Wolf Whistle

by Lewis Nordan

ALA Notable Book; 1994 Mississippi Writers Award for Fiction; 1994 Southern Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. In WOLF WHISTLE, Lewis Nordan unleashes the hellhounds of his prodigious imagination on one of the most notorious racial killings of the century, the Emmett Till murder. Soon we're on a magical mystery tour of the Southern psyche of the mid-1950s and the dawning of guilt and recognition in a whole generation of white Southerners. "An immense and wall-shattering display of talent. WOLF WHISTLE will help usher Lewis Nordan into the Hall of Fame of American Letters."--Randall Kenan, The Nation.

• ISBN10: 1565121104
• ISBN13: 9781565121102
• Publish Date: 5 October 2003 (first published 10 January 1993)
• Publish Status: Active
• Out of Print: 13 July 2011
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Algonquin Books
• Format: Paperback (UK Trade)
• Pages: 312
• Language: English

Reviews

[jamiereadthis]

Nothing about this should work, nothing, but God Almighty, so help me, it does. The white-trash telling of Emmett Till’s murder. The fantastical, twisty what-if of 1950’s Mississippi. It’s a lightning storm in the swamp. It’s electricity and madness and hilarity/horror and the boiled-down heart and soul of love and hate. It’s fiction, but it’s fact, and it’s history, and it’s history and fact and the heart of the matter in the way that takes fiction to get there. Larger than life. Magic even when you don’t believe a thing such as magic exists.

In my favorite review of it, the review that made me pick this book up, Jimmy says “It’s your own heart, idiot.” It’s all our hearts. It’s Mississippi.