Author | Ta-Nehisi Coates |
---|---|
Audio read by | Joe Morton [1] |
Cover artist | Calida Garcia Rawles [2] |
Language | English |
Genre | Historical fiction, science fiction |
Publisher | One World |
Publication date | September 24, 2019 |
Publication place | United States |
Media type | Print (hardcover) |
Pages | 407 |
ISBN | 978-0-399-59059-7 |
813/.6 | |
LC Class | PS3603.O17 W38 2019 |
The Water Dancer is the debut novel by Ta-Nehisi Coates, published on September 24, 2019, by Random House under its One World imprint. It is a surrealist story set in the pre-Civil War South, concerning a superhuman protagonist named Hiram Walker who possesses a photographic memory, but who cannot remember his mother. He learns he has a special ability known as "conduction", with which he is able to transport people—including himself—over long distances. Conduction is powered by his memories and storytelling, and can fold the Earth like fabric, allowing travel across large areas via waterways. [3]
The novel debuted at number one on The New York Times fiction best-seller list and was selected for the revival of Oprah's Book Club.
Hiram Walker was born into slavery during the Antebellum South on a declining tobacco plantation in Virginia named Lockless. He is the mixed-race son of a white plantation owner and a black mother who was sold away by his father when Hiram was young. The local community consists of the enslaved ("the Tasked"); the landowners ("the Quality"); and the low-class whites ("the Low"). Hiram has an extraordinary photographic memory but is unable to remember his mother. However, in one instance when Hiram is driving across a bridge he suddenly has a vision of his mother dancing. When the vision ends, his carriage has fallen into the water. His white half brother drowns, but Hiram is transported out of the water. He learns that his miracle survival was a result of a superhuman ability he calls "conduction", with which he can transport himself and others across impossible distances. Conduction is triggered by powerful memories: those of his mother. He becomes involved with the Underground Railroad. Hiram escapes to Philadelphia, where he encounters Box Brown and Jarm Logue. He eventually comes to meet a famous member of the Underground named Moses, who also has the power of Conduction. Moses is later revealed to be Harriet Tubman.
Coates began writing the novel around 2008 and 2009. He had recently finished his first memoir, The Beautiful Struggle, and was encouraged by his agent to write fiction. At the time, Coates was extensively researching slavery and the Civil War. At the end of The Water Dancer, Coates adds an author's note, listing Peter and William Still as the inspiration for the characters in the White family. Coates was influenced by author E. L. Doctorow and "how he almost reinvented history; he made history his in a certain kind of way". Coates cited Doctorow's novels Ragtime (1975) and Billy Bathgate (1989) as early influences and recalled later reading The Waterworks . He was also influenced by his childhood love of comic books and, in general, the concept of heroes. While researching the Civil War, he was frustrated with how "a lot of the people who were held up as heroic were in fact straight-up white supremacists." Coates worked on the novel for a decade in "various degrees". [4]
The Water Dancer received favorable reviews. According to Book Marks, the book received "positive" reviews based on 42 critic reviews, with 13 being "rave" and 24 being "positive" and three being "mixed" and two being "pan". [5] In Books in the Media, a site that aggregates critic reviews of books, the book received a rating of 3.36 out of 5 from the site which was based on nine critic reviews. [6] In the November/December 2019 issue of Bookmarks , a magazine that aggregates critic reviews of books, the book received a rating of 4.00 out of 5 based on critic reviews with a critical summary saying, "Despite these flaws, an important book". [7] [8]
The novel debuted at number one on The New York Times fiction best-seller list for the week ending September 28, 2019. [9] The novel was selected by Oprah Winfrey as the first book for the revival of her Oprah's Book Club on Apple TV+. She called it "one of the best books I have ever read in my entire life. Right up there in the Top 5." [10] [11] [12]
Publishers Weekly gave the novel a rave review, writing, "In prose that sings and imagination that soars, Coates further cements himself as one of this generation's most important writers, tackling one of America's oldest and darkest periods with grace and inventiveness. This is bold, dazzling, and not to be missed." [13] David Fear of Rolling Stone gave the novel a rave review, saying it exceeded expectations for a debut novel and writing, "What's most powerful is the way Coates enlists his notions of the fantastic, as well as his fluid prose, to probe a wound that never seems to heal. [...] There's an urgency to his remembrance of things past that brims with authenticity, testifying to centuries of bone-deep pain. It makes The Water Dancer feel timeless and instantly canon-worthy." [14] Dwight Garner of The New York Times gave the novel a positive review, calling it "a jeroboam of a book, a crowd-pleasing exercise in breakneck and often occult storytelling that tonally resembles the work of Stephen King as much as it does the work of Toni Morrison, Colson Whitehead and the touchstone African-American science-fiction writer Octavia Butler." [15] Kirkus Reviews gave the novel a favorable review, but felt it was "less intensely realized" than Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad (2015). [16]
Constance Grady of Vox praised the "clarity of Coates's ideas and the poetry of his language" but largely panned the novel as a "mess" with monotonous characters and lacking a strong plot development to make up for it. She criticized the movement between the plot-driven and allegorical storytelling modes as "whiplash-inducing". [17] Shah Tazrian Ashrafi of The Daily Star , while complimenting its "lyrical prose", felt that the novel "left [him] craving more action and high-geared moments of grief, suspense, climax, and character development." [18]
Cory Efram Doctorow is a Canadian-British blogger, journalist, and science fiction author who served as co-editor of the blog Boing Boing. He is an activist in favour of liberalising copyright laws and a proponent of the Creative Commons organization, using some of its licences for his books. Some common themes of his work include digital rights management, file sharing, and post-scarcity economics.
