Men We Reaped: A Memoir

(Paperback)

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NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE FINALIST '...And then we heard the rain falling, and that was the drops of blood falling; and when we came to get the crops, it was dead men that we reaped.' Harriet Tubman Jesmyn Wards acclaimed memoir shines a light on the community she comes from, in the small town of DeLisle, Mississippi, a place of quiet beauty and fierce attachment. Here, in the space of four years, she lost five young men dear to her, including her beloved brother to accidents, murder and suicide. Their deaths were seemingly unconnected, yet their lives had been connected, by identity and place, and as Jesmyn dealt with these losses, she came to a staggering truth: These young men died because of who they were and the place they were from, because racism and economic struggle breed a certain kind of bad luck. The agonising reality brought Jesmyn to write, at last, their true stories and her own. Men We Reaped opens up a parallel universe, yet it points to problems whose roots are woven into the soil under all our feet. This indispensable American memoir is destined to become a classic.

Reviews

Heart-wrenching ... A brilliant book about beauty and death ... Ward is one of those rare writers whos traveled across Americas deepening class rift with her sense of truth intact ... a stirring and sad record * Los Angeles Times *
A brutal, moving memoir Melancholic and introspective rather than morbid and self-indulgent, it is really a story of what it is like to grow up smart, poor, black and female in Americas deep south Anyone who emerges from Americas black working-class youth with words as fine as Wards deserves a hearing * Guardian *
An important, and perhaps even essential, book * San Francisco Chronicle *
Raw, beautiful and dangerous * New York Times Book Review *
A memoir that, in plainsong prose punctuated with sudden poetic flashes, schools us in the unforgiving experiences from which [Ward] has drawn her triumphal fiction . . . Unvarnished and penetrating * Elle *
No American memoir feels more essential Elegiac, rage-filled, and uncommonly brave * Vogue *

Author Bio

Jesmyn Ward received her MFA from the University of Michigan and is currently an associate professor of creative writing at Tulane University. She is the author of the novels Where the Line Bleeds, Salvage the Bones, which won the 2011 National Book Award, and Sing, Unburied, Sing, which won the 2017 National Book Award. She is also the editor of the anthology The Fire This Time and the author of the memoir Men We Reaped, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2016, the American Academy of Arts and Letters selected Ward for the Strauss Living Award, and in 2017 she was awarded a MacArthur 'Genius' Award. She lives in Mississippi with her family. @jesmimi