Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“It was as though they hadn’t seen me, as though I was here, and yet not here.”

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

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“You’re nobody, son. You don’t exist–can’t you see that?” Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man is an electrifying study of a young Black man and his different experiences as he journeys through a racist society. The narrator, who is never named, starts the book telling the reader he lives in the sealed off basement of a Harlem apartment, the dark and cold offset by over 1,300 electric lights. The very first line of the book is “I am an invisible man.” In the beginning he recollects an […]

Three Before the Shooting… – Ralph Ellison (2010)

Three Days before the Shooting... by Ralph Ellison

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So going into this, you should know that it’s not Ralph Ellison’s second novel. And despite what the cover of the other version of this material “Juneteenth” says, that’s also not Ralph Ellison’s second novel. John F Callahan edited both, but his editing here suggests he knows better. Instead, this represents some half of the written material that Ralph Ellison wrote after the publication of Invisible Man. The basic editorial decision making process was: where they could determine Ralph Ellison’s intentions, they honored those. That’s […]

Everybody’s pleasant these days, but me.

The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison by Ralph Ellison

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There’s something inherently amazing about a collected letters of any famous person, or in this case a famous writer. For one, there’s extraordinary amount of research and footwork put into the project, from collecting the letters from a potential wide-ranging set of recipients to placing them in order, providing editorial content, and for verifying different aspects of the letters, let alone providing an analysis of the content. So the editors of this collection have been very successful (so far is readily apparent in reading them). […]

What, if anything, is there that a novelist can say about his work that wouldn’t be better left to the critics?

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I don’t know what to say about a 900 page collection of essays that represent the 50 year career of Ralph Ellison. What I can talk about are some of the various interests, ghosts, and other throughlines that make their way through these essays. He’s a writer who’s very concerned about the racialized criticism of language, of the experiences of Blackness, of literature, and of music. And I guess I mean by that that he’s concerned about each of those items on their own, as […]

Distortion for the effect of design

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I don’t know about the Great American Novel. But I do know about great American novels, and especially books that so fully capture the experience of a time and a place and an identity. I think Moby Dick is the great American 19th century novel. It has everything (except women) to say about what America is, contains, and says it in both perfectly and multivalent ways. This book is the same for the 20th century. And I would argue, quite possibly for the 21st century. I […]



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