"Nothing short of a wonder-book."--New York Times Book Review&nbsp; The story collection that hailed the arrival of an essential voice in southern literature--a sharp, rich exploration of what it means to poor, Black, and gay in the United States. A three-year-old boy begins to deliver messages from dead relatives. A zombie uprising is led by an evil preacher. A woman is haunted by a child her husband may have drowned. A pig talks. The stories in Let the Dead Bury Their Dead embody the type of fiction that defined Randall Kenan's career: set in the thinly veiled fictional Carolina town of Tims Creek, they follow a diverse cast of Southern folkways, and stare into a long shadow of history. A stunning mix of magic, myth, and folktales, Kenan masterfully portrays a world of varied voices, and in wondrous prose, brings to life the ghosts of our past and present.

Let the Dead Bury Their Dead: And Other Stories

Literature & Fiction

Kenan, Randall

United States

Mariner Books Classics

A collection of stories by the author of A Visitation of Spirits features tales of a boy with the gift to receive messages from the grave, a widow's transformation after a weekend affair with a teenager, and others. 10,000 first printing.

Let the Dead Bury Their Dead and Other Stories

Humor & Entertainment

Television

Harcourt

Set in North Carolina, these are stories about blacks and whites, young and old, rural and sophisticated, the real and fantastical. Named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, nominated for the 1992 National Book Critics Circle Award, and given the Lambda Award.

Let The Dead Bury Their Dead (Harvest American Writing Series)

Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century

History

Americas

Little,Brown & Co

Horace Cross, the 16-year-old descendent of slaves and deacons of the church, spends a horror-filled spring night wrestling with the demons and angels of his brief life. Brilliant, popular, and the bright promise of his elders, Horace struggles with the guilt of discovering who he is, a young man attracted to other men and yearning to escape the narrow confines of Tim's Creek. His cousin, the Reverend James Greene, tries to help Horace but finds he is no more prepared than the older generation to save Horace's soul or his life. And as he views the aftermath of Horace's horrible night, he is left with only questions and the passing of generations. In his powerful first novel, Randall Kenan--recipient of the Prix de Rome, the Whiting Award, and other accolades--shows us the effects of a proud family heritage on a generation that must confront a world far removed from anything they are prepared for. Told in a montage of voices and memories, A Visitation of the Spirits shows just how richly populated a family's present is with the spirits of the past and the future.

A Visitation of Spirits: A Novel

Vintage

In a remarkable first novel--uniquely conceived and executed--Randall Kenan has created a vivid portrait of four generations of a Southern black family in rural North Carolina.

Anchor

If I Had Two Wings: Stories

About the Author\nRandall Kenan (1963–2020) was the former chancellor of the Fellowship of Southern Writers and a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill. He lived in Hillsborough, North Carolina.\nFinalist for 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction 
Longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction 
Finalist for the 2021 Aspen Words Literary Prize\nMingling the earthy with the otherworldly, these ten stories chronicle ineffable events in ordinary lives. 
In Kenan’s fictional territory of Tims Creek, North Carolina, an old man rages in his nursing home, a parson beats up an adulterer, a rich man is haunted by a hog, and an elderly woman turns unwitting miracle worker. A retired plumber travels to Manhattan, where Billy Idol sweeps him into his entourage. An architect who lost his famous lover to AIDS reconnects with a high-school fling. Howard Hughes seeks out the woman who once cooked him butter beans. 
Shot through with humor and seasoned by inventiveness and maturity, Kenan riffs on appetites of all kinds, on the eerie persistence of history, and on unstoppable lovers and unexpected salvations. If I Had Two Wings is a rich chorus of voices and visions, dreams and prophecies, marked by physicality and spirit. Kenan’s prose is nothing short of wondrous.

