MISSISSIPPI READS is a statewide initiative to encourage all Mississippians to read and discuss a work of fiction written by a Mississippian. The selection for 2008 is Richard Wright's UNCLE TOM'S CHILDREN (HarperPerennial, pb. 13.95). The 2009 choice is Eudora Welty's Collected Stories.

 

Richard Wright was born in 1908 near Roxie, Mississippi, and died in Paris in 1960. One of our most popular and critically acclaimed writers, he is the author of Native Son, Black Boy, The Long Dream, and other books.

 

Published in 1938, Uncle Tom's Children was Wright's first book. Each of the five powerful novellas set in the Deep South concerns an aspect of the lives of African-Americans in the post-slavery era, exploring resistance to white racism and oppression. The HarperPerennial edition includes Wright's essay "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow," an autobiographical indictment of the psychic costs of racism.

 

Square Books has a full schedule of signings for March. Check out our updated calendar and Dear Reader on-line at www.squarebooks.com.

 

"It was so hot in Léogâne that summer that most of the frogs exploded, scaring not just the children who once chased them into the river at dusk or the parents who hastily pried the threadbare carcasses from their fingers, but also my 39-year old sister Lélé, who was four months pregnant with her first child and feared that, should the temperature continue to rise, she too might burst."

From  Lélé by Edwidge Danticat in THE BOOK OF OTHER PEOPLE.