The Narrows by Ann Petry
Link Williams is a handsome and brilliant Dartmouth graduate who tends bar for a lack of better opportunities for an African American man in a staid mid-century Connecticut town. The routine of Link's life is interrupted when he intervenes to save a woman from a late-night attack. Petry peoples the novel with a cast of characters written in mesmerizing detail.
“Petry’s novels are unique for their time, and brilliant expositions in the intricacies of their literary, political, philosophical, and social implicationsWritten in a period when deliberate black feminist fiction and black feminist interpretations of fiction were ideas whose time had not yet come, they were revolutionary.” — Nellie Y. McKay
"Before the Bottom, before Brewster Place, there was the Narrows (also called the 'Eye of the Needle, The Bottom, Little Harlem, Dark Town, Niggertown). Before China, one of the whores in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, there was China the whore who lived in the Narrows. Before Alice Walker's sexy blues singer Sugg Avery, there was Mamie Powther the busty, sensual, blues-singing woman desired by all the men of the Narrows and beyond. And before Milkman Dead, the middle-class protagonist of Morrison's Song of Soloman was Link Williams, the Robesonesque lead character of Ann Petry's final novel, The Narrows." —Farah Jasmine Griffin, Columbia University
"Before the Bottom, before Brewster Place, there was the Narrows (also called the 'Eye of the Needle, The Bottom, Little Harlem, Dark Town, Niggertown). Before China, one of the whores in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, there was China the whore who lived in the Narrows. Before Alice Walker's sexy blues singer Sugg Avery, there was Mamie Powther the busty, sensual, blues-singing woman desired by all the men of the Narrows and beyond. And before Milkman Dead, the middle-class protagonist of Morrison's Song of Soloman was Link Williams, the Robesonesque lead character of Ann Petry's final novel, The Narrows." —Farah Jasmine Griffin, Columbia University
ANN PETRY (1908–1997) was a reporter, pharmacist, social worker, and community activist. She illuminated the range of black and white experience in her novels, short stories, and other writing. Her book The Street was the first novel by an African American woman to sell more than a million copies.
KEITH CLARK is the author of The Radical Fiction of Ann Petry and Black Manhood in James Baldwin, Ernest J. Gaines, and August Wilson and the editor of Contemporary Black Men’s Fiction and Drama. He is an associate professor of English and African American studies at George Mason University in Virginia.
KEITH CLARK is the author of The Radical Fiction of Ann Petry and Black Manhood in James Baldwin, Ernest J. Gaines, and August Wilson and the editor of Contemporary Black Men’s Fiction and Drama. He is an associate professor of English and African American studies at George Mason University in Virginia.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780810135512 |
| ISBN 10 | 0810135515 |
| Title | The Narrows |
| Author | Ann Petry |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Northwestern University Press |
| Year published | 2017-07-30 |
| Number of pages | 464 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |