Bloodline: Five Stories

Bloodline: Five Stories

In these five stories, Ernest Gaines returns to the cane fields, sharecroppers' shacks, and decaying plantation houses of Louisiana, the terrain of his great novels <i>A Gathering of Old Men</i> and <i>A Lesson Before Dying</i>. As rendered by Gaines, this country becomes as familiar, and as haunted by cruelty, suffering, and courage, as Ralph Ellison's Harlem or Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County.<br><br>Gaines introduces us to this world through the eyes of guileless children and wizened jailbirds, black tenants and white planters.  He shows his characters eking out a living and making love, breaking apart aand coming together.  And on every page he captures the soul of black community whose circumstances make even the slightest assertion of self-respect an act of majestic€"and sometimes suicidal€"heroism.  <i>Bloodline</i> is a miracle of storytelling.<br><br>STORIES INCLUDE:<br><br>A Long Day in November<br>The Sky Is Gray<br>Three Men<br>Bloodline<br>Just Like a Tree