An enthralling literary tour-de-force that pays tribute to Detroit's legendary neighborhood, a mecca for jazz, sports, and politics, Black Bottom Saints is a powerful blend of fact and imagination reminiscent of E.L. Doctorow's classic novel Ragtime and Marlon James' Man Booker Award-winning masterpiece, A Brief History of Seven Killings. From the Great Depression through the post-World War II years, Joseph "Ziggy" Johnson, has been the pulse of Detroit's famous Black Bottom. A celebrated gossip columnist for the city's African-American newspaper, the Michigan Chronicle, he is also the emcee of one of the hottest night clubs, where he's rubbed elbows with the legendary black artists of the era, including Ethel Waters, Billy Eckstein, and Count Basie. Ziggy is also the founder and dean of the Ziggy Johnson School of Theater. But now the doyen of Black Bottom is ready to hang up his many dapper hats.&nbsp;&nbsp; As he lays dying in the black-owned-and-operated Kirkwood Hospital, Ziggy reflects on his life, the community that was the center of his world, and the remarkable people who helped shape it. Inspired by the Catholic Saints Day Books, Ziggy curates his own list of Black Bottom's venerable "52 Saints." Among them are a vulnerable Dinah Washington, a defiant Joe&nbsp; Louis, and a raucous Bricktop. Randall balances the stories of these larger-than-life "Saints" with local heroes who became household names, enthralling men and women whose unstoppable ambition, love of style, and faith in community made this black Midwestern neighborhood the rival of New York City's Harlem. Accompanying these "tributes" are thoughtfully paired cocktails--special drinks that capture the essence of each of Ziggy's saints--libations as strong and satisfying as Alice Randall's wholly original view of a place and time unlike any other.

Black Bottom Saints: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

Randall, Alice

United States

Amistad

Product Description 
An enthralling literary tour-de-force that pays tribute to Detroit's legendary neighborhood, a mecca for jazz, sports, and politics, Black Bottom Saints is a powerful blend of fact and imagination reminiscent of E.L. Doctorow's classic novel Ragtime and Marlon James' Man Booker Award-winning masterpiece, A Brief History of Seven Killings. 
From the Great Depression through the post-World War II years, Joseph “Ziggy” Johnson, has been the pulse of Detroit’s famous Black Bottom. A celebrated gossip columnist for the city’s African-American newspaper, the Michigan Chronicle, he is also the emcee of one of the hottest night clubs, where he’s rubbed elbows with the legendary black artists of the era, including Ethel Waters, Billy Eckstein, and Count Basie. Ziggy is also the founder and dean of the Ziggy Johnson School of Theater. But now the doyen of Black Bottom is ready to hang up his many dapper hats. 
As he lays dying in the black-owned-and-operated Kirkwood Hospital, Ziggy reflects on his life, the community that was the center of his world, and the remarkable people who helped shape it. 
Inspired by the Catholic Saints Day Books, Ziggy curates his own list of Black Bottom’s venerable "52 Saints." Among them are a vulnerable Dinah Washington, a defiant Joe Louis, and a raucous Bricktop. Randall balances the stories of these larger-than-life "Saints" with local heroes who became household names, enthralling men and women whose unstoppable ambition, love of style, and faith in community made this black Midwestern neighborhood the rival of New York City’s Harlem. 
Accompanying these “tributes” are thoughtfully paired cocktails―special drinks that capture the essence of each of Ziggy’s saints―libations as strong and satisfying as Alice Randall’s wholly original view of a place and time unlike any other.\nReview 
"I cannot tell you how much I appreciate and really love this book. So many stories, our stories, Mom's, Bricktop Valda Grey...so many of us NEED to know these stories. Brava, Bravo!" -- Whoopi Goldberg\n"Black Bottom Saints offers Randall's multihued genius -- as author of country music compositions, historical fiction, magazine profiles, essays, editorials, children's books, and screenplays -- a splendid venue to shine as she creates a magical world worthy of her magnificent gifts." -- Michael Eric Dyson\n"Lively, engaging, and often wise." -- 
New York Times Book Review\n“Alice Randall's magical 
Black Bottom Saints evokes Detroit’s legendary Black Bottom, one of America’s most influential, artful Black communities. Her “Caramel Camelot” comes alive in the voice of Ziggy Johnson, whose School of the Theater extravaganzas were actually “citizenship schools” of self discovery, performance and celebration for Black girls. Ziggy’s decades of who's who and what's what weekly columns for the 
Michigan Chronicle document the “Saints” whose lives and talents created “fifty-two paths from trauma to transcendence.” Effervescent, tragic, proud, and immensely compelling, 
Black Bottom Saints is a must-read-now triumph.” -- Jayne Anne Phillips, National Book Award/NBCC Finalist, author of 
Black Tickets, 
Machine Dreams, 
Shelter, Lark and 
Termite & Quiet Dell\n" 
Black Bottom Saints is easily the most inventive and musical novel I've read in a decade. Alice Randall has rewritten and re-energized the rules of the American novel!" -- Kiese Laymon, author of 
Long Division and 
Heavy, Professor of English and Creative Writing, University of Mississippi\n“Alice Randall’s 
Black Bottom Saints arrives at a critical moment in our nation’s history, and it’s exactly the right book for our times—an entertaining and necessary act of hagiography and a singular hybrid of fiction, biography and history. I wish I could have seen Black Bottom in its heyday—and thrown back a cocktail with Ziggy Johnson--but reading Randall’s latest novel makes me feel that, actually, I have.” 
 -- Jay McInerney, author of 
Bright Ligh

BLK BOTTOM SAINTS

Cindy, the beautiful, illegitimate half-sister of Scarlett O'Hara, describes her life as a slave on a plantation and relates how she made her way to Atlanta to become the mistress of a white businessman, only to leave him for an aspiring black politician.

