A Genealogical History of the Hoyt, Haight, and Hight Families

Song of Solomon — a magical travel story about returning to one's local and global roots — won a National Book Critics Circle Award and was the first African American novel since Richard Wright's Native Son (1940) to be included for selection by the Book-of-theMonth Club. As Morrison suggests, Milkman Dead has "to pay attention to signs and landmarks" in order to discover "the real names" and with these the author allows her black middle-class protagonist to piece together his fantastic genealogical history all the way back to Africa. "How many dead lives and fading memories," Morrison writes, "were buried in and beneath the names of the places." Arturo Islas is fascinated in his work by the liminal United States — Mexico borderlands, a postcontemporary "laboratory" where we can see culture of the First World imploding its postmodernist strategies into the Third World. Planned as a trilogy about the Angel family, The Rain God (1984) and Migrant Souls (1990), read collectively, are sprawling narratives, with genealogical trees as convoluted as Faulkner's and Garcia Marquez's ...»