Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick by Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston, a legend of the Harlem Renaissance, is probably best known for her expressive rendering of Southern Black life in novels like Their Eyes Were Watching God and Jonah’s Gourd Vine. But this new collection—published 60 years after her death—features eight “lost” stories that are set in Harlem, where she lived in the 1920s and formed bonds with other cultural luminaries like Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen. These stories, along with the 13 others in this collection, add more texture to our understanding of Hurston, who wrote about the Great Migration, race, gender and various guises of depression with an unflinching pen, often finding humor in pain.

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