Reviews for The Finer Grain

The average rating for The Finer Grain based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-01-05 00:00:00 Brian Meadows This is probably my favorite "forgotten" classic of the year. It's a collection of antebellum slave folk tales first published in 1899. The writing style is super clever and smart-Chesnutt definitely had a way with words-and the stories in the book offer a completely unromanticized portrait of a world terrible and strange, where anything can happen. That might make it seem far removed from the modern era, but the way Chesnutt frames the folk tales allows him to comment on contemporary (for his own time, at least) race relations in the South, and to show how they're informed by the past. I listened to the Librivox audiobook production of The Conjure Woman and the reader, James K. White, was absolutely pitch perfect. Definitely recommend this one! ' Tasha Brandstatter from The Best Books We Read In December:

Review # 2 was written on 2020-08-20 00:00:00 Ron Bodnar This book consists of stories recounted by Julius, an old black servant, to a younger wealthy black couple that recently moved to North Carolina from Ohio. Julius' dialect is thick. But if you read those passages aloud, the meaning is soon clear, and the surprise of recognizing a seemingly opaque word or phrase is part of the charm. The tales are full of trickery, including the probable reasons for Julius making up such tales and telling them to his boss. The irony and the humor are reminiscent of the Br'er Rabbit stories of Joel Chandler Harris, a contemporary of Chesnutt. I picked this up because of the similarity of title to the recently published Conjure Women by Afia Atakora. This was a delightful find. PS -- Reading his dialect was a bit like reading Finnegan's Wake -- the surprise pleasure of recognizing a word or a phrase -- only much much easier than Joyce.