A major literary event: a never-before-published work from the author of the American classic, Their Eyes Were Watching God which brilliantly illuminates the horror and injustices of slavery as it tells the true story of the last known survivor of the Atlantic slave trade-illegally smuggled from Africa on the last "Black Cargo" ship to arrive in the United States. In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, to interview ninety-five-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Of the millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then the only person alive to tell the story of this integral part of the nation's history. Hurston was there to record Cudjo's firsthand account of the raid that led to his capture and bondage fifty years after the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed in the United States. In 1931, Hurston returned to Plateau, the African-centric community three miles from Mobile founded by Cudjo and other former slaves from his ship. Spending more than three months there, she talked in depth with Cudjo about the details of his life. During those weeks, the young writer and the elderly formerly enslaved man ate peaches and watermelon that grew in the backyard and talked about Cudjo's past-memories from his childhood in Africa, the horrors of being captured and held in a barracoon for selection by American slavers, the harrowing experience of the Middle Passage packed with more than 100 other souls aboard the Clotilde, and the years he spent in slavery until the end of the Civil War. Based on those interviews, featuring Cudjo's unique vernacular, and written from Hurston's perspective with the compassion and singular style that have made her one of the preeminent American authors of the twentieth-century, Barracoon brilliantly illuminates the tragedy of slavery and one life forever defined by it. Offering insight into the pernicious legacy that continues to haunt us all, black and white, this poignant and powerful work is an invaluable contribution to our shared history and culture.

This is a three-act comedy from the Harlem Renaissance. The setting is Florida. The main characters are two song and dance men and Daisy. Here is a classic love triangle. Jealously causes Jim to hit Dave with a mule bone. The town is split over this incident. The Methodists want Jim pardoned. The Baptists want him banished.

"An illuminating, and at the same time, thoroughly entertaining compilation, Louisiana Stories is enhanced by an introductory essay that is a contribution not only to the literary history of the state but also of the South." Lewis P. Simpson, former professor of English at Louisiana State University and editor of The Southern Review. Southern writers have always excelled in the short story form. Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, and Peter Taylor are the yardsticks by which short story writers are judged not only within the realm of Southern literature but also within that of American literature. By compiling an impressive array of stories by many of the Deep South's finest writers, anthologist Ben Forkner demonstrates how Louisianans in particular have influenced the development of the short story. Forkner writes in his insightful introductory essay: "These same native Louisiana stories manage to announce the central themes of modern Southern fiction more emphatically, and earlier, than the writing of any other single Southern region." Included in this compilation are works by Henry Clay Lewis, George Washington Cable, Lafcadio Hearn, Grace King, Kate Chopin, William Faulkner, Lyle Saxon, Arna Bontemps, Zora Neale Hurston, E.P. O'Donnell, Shirley Ann Grau, Ernest Gaines, Andre Dubus, James Lee Burke, Robb Forman Dew, and John William Corrington. Ben Forkner is the director of the English department at the University of Angers in France where he teaches American and Irish literature. A graduate of Stetson University in Florida, he received his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has co-edited three anthologies of Southern literature, Stories of the Modern South, A Modern Southern Reader, and Stories of the Old South .