The Wind Done Gone: A Novel

Houghton/Mifflin

The Wind Done Gone

Literary

Houghton, Mifflin Company

In a brilliant rejoinder and an inspired act of literary invention, Alice Randall explodes the world created in Margaret Mitchell's famous 1936 novel, the work that more than any other has defined our image of the antebellum South. Imagine simply that the black characters peopling that world were completely different, not egregious, one-dimensional stereotypes but fully alive, complex human beings. And then imagine, quite plausibly, that at the center of this world moves an illegitimate mulatto woman, and that this woman, Cynara, Cinnamon, or Cindy -- beautiful and brown -- gets to tell her story. Cindy is born into a world in which she is unacknowledged by her plantation-owning father and passed over by her mother in favor of her white charges. Sold off like so much used furniture, she eventually makes her way back to Atlanta to take up with a prominent white businessman, only to leave him for an aspiring politician of her own color. Moving from the Deep South to the exhilarating freedom of Reconstruction Washington, with its thriving black citizenry of statesmen, professionals, and strivers of every persuasion, Cindy experiences firsthand the promise of the new era at its dizzying peak, just before it begins to slip away. Alluding to events in Mitchell's novel but ingeniously and ironically transforming them, THE WIND DONE GONE is an exquisitely written, emotionally complex story of a strong, resourceful black woman breaking away from the damaging world of the Old South to emerge into her own, a person capable of not only receiving but giving love, as daughter, lover, and mother. A passionate love story, a wrenching portrait of a tangled mother-daughter relationship, and a book that gives a voice to those history has silenced, THE WIND DONE GONE is an elegant literary achievement of significant political force and a novel whose time has finally come.

Genre Fiction

Mariner Books

In an inspired act of literary invention, Alice Randall explodes the world created in Margaret Mitchell's famous 1936 novel, the work that more than any other has defined our image of the antebellum South. Imagine simply that the black characters peopling that world were completely different, not egregious, one-dimensional stereotypes but fully alive, complex human beings. And then imagine, quite plausibly, that at the center of this world moves an illegitimate mulatto woman, and that this woman, Cynara, Cinnamon, or Cindy -- beautiful and brown -- gets to tell her story. Cindy is born into a world in which she is unacknowledged by her plantation-owning father and passed over by her mother in favor of her white charges. Sold off like so much used furniture, she eventually makes her way back to Atlanta to take up with a prominent white businessman, only to leave him for an aspiring politician of her own color. Moving from the Deep South to the exhilarating freedom of Reconstruction Washington, with its thriving black citizenry, Cindy experiences firsthand the promise of the new era at its dizzying peak, just before it begins to slip away. Alluding to events in Mitchell's novel but ingeniously and ironically transforming them, THE WIND DONE GONE is an exquisitely written, emotionally complex story of a strong, resourceful black woman breaking away from the damaging world of the Old South to emerge into her own, a person capable of not only receiving but giving love, as daughter, lover, and mother. A book that gives voice to those history has silenced, THE WIND DONE GONE is an elegant literary achievement of significant political force and a novel whose time has finally come.

In this daring and provocative literary parody which has captured the interest and imagination of a nation, Alice Randall explodes the world created in GONE WITH THE WIND, a work that more than any other has defined our image of the antebellum South. Taking sharp aim at the romanticized, whitewashed mythology perpetrated by this southern classic, Randall has ingeniously conceived a multilayered, emotionally complex tale of her own - that of Cynara, the mulatto half-sister, who, beautiful and brown and born into slavery, manages to break away from the damaging world of the Old South to emerge into full life as a daughter, a lover, a mother, a victor. THE WIND DONE GONE is a passionate love story, a wrenching portrait of a tangled mother-daughter relationship, and a book that "celebrates a people's emancipation not only from bondage but also from history and myth, custom and stereotype" (San Antonio Express-News).

The author of The Wind Done Gone explores the racial divide in America through the character of Harvard-educated African-American professor of Russian literature Windsor Armstrong--a liberal black woman who is troubled by her son's romantic interest in a white Russian stripper.

Pushkin and the Queen of Spades

Houghton, mifflin, harcourt

The author of The Wind Done Gone explores the racial divide in America through the character of Harvard-educated African-American professor of Russian literature Windsor Armstrong--a liberal black woman who is troubled by her son's romantic interest in a white Russian stripper.

Windsor Armstrong has a problem: her brilliant boy, Pushkin X, has become a football superstar and is planning to marry a Russian lap dancer. In Windsor's opinion, Pushkin is throwing away every good thing she has given him. When she was an unwed teen mother, Windsor attended Harvard, leaving her shady Detroit roots behind. She raised her son to be fiercely intelligent, well-spoken, and proud. Now he lives for pro football and a white woman of no account. Outraged by her son's decisions but devoted to loving him right, Windsor prepares to give up her last secret: the identity of Pushkin's father.

Pushkin And The Queen Of Spades: A Novel

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

Books by Randall, Alice

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

Black Bottom Saints: A Novel

BLK BOTTOM SAINTS

The Wind Done Gone: A Novel

The Wind Done Gone

The Wind Done Gone

The Wind Done Gone

The Wind Done Gone: A Novel

Pushkin and the Queen of Spades

Pushkin and the Queen of Spades

Pushkin And The Queen Of Spades: A Novel