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Exuberant and heart-warming, J. California Cooper is the embodiment of the simple folk tradition in black writing associated most often with Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes. The author of seventeen plays and two novels, it is her stories of black family life in rural and small town America that have achieved the most acclaim and the broadest audience. SOME SOUL TO KEEP is amongst the finest and most enduring of her work.
Cooper writes with a transparent clarity and such high-spirited energy that her characters leap off the page, bursting with the stories they’ve got to tell–stories of simple people, stories of families and fate, of love and marriage, of death and the triumph of the human spirit. Cooper is that most rare and wondrous thing: a true storyteller whose tales trace the energies of life itself.
Some Soul to Keep is available on Amazon, at your library and, hopefully, at your favorite brick and mortar book shop.
J. California Cooper fans will also enjoy Family. This wise, beguiling, and beautiful novel set in the era of the Civil War, paints a haunting portrait of a woman named Always and four generations of her African-American family.
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