The Wedding by Dorothy West - ISBN: 9780349012049
Paperback
Forbidden love shakes a black community, revealing generations of secrets.

$33.54

  • Paperback

    240 pages

  • Release Date

    27 August 2019

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Summary

With a new introduction by DIANA EVANS

‘Timelessly cinematic, with painterly visual descriptions and pitch-perfect dialogue that ranges across class, region, race, age, and gender’ Emma Garman, Paris Review

Set on a bucolic Martha’s Vineyard in the 1950s, THE WEDDING tells the story of life in the Oval, a proud, insular community made up of the best and brightest of the East Coast’s black bourgeoisie. Within this inner circle of ‘blue-vein so…

Book Details

ISBN-13:9780349012049
ISBN-10:0349012040
Author:Dorothy West, Diana Evans
Publisher:Little, Brown Book Group
Imprint:Virago Press Ltd
Format:Paperback
Number of Pages:240
Release Date:27 August 2019
Weight:190g
Dimensions:196mm x 126mm x 17mm
Series:Virago Modern Classics
What They're Saying

Critics Review

In The Wedding, West brilliantly portrays the ferocity of class, race, and gender distinctions within family, groups, and generations - Entertainment Weekly

West published her second novel, The Wedding (1995), at the age of 87. It received an ecstatic reaction … Set on the Vineyard on a single summer weekend, The Wedding is narrated by an irresistibly droll omniscient voice that veers across centuries to trace the knotty, reverberating heritage of an affluent African American family … timelessly cinematic, with painterly visual descriptions and pitch-perfect dialogue that ranges across class, region, race, age, and gender - PAris Review

The tranquility of a late summer weekend in 1953 is shattered by a tragic accident in this spare, affecting novel by one of the last surviving members of the Harlem Renaissance … Through the ancestral histories of the Coles family, West subtly reveals the ways in which color can burden and codify behavior. The author makes her points with a delicate hand, maneuvering with confidence and ease through a sometimes incendiary subject … a triumph. - Publisher’s Weekly

You have only to read the first page to know that you are in the hands of a writer, pure and simple. At the end, it’s as though we’ve been invited not so much to a wedding as to a full-scale opera, only to find that one great artist is belting out all the parts. She brings down the house - New York Times

West is a wonderful storyteller, painting vivid and memorable scenes of the life and plight of African Americans from slavery to the fifties. The Wedding is an engrossing tale - USA Today

About The Author

Dorothy West

Dorothy West’s career spans eight decades. A leading light of the Harlem Renaissance movement of the 1930s, she founded literary magazines Challenge and New Challenge. Her short stories appear in numerous anthologies of 20th century African-American fiction. She died in 1998.

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