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THE BLACK PRINCE AND OTHER STORIES by Sirley Ann Grau

THE BLACK PRINCE AND OTHER STORIES

By

Publisher: Knopf

A first collection of short stories, three of which have had magazine appearance and one (Joshua) which was tapped for inclusion in the Prize Stories- 1955 (Doubleday) annual, derives from a sere and often drowsy southern climate in which the intimations of violence are never far from its expression. And in her stories of colored people, which work out of the Louisiana bayou reaches and which are streaked by racial resentment, she is perhaps the most effective. In White Girl, Fine Girl, Jayson Paul who has worked off a manslaughter charge comes out of jail-looking for the woman who had helped to send him there; Miss Yellow Eyes is all gold-colored but her plans to cross over with the boy she loves crumble with his death; The Black Prince with the jingle of silver in his pockets courts the woman of his choice, vanishes, but endures in local legend; in The Way of a Man, a boy kills his father and learns that ""the things a man has done he has to live with""; in One Summer, another youngster is part of his grandfather's death and has the first presentiment of what it means to age and be afraid; Joshua robs the body of a dead man in a cold, wet swmp to get a winter cot; etc. etc. A stripped prose does much to intensify the stark and sultry incidents here, introduces a new writer who has found more substance than shadow in the character and idiom of the south.