From Powells.com
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Synopses & Reviews
A black father makes amends with his gay son through letters written on his deathbed in this wise and penetrating novel of empathy and forgiveness, for fans of Ta-Nehisi Coates, Robert Jones Jr., and Alice Walker
As Jacob lays dying, he begins to write a letter to his only son Isaac. They have not met or spoken in many years, and there are things that Isaac must know. Stories about his ancestral legacy in rural Arkansas that extends back to slavery. Secrets from Jacob's tumultuous relationship with Isaac's mother and the shame he carries from the dissolution of their family. Tragedies that informed Jacob's role as a father and his reaction to Isaac being gay. But most of all, Jacob must share with Isaac the unspoken truths that reside in his heart. He must give voice to the trauma that Isaac has inherited. And he must create a space for the two to find peace.
With piercing insight and profound empathy, acclaimed author Daniel Black illuminates to the lived experiences of Black fathers and queer sons, offering an authentic and ultimately hopeful portrait of reckoning and reconciliation. Spare as it is sweeping, poetic as it is compulsively readable, Don't Cry for Me is monumental novel about one family grappling with love's hard edges and the unexpected places where hope and healing take flight.
Review
"Don't Cry for Me a perfect song: the epistolary dirge of a man singing to his son as he faces death by cancer. At turns intense and funny, tender and brutally honest, Jacob’s letter to his son, Isaac, is revelatory. While the story is an unflinching account of a family and a community in the Black American Midwest coming of age in the modern now, it is also full of that which makes us all human, regardless of where we are from or who we are: full of fathers trying to understand sons, sons trying to understand fathers, parents feeling as if they have failed children, children realizing how they have passed their own traumas on to others and so on. It’s a beautiful book. Read it.” Jesmyn Ward
Review
“In Daniel Black’s Don't Cry for Me, we’re reminded that consequential movement is always happening whether we like it or not. Black manages to capture, and really free characters, scenes, and so much subtext we’ve felt, but rarely seen or heard in American literature. The book is unafraid of the pungent slivers of joy and those dazzling shards of horror that accompany loneliness and progress. Don't Cry for Me is literally the book my favorite books needed to read. It is an unparalleled literary achievement that already feels like it will, of all things, endure.” Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy: An American Memoir
Review
"Don't Cry For Me shows Daniel Black at the top of his writerly craft. In this painful yet profound novel, Black forces us to grapple with our deepest male fears, pains, taboos, and desires. At the same time, he dares us to imagine new and freer selves. This magical text is one of the most beautiful and important books of this young century." Marc Lamont Hill, author of Nobody: Casualties of America's War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond
About the Author
Daniel Black is an author and professor of African American studies and English at Clark Atlanta University, His books include The Coming, Perfect Peace, and They Tell Me of a Home. He is the winner of the Distinguished Writer's Award for the Mid-Atlantic Writer's Association has been nominated for The Townsend Literary Prize, The Ernest J. Gaines Award, the Ferro-Grumbley Literary Prize, the Lambda Literary Award, and the Georgia Author of the Year Prize. He was raised in Blackwell, Arkansas and lives in Atlanta, Georgia.