Vanderbilt University
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I suspect the most monumental task of a writer must certainly lie in maintaining the illusion of effortlessness in crafting the sound, shape and color of characters. This must be particularly true when the writer’s tale requires the distinct and unique dimensionality of many in order to be effectively told. In Perfect Peace, as in the lives of all of us, generations long dead and gone, their thoughts and actions and, most importantly, the lack of expanse in their individual perspectives and needs draw the sharp defining lines of myriad characters, who, in turn, most literally “create” the story’s protagonist. Daniel Black, with his easy, unstrained prose, did not invent the character of Perfect Peace. Rather, he’s painted the intricate portraits of all the others, seen and unseen, in a too real world. His vividly rural pre-civil rights South is not long ago and far away. Its people cannot be relegated to times and things past. And this author’s subtle craft will not spare us seeing ourselves in their choices, both sublime and tragic, cowardly and brave. It is upon that rich and layered background that the painfully, gloriously complex, conflicted, and, like us, ultimately triumphant spirit of Perfect Peace could have done none other than but to eventually appear. Mr. Black’s novel nudges our sense of awareness and accountability. His narrative eloquently poses difficult questions with disarming kindness: “Do you know who you are? Do you know what you do? Do you know that there is never an excuse?” The relevance of this work with regard to all we are and all we do far exceeds his adroitly simple telling of the tale. Keith Hamilton Cobb, actor Part cautionary tale, part folk tale, part fable, Daniel Black's Perfect Peace is a complete triumph. It bursts with emotions as intense as opera. Perfect Peace will bring you to tears and laughter. You will recognize characters from your own life, and perhaps even recognize yourself. In Emma Jean Peace, a mid-20th-Century rural Southern black woman who wants a daughter so desperately that she raises her infant son as a girl, Dr. Black has created a character as complex, equivocal and unforgettable as Scarlett O'Hara. Larry Duplechan, author of Blackbird, Captain Swing, and the Lambda Literary Award-winning Got 'Til It's Gone |
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Reviews of They Tell Me of a Home and Sacred Place |
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"The brilliantly told lesson we learn in
reading Daniel Black's thrilling literary debut is that the power of
unspoken love can carry us through life and that resentment, hate,
and anger do not ultimately triumph over the will to embrace family,
no matter how flawed. They Tell Me of a Home is laced with folkloric
humor, mystery, and jaw-dropping surprises that prove that home may
not be where the heart is, but it is surely where we must journey to
know our true selves. Daniel Black wields a powerful pen, a sharp
eye, and muscular prose in giving us a memorable, even haunting,
story of the ties that bind."
"They Tell Me of a
Home is a wonderful novel! There is skill. Grace. Humor. Joy. In
the writing. In the telling. I saw, heard, history and herstory, and
I saw how important this book is for our community. Welcome, my
brother, to the telling of our communal home."
"I laughed, cried,
prayed, sang, mourned, rejoiced.....I lived in the pages of They
Tell Me of a Home. If ever we needed to chart our way Home, this is
about as close as we'll ever get. Every traveler will hold fast to
this home-going road map! Daniel Omotosho Black has penned a fiction
that pierces almost every portal to what is real, reminding us that
fine distinctions are not only blurred; we begin to ask why we
pretend there is any difference between what we know is real and
imagine isn't. Mr. Black has written life's great parable! Go
Home....and find yourself along the way." They Tell Me of a Home was nominated for the 2006 Townsend Prize in Fiction, an award given to the Georgia writer who publishes the best work of fiction in a two-year span. |
"In surprising twists that resist any expectations readers may bring to the text, Black executes a revisioning and transcendence worthy of consideration by any serious reader of American literature, history, and culture. The narrative is a provocative and evocative blend on history and imagination, facts and the explosion of facts into unanticipated possibilities." Trudier Harris, J. Carlyle Sitterson Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of Summer Snow: Reflections from a Black Daughter of the South. "The Sacred Place is a captivating art of storytelling in a time before the civil rights era. This great novel serves as a time machine, helping us revisit our past in hopes of someday reconciling our differences." Keith A. Beauchamp, director/producer of The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till "The Sacred Place is a work of power and depth, reminding us of a recent, painful past that too many of us have tried to forget." Trey Ellis, author of Platitudes and Right Here, Right Now "No one who reads and understands Black's novel can easily assuage the need to take a roll call of the giants of American fiction in order to see how many of them have dared to enter, much less explore or cultivate, 'the sacred place' within the darkest recesses of American culture." Melvin B. Rahming, Ph.D., professor of African American and Caribbean Literature at Morehouse College |
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Copyright © 2011 Daniel Black. |
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