W.W.Norton&Company

Black Folk Could Fly: Selected Writings by Randall Kenan

Review\n"[Kenan] dreams a path forward using resources that lie deep in the past. This applies to the whole of Black Folk Could Fly, a collection of essays that, while less known than his celebrated fiction ― many appeared as introductions or in small magazines ― provide rare insight into Kenan’s life and mind, while retaining the humor, humanity and elegant power for which he is loved. In a sense, the collected pieces function as memoir, or as a series of love letters to the forces that shaped the writer." 
― Kinohi Nishikawa, New York Times\n"Each essay in this collection is an education, an illumination, a bridge from the past to the present, to the future, as long as Randall Kenan’s writing is read. The breadth of his knowledge of life, food, literature, American history, his own history, touches down here again and again in moments of mixed grace, candor, and wit. The result is a book you sit with instead of rush through, lingering like you might with a friend when you just don’t want to say goodbye." 
― Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel\n"Randall Kenan’s erudition was matched only by his imagination, his love for his homeplace only by his vast appreciation of elsewhere, his profound engagement with Black culture only by his daring and thoughtful explorations of its broader meanings. Few writers are as secure in their various identities as he was and as generous in celebrating the worlds of others. This collection is a tribute to one of the great writers in the African American tradition and assures his place in the canon. It also reminds us how much we need to hear his voice today." 
― Henry Louis Gates Jr., author of The Black Church\n"Randall Kenan’s posthumous collection of essays soars…his pieces on Southern footways sparkle with personality and color…his acute attention to sense of place permeates his work, no matter the genre. One of the hallmarks of his writing is his ability to put his audience in vivid-sensory-filled spaces." 
― Latria Graham, Atlanta Journal Constitution\n"Almost everything in the inimitable sound of Randall Kenan’s baritone voice is contained in this collection of beautiful thinking and feeling. The warm, mercurial intelligence of Kenan’s smile, especially, is made word in this collection of beautiful thinking and feeling, thank goodness." 
― Terrance Hayes, author of American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassins\n"In these wonderfully far-ranging essays Randall Kenan writes with wit, warmth, and humility about Baldwin and Bergman and Blackness and the great Eartha Kitt. Best of all, he writes about himself: his fascinating childhood, his relationship with the South, his thoughts on Star Wars and Race and writing and pop culture and barbecue. He understood we live in perilous times; he understood the necessity of joy." 
― Margot Livesey, author of The Boy in the Field\n"Stirring, deeply thought-through essays and letters on topics ranging from sexuality and racism to foodways and the sense of place... A superb introduction to a writer deserving much greater recognition." 
― Kirkus (starred review)\nA personal, social, and intellectual self-portrait of the beloved and enormously influential late Randall Kenan, a master of both fiction and nonfiction. 
Virtuosic in his use of literary forms, nurtured and unbounded by his identities as a Black man, a gay man, an intellectual, and a Southerner, Randall Kenan was known for his groundbreaking fiction. Less visible were his extraordinary nonfiction essays, published as introductions to anthologies and in small journals, revealing countless facets of Kenan’s life and work. 
Flying under the radar, these writings were his most personal and autobiographical: memories of the three women who raised him―a grandmother, a schoolteacher great-aunt, and the great-aunt’s best friend; recollections of his boyhood fear of snakes and his rapturous discoveries in books; sensual evocations of the land, seasons, and crop

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

Walking on Water is a profoundly moving and provocative account--both timely and enduring--of the thoughts, the feelings, the lives, of African Americans in the post-Civil Rights era of the nineties, by the highly praised author of Let the Dead Bury Their Dead and A Visitation of Spirits. Traversing the country over a period of six years, Randall Kenan talked to nearly two hundred African Americans, whose individual stories he has shaped into a continent-sized tapestry of black American life today. He starts his journey in the famous, long-standing black resort community on Martha's Vineyard, travels up through New England, and heads west, visiting Chicago, Minneapolis (home of the singer Prince and of the Pilgrim Baptist Church, with its seven choirs and vast outreach), Coeur d'Alene (skinhead capital of the world), Seattle, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas. He moves on to the South, to Louisiana and St. Simons Island, where so many slave ships landed, and ends up at home in North Carolina, telling his own family's story. Kenan talks to a wide variety of people: to the Harlem Renaissance writer Dorothy West; to the Republican congressman from Alaska, Walter Furnace; to a rising young air force major whose father was lynched in Alabama when the major was a child; to a vocal welfare mom. He interviews a retired railroad conductor, an energetic "child of the dream" majoring in public relations at the University of North Dakota, Atlanta's new Panther-style militants, a bisexual AIDS activist, a twelve-year-old girl who fought the racism at her elementary school with a stunning essay, a Baptist minister in Mormon Utah. He speaks to teachers, retired maids, filmmakers, dancers, entrepreneurs, cyberspace whizzes, lawyers, farmers, painters, and many, many more. The people we meet--each with his or her own unique slant on black life--are fascinating. And as we listen to them, a multifaceted portrait of the black community at the end of the century emerges, with its diverse and little-known local cultures, its widely varying accommodations to integration, its desire to keep the soul-satisfying elements of black life intact while integrating with the larger society, its many ways of coping with the discrimination that remains: its triumphs, its problems, its optimism in spite of all the odds. Walking on Water is a richer, sharper, fuller picture than we have yet had of the astonishing experience of being black in America.

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

KNOPF

"A meaningful panoramic view of what it means to be human...Cause for celebration." --Times-Picayune From the author of the National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Let the Dead Bury Their Dead comes a moving, cliché-shattering group portrait of African Americans at the turn of the twenty-first century. In a hypnotic blend of oral history and travel writing, Randall Kenan sets out to answer a question that has has long fascinated him: What does it mean to be black in America today? To find the answers, Kenan traveled America--from Alaska to Louisiana, from Maine to Las Vegas--over the course of six years, interviewing nearly two hundred African Americans from every conceivable walk of life. We meet a Republican congressman and an AIDS activist; a Baptist minister in Mormon Utah and an ambitious public-relations major in North Dakota; militant activists in Atlanta and movie folks in Los Angeles. The result is a marvellously sharp, full picture of contemporary African American lives and experiences.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Kenan, Randall. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Kenan, Randall

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Kenan, Randall. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Let the Dead Bury Their Dead: And Other Stories

Let the Dead Bury Their Dead and Other Stories

Let The Dead Bury Their Dead (Harvest American Writing Series)

Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century

A Visitation of Spirits: A Novel

A Visitation of Spirits: A Novel

If I Had Two Wings: Stories

Black Folk Could Fly: Selected Writings by Randall Kenan

Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century

Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century