Outsider Classics is Dead Ink's resurrection ground for the strange, the silenced, and the outcasts. This series exhumes lost literary voices that were ahead of their time to restore them to the cult status they always deserved. From forgotten masterpieces to once-censored provocations, each title is a reaction against the canon curated for readers who want to stray into the margins and away from the mainstream. A VISITATION OF SPIRITS, is the powerful story of Horace Cross, a popular and ...

Finalist for 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award in FictionLonglisted for the 2020 National Book Award for FictionFinalist for the 2021 Aspen Words Literary PrizeMingling the earthy with the otherworldly, these ten stories chronicle ineffable events in ordinary lives.In Kenan's fictional territory of Tims Creek, North Carolina, an old man rages in his nursing home, a parson beats up an adulterer, a rich man is haunted by a hog, and an elder...

At the intersection of food and story, The Carolina Table: North Carolina Writers on Food offers a collection of food-related stories set in North Carolina, though geography is sometimes secondary to the main theme, which is food in any form: meals and manners, cooking and ingredients, recipes and recollections. Novelist Michael Parker writes about his mother's reluctant, but exclamation-point-laden food column for her husband's newspaper; Celia Rivenbark remembers her summer job at the on...

A personal, social, and intellectual self-portrait of the beloved and enormously influential late Randall Kenan, a master of both fiction and nonfiction.Virtuosic in his use of literary forms, nurtured and unbounded by his identities as a Black man, a gay man, an intellectual, and a Southerner, Randall Kenan was known for his groundbreaking fiction. Less visible were his extraordinary nonfiction essays, published as introductions to anthologies and in small journal...

“Kenan continues Baldwin’s legendary tradition of ‘telling it on the mountain’ by giving a voice to the unvarnished truth.”—The San Francisco ChronicleJames Baldwin's The Fire Next Time was one of the essential books of the sixties, and one of the most galvanizing statements of the American civil rights movement.In The Fire This Time, inspired by Baldwin, Kenan combines elements of memoir and commentary, casting a critical eye fro...

**“With A Visitation of Spirits, Randall Kenan continues James Baldwin’s legendary tradition of ‘telling it on the mountain.’”—**San Francisco ChronicleWhen A Visitation of Spirits was published, Randall Kenan (1963-2020) was instantly recognized as a writer of significance, and one who brought into literary fiction the southern Black, gay experience, one of the first such writers to achieve mainstream success. His groundbreaking first no...

The first book-length study of the life and writings of the critically acclaimed Southern writerRandall Kenan is an American author best known for his novel A Visitation of Spirits and his collection of stories Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, was a nominee for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction, and named a New York Times Notable Book. He is the recipient of a...

The Summer 2018 Issue. Ploughshares is an award-winning journal of new writing. Two out of each year’s four issues are guest-edited by prominent writers who explore different personal visions, aesthetics, and literary circles; the Fall and Winter issues are staff-edited.As guest-editor Jill McCorkle writes in her introduction, “Some of the most satisfying moments in fiction are those where I might gasp with shock or surprise only to immediately see that I should have known, that in...

Best Creative Nonfiction of the South serves as a valuable resource for scholars, students, writers, and general readers interested in creative nonfiction both from specific areas of the South and across the region as a whole. This North Carolina volume, second in the series, contains essays that celebrate and document the Tar Heel state’s diverse cultures and geography, from the mountains to the sea. The writers included here come from diverse backgrounds, generations, and artist...

**From one of the most brilliant and provocative literary figures of the past century—a collection of essays, articles, reviews, and interviews that have never before been gathered in a single volume.“An absorbing portrait of Baldwin’s time—and of him.” —New York Review of Books**James Baldwin was an American literary master, renowned for his fierce engagement with issues haunting our common history. In The Cross of Redemption we have Baldwin discoursing o...