By Gloria Naylor

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On Sale: Feb 1, 1997
Page Count: 592 pages
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
ISBN-13: 9780316599238

The sequel to Langston Hughes’s 1967 classic anthology The Best Short Stories by Black Writers, Gloria Naylor’s Children of the Night is a “brilliant collection” of short stories by black writers including Maya Angelou, Ralph Ellison, and Edward P. Jones (Booklist).

In 1969, Langston Hughes edited The Best Short Stories by Black Writers, the classic compendium of African-American short fiction from 1899 to 1967. A quarter of a century later, Gloria Naylor compiled an encore volume, Children of the Night, gathering together the most gifted black writers of the later twentieth century — from 1967 to its publication in 1997 — in a rich and varied collection of stories.

The portrait that emerges of the African-American experience in the post-Civil Rights era is stirring, compelling, sometimes disturbing, and certainly provocative. Arranged in in four thematic section — “Remembering,” “Affirming,” “Revealing the Self Divided,” and “Moving On” — the thirty-seven stories included brilliantly capture the many facets of the black experience in America.