The Women of Brewster Place - A Novel in Seven Stories

The National Book Award-winning novel and contemporary classic that launched the brilliant career of Gloria Naylor, now with a foreword by Tayari Jones

[A] shrewd and lyrical portrayal of many of the realities of black life . . . Naylor bravely risks sentimentality and melodrama to write her compassion and outrage large, and she pulls it off triumphantly. The New York Times Book Review

Brims with inventiveness and relevance. NPR's Fresh Air

In her heralded first novel, Gloria Naylor weaves together the stories of seven women living in Brewster Place, a bleak-inner city sanctuary, creating a powerful, moving portrait of the strengths, struggles, and hopes of black women in America. Vulnerable and resilient, openhanded and openhearted, these women forge their lives in a place that in turn threatens and protects a common prison and a shared home. Naylor renders both loving and painful human experiences with simple eloquence and uncommon intuition in this touching and unforgettable read.

Rezension:

"[Naylor's] ardent inventiveness as a storyteller and the complex individuality she gives to each of her seven main characters make the novel so much more than a contrived literary assembly line. . . . Deftly, Naylor gathers all these individual stories into one climactic narrative that works through the reader via a word-by-word sense of horror and outrage. . . . The Women of Brewster Place, born of the details of a particular time and community, also turns out to be one of those, yes, universal stories depicting how we, the fallen, seek grace.
Maureen Corrigan, NPR's Fresh Air

The most refreshing voice in the black idiom since readers first discovered Toni Morrison.
Claude Brown, author of Manchild in the Promised Land

Naylor creates a completely believable, and very frightening, world of degradation, violence and human very human courage and sturdiness.
Chicago Sun-Times

Vibrating with undisguised emotion, The Women of Brewster Place s prings from the same roots that produces the blues. Like them, [Naylor s] book sings of sorrow proudly borne by black women in America.
The Washington Post

The miracle of the National Book Awards choices in 1983, which included Naylor s The Women of Brewster Place and Walker s The Color Purple, meant that books that sounded in me in new and more complete ways were held up as models of great literature. It meant that Walker s and Naylor s works could garner much wider publicity and acclaim, and more easily find their way to small, rural libraries around the country.( )While Naylor provided witness and reason for my people, Walker provided witness and reason for my place.
Jesmyn Ward, The Washington Post