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About James
Marlon James was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1970. His first novel, John Crow's Devil (Akashic Books, 2005) was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Commonwealth Writers Prize and was a New York Times Editors' Choice.
He graduated from The University of the West Indies in 1991 with a B.A in Literature, and Wilkes University in 2006 with an M.A. in Creative Writing. At Wilkes he was awarded Norman Mailer's Norris Church Mailer Scholarship for Creative Writing.
Areas of Study
* Creative writing
* Fiction
* Post colonial literature
* Southern literature
* Latin American fiction
* Criticism and blogs |
The Chicago Tribune wrote, "it deserves to be read," of English Professor Marlon James' novel The Book of Night Women.
Listen to Marlon James discuss his book through Macalester Talks, a bi-weekly podcast series»
From the New York Times
"Marlon James’s second novel is both beautifully written and devastating." While the gruesome history of slavery in the Americas is a story we may dare to think we already know, every page of “The Book of Night Women” reminds us that we don’t know nearly enough. James’s narrative, related in a hard-edged but lilting dialect, takes us back to the cruel world of a Jamaican sugar plantation at the turn of the 19th century.
Read more in the New York Times»
From the Chicago Tribune
"The Book of Night Women" is a bright dream of hell, an overheated nightmare painted with a brush dipped in blood.
Its protagonist, a slave girl named Lilith, wouldn't think much of that characterization, though. For blood is so ubiquitous in plantation life that it has no color to those who see it every day. As the narrator says, blood has no color when it "spurt from the skin, or spring from the axe, the cat-o'-nine, the whip, the cane, and the blackjack and every day in slave life is a day that colour red. It soon come to pass when red no different from white or blue or black or nothing."
Read more in The Chicago Tribune»
From the Washington Post
"Every Negro walk in a circle," says the narrator of "The Book of Night Women." The phrase is repeated throughout Marlon James's darkly powerful second novel. It seems to mean that black life in the Americas was a vicious circle, full of the terrible things that whites did to blacks and that blacks did to whites and to blacks because of whites. "What a terrible thing 'pon this world the white man must be," says the woman Homer, the head slave at Montpelier, an early 19th-century Jamaican sugar plantation. "What a wicked, terrible, brutal creature, nothing no wicked like he so. That is the only thing they can teach we. Watch today when they see how much we learn." The book is full of such racial anger.
Read about it in The Washington Post»
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