Search results for ""Author Margo Jefferson""

WINNER OF THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023 FROM THE PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING CRITIC AND ACCLAIMED AUTHOR OF NEGROLAND 'This is one of the most imaginative - and therefore moving - memoirs I have ever read' - Vivian Gornick, author of Fierce Attachments Margo Jefferson boldly and brilliantly fuses cultural analysis and memoir to probe race, class, family and art. Taking in the jazz and blues icons whom Jefferson idolised as a child in the 1950s, ideas of what the female body could be - as incarnated by trailblazing Black dancers and athletes - Harriet Beecher Stowe's Topsy reimagined in the artworks of Kara Walker, white supremacy in the novels of Willa Cather, and more, this breathtakingly eloquent account is both a critique and a vindication of the constructed self. 'Margo Jefferson's Constructing a Nervous System is as electric as its title suggests. It takes vital risks, tosses away rungs of the ladder as it climbs, and offers an indispensable, rollicking account of the enchantments, pleasures, costs, and complexities of "imagin[ing] and interpret[ing] what had not imagined you' - Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts 'If you want to know who we are and where we've been, read Margo Jefferson' - Edmund White, author of A Previous Life 'This is a moving portrait of the life of a brilliant African American woman's mind. Margo Jefferson is so real, her sensibility so literary, her learning such a joy. The gifts of reading her are many' - Darryl Pinckney, author of Sold and Gone

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Michael Jackson: provocateur, icon, enigma. Who was he, really? And how does his spectacular rise, his catastrophic fall, reflect upon those who made him, those who broke him, and those who loved him? Almost ten years on from Jackson's untimely death, here is Margo Jefferson's definitive and dazzling dissection of the King of Pop: a man admired for his music, his flair, his performances; and censured for his skin, his erratic behaviour, and, in his final years, for his relationships with children.

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'Jefferson's eye for details yields some devastatingly honest and painful insights' The Times 'Captivating... Charm is this book's watchword' Colin Grant, Guardian The daughter of a successful paediatrician and a fashionable socialite, Margo Jefferson spent her childhood among Chicago's black elite. She calls this society 'Negroland': 'a small region of Negro America where residents were sheltered by a certain amount of privilege and plenty'. With privilege came expectation. Reckoning with the limits and demands of Negroland at crucial historical moments - the civil rights movement, the dawn of feminism, the fallacy of post-racial America - Jefferson brilliantly charts the twists and turns of a life informed by psychological and moral contradictions. Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. 'Negroland is a sharp-eyed cultural commentary on an era of America that has often been too simply told' Aminatta Forna, Guardian 'Jefferson writes with piercing clarity of a childhood which was full of love and opportunity at home, but also saturated by contradictions, confusions and a racism which corrodes, like rust, to the heart's core' Observer 'Utterly compelling... a remarkable achievement' Sunday Times

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'Such a wonderful book. Utterly unique, exquisitely crafted and quietly powerful. I loved it and want everyone to read this lost literary treasure.' Bernardine Evaristo'Maud Martha finds beauty in the brutal formative moments that make us. It is one of my favorite depictions of how a woman comes to trust her eyes.' Raven Leilani'The quotidian rises to an exquisite portraiture of black womanhood in the hands of one of America's most foundational writers.' Claudia Rankine'Maud Martha reveals the poetry, power and splendor of an ordinary life.' Tayari Jones'Incredible ... She is a quietly radical seer, she is literature itself, a person in the world. It's a rare kind of perfect!' Max PorterWhat, what, am I to do with all of this life? Maud Martha Brown is a little girl growing up on the South Side of 1940s Chicago. Amidst the crumbling taverns and overgrown yards, she dreams: of New York, romance, her future. She admires dandelions, learns to drink coffee, falls in love, decorates her kitchenette, visits the Jungly Hovel, guts a chicken, buys hats, gives birth. But her lighter-skinned husband has dreams too: of the Foxy Cats Club, other women, war. And the 'scraps of baffled hate' - a certain word from a saleswoman; that visit to the cinema; the cruelty of a department store Santa Claus- are always there .Written in 1953 but never published in Britain, Maud Martha is a poetic collage of happenings that forms an extraordinary portrait of an ordinary life: one lived with wisdom, humour, protest, rage, dignity, and joy.

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