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The Known World
Edward P. Jones. HarperCollins: 2004 (paperback). ISBN: 0060557559. 416 pages.
Guide not available
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The very newest winner of the Pulitzer Prize for literature (would that be for 2004? How did they decide already? Anyway). Inspired by his own research into a relatively overlooked phenomena in America's pre-Civil War historical past, Edward P. Jones has unleashed a powerful but poignant punch to the gut of our collective ideas about the dirty little misfortune of a once-very-popular industry. Sure, it wasn't a common thing, but in certain areas of the American South, free black men and women could and did own black slaves. Jones sets us up with two slave-owning plantation families, one owned by a decently open-minded but severely self-satisfied powerful white landed gentleman, the other by his protégé, a freed slave who runs an almost equally prosperous operation. It took us a few pages to get into the rhyme and rhythm of this elegantly ambitious novel, but by the end of the first chapter we were utterly hooked. It's the kind of story of fuzzy boundaries, confusing loyalties, and the best of misguided intentions that's so vividly alive it literally bounces off the page-you can picture the movie that you just know they're going to make, and hope that Hollywood doesn't attempt to tidy it up. Definitely a must-read choice that will delight and devastate the discerning reader of the twenty-first century-and prepare yourself to be knocked flat on your posterior by the blood-rattling ending.
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