Children of the Night: The Best Short Stories by Black Writers 1967 to the Present - Gloria Naylor

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nIn 1969, Little, Brown and Company published The Best Short Stories by Black Writers, edited by Langston Hughes - the classic compendium of African-American short fiction from 1897 to 1967. Now, a quarter of a century later, Gloria Naylor has compiled an encore volume, Children of the Night, bringing this extraordinary series up to date. Gathering together the most gifted black writers of our time - from 1967 to the present - Naylor has assembled a rich and varied collection of stories. The portrait that emerges of the African-American experience in the post-Civil Rights era is stirring, compelling, sometimes disturbing, and certainly provocative. Naylor has arranged the stories thematically so the reader focuses on a particular subject - slavery, for example, or the family. In the hands of different writers, these themes provide a wealth and variety of human experience. The stories are more than testimonies of the long battle for survival. From a young woman's struggles with her barren faith in Alice Walker's lyrical The Diary of an African Nun to an innocent man's involvement in a horrifying act of violence in Ann Petry's The Witness, they are, as Naylor states in her introduction, examples of affirmation: of memory, of history, of family, of being. They are stories for all of us at the beginning: of mankind as a species; of America as a nation; of the African-American as a full citizen. nThe sequel to Langston Hughes's 1967 classic anthology The Best Short Stories by Black Writers, Gloria Naylor's Children of the Night is a brilliant collection of short stories by black writers including Maya Angelou, Ralph Ellison, and Edward P. Jones (Booklist). n nIn 1969, Langston Hughes edited The Best Short Stories by Black Writers, the classic compendium of African-American short fiction from 1899 to 1967. A quarter of a century later, Gloria Naylor compiled an encore volume, Children of the Night, gathering together the most gifted black writers of the later twentieth century -- from 1967 to its publication in 1997 -- in a rich and varied collection of stories. n nThe portrait that emerges of the African-American experience in the post-Civil Rights era is stirring, compelling, sometimes disturbing, and certainly provocative. Arranged in in four thematic section -- Remembering, Affirming, Revealing the Self Divided, and Moving On -- the thirty-seven stories included brilliantly capture the many facets of the black experience in A