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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher |
| Original language | |
| English | |
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WE CAST A SHADOW
A pacey, razor-sharp satire of surviving racism in America and also a profoundly moving family story. In the tradition of Ralph Ellison's INVISIBLE MAN, WE CAST A SHADOW fearlessly shines a light on the desperate things we do for the ones we love.
Powerful, touching, and hilarious, this novel is set in the south in a society much like our own (only even more devolved) in which interracial marriage rates have been fast declining, and where everyone is talking about a new experimental medical procedure that boasts unprecedented success rates.
In a society plagued by racism, segregation, and private prisons, this operation saves lives with a controversial method--by turning people white. Like any father, our unnamed narrator just wants the best for his son Nigel, a biracial boy whose black birthmark is getting bigger by the day.
But in order to afford Nigel's whiteness operation, our narrator must make partner at his law firm. He is one of the few black associates there and we forge ahead with him as he jumps through a series of increasingly absurd hoops--from diversity committees to plantation tours to equality activist groups, and down a rabbit hole or two--in a tragicomic quest to do what he thinks is best to protect his son.
Maurice Carlos Ruffin's work has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, AGNI, Kenyon Review, Massachusetts Review, and Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas(University of California, 2013). He is a recipient of an Iowa Review Award in fiction and was the winner of the 2014 William FaulknerWilliam Wisdom Creative Writing Competition for Novel-in-Progress. He is a graduate of the University of New Orleans Creative Writing Workshop and a member of the Peauxdunque WritersAlliance. A native of New Orleans, Maurice published highly salient and widely disseminated essays in Lit Hub in the days surrounding the election, "Talking in New Orleans in the Age of Trump," and "The Effects of White Supremacy Are Non-Transferable."
In a society plagued by racism, segregation, and private prisons, this operation saves lives with a controversial method--by turning people white. Like any father, our unnamed narrator just wants the best for his son Nigel, a biracial boy whose black birthmark is getting bigger by the day.
But in order to afford Nigel's whiteness operation, our narrator must make partner at his law firm. He is one of the few black associates there and we forge ahead with him as he jumps through a series of increasingly absurd hoops--from diversity committees to plantation tours to equality activist groups, and down a rabbit hole or two--in a tragicomic quest to do what he thinks is best to protect his son.
Maurice Carlos Ruffin's work has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, AGNI, Kenyon Review, Massachusetts Review, and Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas(University of California, 2013). He is a recipient of an Iowa Review Award in fiction and was the winner of the 2014 William FaulknerWilliam Wisdom Creative Writing Competition for Novel-in-Progress. He is a graduate of the University of New Orleans Creative Writing Workshop and a member of the Peauxdunque WritersAlliance. A native of New Orleans, Maurice published highly salient and widely disseminated essays in Lit Hub in the days surrounding the election, "Talking in New Orleans in the Age of Trump," and "The Effects of White Supremacy Are Non-Transferable."
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Book
Published 2019-01-29 by One World |
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Book
Published 2019-01-29 by One World |