Plot summary
When he learns that his pregnant wife has been spirited off to a distant city, William responds as any man might—he drops everything to pursue her. But as a fugitive slave in antebellum America, he must run a terrifying gauntlet, eluding the many who would re-enslave him while learning to trust the few who dare to aid him on his quest.
Among those hunting William is Morrison, a Scot who as a young man fled the miseries of his homeland only to discover more brutal realities in the New World. Bearing many scars, including the loss of his beloved brother, Morrison tracks William for reasons of his own, a personal agenda rooted in tragic events that have haunted him for decades.
Walk Through Darkness is a provocative meditation on racial identity, freedom and equality. It followed Durham's award-winning Gabriel's Story and preceded his bestselling Pride of Carthage .
Gabriel's Story is an award-winning 2001 novel by American author David Anthony Durham.
Pride of Carthage is a 2005 novel about the Second Punic War by American author David Anthony Durham. It was first published by Doubleday, in the United States, 2005. The book was translated into Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish.
Toni Morrison is an American novelist, essayist, editor, teacher and professor emeritus at Princeton University.
Armistead Jones Maupin, Jr. is an American writer, best known for Tales of the City, a series of novels set in San Francisco.
Anthony Boucher was an American author, critic, and editor, who wrote several classic mystery novels, short stories, science fiction, and radio dramas. Between 1942 and 1947 he acted as reviewer of mostly mystery fiction for the San Francisco Chronicle. In addition to "Anthony Boucher", White also employed the pseudonym "H. H. Holmes", which was the pseudonym of a late-19th-century American serial killer; Boucher would also write light verse and sign it "Herman W. Mudgett".
Herb Caen was a San Francisco journalist whose daily column of local goings-on and insider gossip, social and political happenings, painful puns and offbeat anecdotes—"a continuous love letter to San Francisco"—appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle for almost sixty years and made him a household name throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.
Nicole Krauss is an American author best known for her four novels Man Walks Into a Room (2002), The History of Love (2005), Great House (2010) and Forest Dark (2017). Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire, and Granta's Best American Novelists Under 40, and has been collected in Best American Short Stories 2003 and Best American Short Stories 2008. Her novels have been translated into 35 languages. In 2010, she was selected as one of The New Yorker's "20 Under 40" writers to watch. In 2011, Nicole Krauss won an award from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards for Great House.
Stephen Suleyman Schwartz is an American Sufi
journalist, columnist, and author. He has been published in a variety of media, including The Wall Street Journal. He is the founder and executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Islamic Pluralism. In 2011–2012 he was a member of Folks Magazine's Editorial Board.
Joe Gould's Secret is a 2000 American drama film directed by Stanley Tucci. The screenplay by Howard A. Rodman is based on the magazine article Professor Sea Gull and the book Joe Gould's Secret by Joseph Mitchell.
Infidel is the autobiography of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-Dutch activist and politician. Hirsi Ali has attracted controversy and death threats were made against Ali in the early 2000s.
John Leonard was an American literary, television, film, and cultural critic.
SoMa is the bestselling debut novel of American author Kemble Scott. It was first published on February 1, 2007 by Kensington Books as a trade paperback original. It was later published in hardcover by the Doubleday Book Club’s InSightOut Books division.
Raven: The Untold Story of the Rev. Jim Jones and His People details the life and ultimate demise of Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple. Written by journalist Tim Reiterman, the book reviews the history of the Peoples Temple. The book includes numerous interviews, audio tapes and documents among its hundreds of sources.
Kevin Killian is an American poet, author, editor, and playwright of primarily LGBT literature. My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, which he co-edited with Peter Gizzi, won the American Book Award for poetry in 2009. His novel, Impossible Princess, won the 2010 Lambda Literary Award as the best gay erotic fiction work of 2009.
Howl is a 2010 American experimental film which explores both the Six Gallery debut and the 1957 obscenity trial of 20th-century American poet Allen Ginsberg's noted poem Howl. The film is written and directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman and stars James Franco as Ginsberg.
Novella Carpenter is the author of the 2009 memoir Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer. The book describes her extensive garden in Ghost Town, a run-down neighborhood about a mile from downtown Oakland, California. Farm City was listed by some reviewers as one of the top books of 2009, and it was the 2014 selection of the Marin County Free Library, City Public Libraries of Marin County and Dominican University of California "One Book One Marin" reading program.
The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery is a historical non-fiction book written by American historian Eric Foner. Published in 2010 by W. W. Norton & Company, the book serves as a biographical portrait of United States President Abraham Lincoln, discussing the evolution of his stance on slavery in the United States over the course of his life.
The Fiery Trial, which derives its title from a State of the Union address by Lincoln, was the 22nd book written by Foner, the DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University. It was praised by critics and won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for History, the Bancroft Prize, and the Lincoln Prize.
Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think is a book by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler that was published in 2012. The writers refer to the book's title as being a future where nine billion people have access to clean water, food, energy, health care, education, and everything else that is necessary for a first world standard of living, thanks to technological innovation.
Bill Henderson is an American author whose writing has explored the mutual influences of popular culture and literature, and the dark side of celebrity. Boston Magazine noted that his work displays "a real feel for the sad, ridiculous squalor in America, the tacky bars and beauty shops and motel swimming pools, the even cheaper dreams of the people who hang out at them. What Henderson does best, though, is transform the seedy into musical prose." Henderson, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer, "has raided the pop-cult pantheon and managed the estimable feat of breathing new life into the theme of adulation and emulation in a fame-happy era." He is best known for his novels Stark Raving Elvis and I Killed Hemingway.