Edwidge Danticat is a Haitian-American novelist and short story writer. Her first novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory, was published in 1994 and went on to become an Oprah's Book Club selection. Danticat has since written or edited several books and has been the recipient of many awards and honors. As of the fall of 2023, she will be the Wun Tsun Tam Mellon Professor of the Humanities in the department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University.
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Ta-Nehisi Paul Coates is an American author, journalist, and activist. He gained a wide readership during his time as national correspondent at The Atlantic, where he wrote about cultural, social, and political issues, particularly regarding African Americans and white supremacy.
Brooklyn is a 2009 novel by Irish author Colm Tóibín. It won the 2009 Costa Novel Award, was shortlisted for the 2011 International Dublin Literary Award and was longlisted for the 2009 Man Booker Prize. In 2012, The Observer named it as one of "The 10 best historical novels".
Oprah's Book Club 2.0 is a book club founded June 1, 2012, by Oprah Winfrey in a joint project between OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network and O: The Oprah Magazine. The club is a re-launch of the original Oprah's Book Club, which ran for 15 years and ended in 2011, but as the "2.0" name suggests, digital media is the new focus. It incorporates the use of various social media platforms and e-readers that allow for the quoting and uploading of passages and notes for discussion, among other features.
An American Marriage is a novel by the American author Tayari Jones. It is her fourth novel and was published by Algonquin Books on February 6, 2018. In February 2018, the novel was chosen for Oprah's Book Club 2.0. The novel also won the 2019 Women's Prize for Fiction.
Between the World and Me is a 2015 nonfiction book written by American author Ta-Nehisi Coates and published by Spiegel & Grau. It was written by Coates as a letter to his then-teenage son about his perception of what the feelings, symbolism, and realities associated with being Black in the United States are. Coates recapitulates American history and explains to his son "racist violence that has been woven into American culture." Coates draws from an abridged, autobiographical account of his youth in Baltimore, detailing his beliefs about what are the ways in which, to him, institutions like schools, the local police, and even "the streets" discipline, endanger, and threaten to "disembody" black men and women.
The Underground Railroad is a historical fiction novel by American author Colson Whitehead, published by Doubleday in 2016. The alternate history novel tells the story of Cora, a slave in the Antebellum South during the 19th century, who makes a bid for freedom from her Georgia plantation by following the Underground Railroad, which the novel depicts as a rail transport system with safe houses and secret routes. The book was a critical and commercial success, hitting the bestseller lists and winning several literary awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the National Book Award for Fiction, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and the 2017 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence. A TV miniseries adaptation, written and directed by Barry Jenkins, was released in May 2021.
Brit Bennett is an American writer based in Los Angeles. Her debut novel The Mothers (2016) was a New York Times best-seller. Her second novel, The Vanishing Half (2020), was also a New York Times best-seller, and was chosen as a Good Morning America Book Club selection. The Vanishing Half was selected as one of The New York Times' ten best books of 2020, and was shortlisted for the 2021 Women's Prize for Fiction.
William Paul Coates is an American publisher, printer and community activist. In 1978 he founded the Black Classic Press (BCP), devoted to publishing obscure and significant works by and about individuals of African descent, particularly previously out-of-print books, and he also established the printing company BCP Digital Printing in 1995. He is the father of award-winning author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates.
We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy is a 2017 collection of essays by Ta-Nehisi Coates originally published in The Atlantic magazine between 2008 and 2016 over the course of the American Barack Obama administration. It includes the titles that launched his career: "The Case for Reparations" and "The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration". Each of the essays is introduced with the author's reflections.
Ghachar Ghochar is a 2013 psychological drama novella written by Kannada author Vivek Shanbhag and was translated into English by Srinath Perur. Set in Bangalore, the book is about an unnamed narrator who reminisces about his dysfunctional family's rags to riches story which results in troubling behavioural changes in each of them. The title is a made-up phrase, invented by the narrator's wife and her brother, which means "tangled up beyond repair".
Rachel Khong is an American writer and editor based in San Francisco.
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The Oprah Conversation is an interview talk show by Oprah Winfrey that premiered on Apple TV+ on July 30, 2020.
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