ISBN: 1936070782 9781936070787

Category: Fiction / African American & Black / Historical

Page count: 241

<p><b><i><b>Award-winning novelist Bernice McFadden's highly anticipated new historical novel set amidst the Harlem Renaissance.</b></i></b></p><p>—<i>Glorious</i> was a finalist for the 2011 NAACP Image Award for Fiction.</p><p>“McFadden’s lively and loving rendering of New York hews closely to the jazz-inflected city of myth. . . . McFadden has a wonderful ear for dialogue, and her entertaining prose equally accommodates humor and pathos.” —<i>New York Times Book Review</i><br><br> “Bernice L. McFadden’s novel <i>Glorious</i>, which starts with a bang-up prologue, has a strong main character (based in part on Zora Neale Hurston), hard-driving prose, and historic sweep of several decades, including the years of the Harlem Renaissance, which has always fascinated me.” —Jane Ciabattari, National Book Critics Circle President</p><p><i>Glorious</i> is set against the backdrops of the Jim Crow South, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Civil Rights era. Blending fact and fiction, Glorious is the story of Easter Venetta Bartlett, a fictional Harlem Renaissance writer whose tumultuous path to success, ruin, and ultimately revival offers a candid and true portrait of the American experience in all its beauty and cruelty.<br><br> It is a novel informed by the question that is the title of Langston Hughes’s famous poem <i>Harlem</i>: "What happens to a dream deferred?" Based on years of research, this heart-wrenching fictional account is given added resonance by factual events coupled with real and imagined larger-than-life characters. <i>Glorious</i> is an audacious exploration into the nature of self-hatred, love, possession, ego, betrayal, and, finally, redemption.</p>