Susan Straight
1) Mecca
Author
Pub. Date
2022.
Description
"A California epic following several native, diverse Californians grasping for air in a world that continues to marginalize them"--
Johnny Fra̕s has California in his blood. A descendant of the state's Indigenous people and Mexican settlers, he has Southern California's forgotten towns and canyons in his soul. He spends his days as a highway patrolman pulling over speeders, ignoring their racist insults, and pushing past the trauma of his rookie...
Author
Pub. Date
[2012]
Description
In August in Rio Seco, California, the ground is too hard to bury a body. But Glorette Picard is dead, and across the canal, out in the orange groves, they'll gather shovels and pickaxes and soak the dirt until they can lay her coffin down. First, someone needs to find her son Victor, who memorizes SAT words to avoid the guys selling rock, and someone needs to tell her uncle Enrique, who will be the one to hunt down her killer, and someone needs to...
Author
Pub. Date
2019.
Description
In the Country of Women is a valuable social history and a personal narrative that reads like a love song to America and indomitable women.
In inland Southern California, near the desert and the Mexican border, Susan Straight, a self-proclaimed book nerd, and Dwayne Sims, an African American basketball player, started dating in high school. After college, they married and drove to Amherst, Massachusetts, where Straight met her teacher and mentor,...
Author
Pub. Date
[2006]
Description
This is the story of Moinette, daughter of an African mother and a white father she never knew. While her mother cares for the plantation linens, Moinette tends to the master's daughter, which allows her to eavesdrop on lessons. She also learns that she is property, and at fourteen she is sold, separated from her mother without a chance to say goodbye. Heartbroken and terrified, and with a full understandiing of what she will risk, Moinette begins...
Author
Pub. Date
[2010]
Description
"Fantine Antoine is a travel writer, a profession that keeps her happily away from her Southern California home. When she returns to mark the fifth anniversary of the murder of her closest childhood friend, Glorette, she finds herself pulled into the tumultuous life of Glorette?s twenty-two-year-old son?and Fantine?s godson?Victor. After getting involved in a shooting, Victor has fled to New Orleans. Together with her father, Fantine follows Victor,...
Author
Pub. Date
2001
Description
"In this story, Susan Straight takes us back to the multiracial area of southern California that is, in Faulkner's phrase, her "postage stamp of soil." As in her highly acclaimed earlier novels, she has created a world of richly imagined characters struggling to retain their dignity and humanity in an often brutal environment." "Serafina is fifteen, a Mexican Indian girl desperate to leave her impoverished existence in Oaxaca. Emigrating illegally...
Author
Series
Pub. Date
[2006]
Description
Readings of excerpts from and critical analysis of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, a novel about a poor family of sharecroppers who are driven from their home by drought, economic hardship, and changes in the agriculture industry during the Great Depression.
Includes interviews, commentaries and excerpts from the novel, providing first-hand accounts of why The Grapes of Wrath remains so compelling seven decades after its initial publication....