Black women writers Series

Link Williams is a handsome and brilliant Dartmouth graduate who tends bar for a lack of better opportunities for an African American man in a staid mid-century Connecticut town. The routine of Link's life is interrupted when he intervenes to save a woman from a late-night attack. When they enter a bar together after the incident, "Camilo" discovers that her rescuer is African American and he that she is a wealthy, married, white woman who's crossed the town's racial divide to relieve her life's tedium. Thus brought together by chance, Link and Camilo draw each other into furtive encounters against the rigid and uncompromising social codes of their town and times.

Petry peoples the novel with a cast of characters written in mesmerizing detail-Weak Knees, Al the Nazi, and the female undertaker F.K. Jackson. As The Narrows sweeps ahead to its shattering denouement, Petry shines a harsh yet richly truthful light on the deforming harm that race and class wreak on human lives. In a fascinating introduction to this new edition, Keith Clark discusses the powerful prescience with which Petry chronicled the enduring ways tabloid journalism, smug elitism, and mob mentality distort and demonize African American men.

The Street

by Ann Petry

Published 31 December 1985

With a new introduction by TAYARI JONES, author of An American Marriage and winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction 2019 * As heard on BBC Radio 4's Book at Bedtime

'Ann Petry's first novel, The Street, was a literary event in 1946, praised and translated around the world - the first book by a black woman to sell more than a million copies . . . Her work endures not merely because of the strength of its message but its artistry' NEW YORK TIMES

'My favorite type of novel, literary with an astonishing plot . . . insightful, prescient and unputdownable' TAYARI JONES

New York City, 1940s. In a crumbling tenement in Harlem, Lutie Johnson is determined to build a new life for herself and her eight-year-old boy, Bub - a life that she can be proud of. Having left her unreliable husband, Lutie believes that with hard work and resolve, she can begin again; she has faith in the American dream. But in her struggle to earn money and raise her son amid the violence, poverty and racial dissonance of her surroundings, Lutie is soon trapped: she is a woman alone, 'too good-looking to be decent', with predators at every turn.

Miss Muriel and Other Stories

by Ann Petry

Published 10 April 1989

A young black girl watches as her aunt’s multiple suitors disrupt her family’s privacy. The same girl, now on the cusp of adulthood, shares her family’s growing fears that her father has disappeared. Acclaimed author Ann Petry penned these and the other unforgettable narratives in Miss Muriel and Other Stories more than fifty years ago, yet in them contemporary readers recognize characters who exist today and dilemmas that recur again and again : the reluctance of African Americans to seek help from the police; the rage that erupts in a black man worn down by brutality; the tyranny that the young can visit on their elders regardless of race. Originally published between 1945 and 1971, Petry’s stories capture the essence of the African American experience in the 1950s and 1960s.