books
William Faulkner always worked what he called “my own little postage stamp of native soil.” He wrote about his fictional country for 24 years. Joan Didion, a native Californian like me, said, “You have to pick the places you don’t walk away from.” I picked Rio Seco, a fictional place like the place I was born in California, when I was 18 and writing stories. For the past 20 years, I’ve written about the same place and many of the same characters. In Aquaboogie, there is Roscoe, Lanier, and Darnell, and mention of a woman named Big Ma. She was Marietta, who got her own book in I Been in Sorrow’s Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots; Darnell got his own book in Blacker Than a Thousand Midnights. Marcus Thompson, who was the high school teacher and hero of The Gettin Place, is a lost love in my new book Take One Candle Light a Room. Serafina, a Mexican mother featured in Highwire Moon, showed up unexpectedly when I wrote this new novel. The only book that travels far away is A Million Nightingales – when I started this trilogy about a family from 1778 to the present, I realized Fantine’s ancestor, Moinette, was a slave in Louisiana, and so that novel is set south of New Orleans. I realized my own take on life: there are two kinds of people – those who leave and those who stay.
- Take One Candle Light a Room (2010)
- The Friskative Dog (2007)
- A Million Nightingales (2006)
- Highwire Moon (2001) (finalist for the National Book Award)
- The Gettin’ Place (1997)
- Blacker than a Thousand Midnights (1995)
- I Been in Sorrow’s Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots (1993)
- Aquaboogie: A Novel in Stories (1990) (Milkweed National Fiction Prize)
Take One Candle Light a Room (2010)
“In luscious prose, Straight expertly captures the complexities of Fantine’s identity.”
– Booklist
“A searing, ultimately redemptive novel about America’s legacy of racial violence and a woman’s struggle to forge her own identity…Straight writes about the thorny subject of race with sensitivity and nuance.”
– Kirkus (starred review)
“A vivid portrait of a mixed-race family, proud yet haunted by the vagaries of the past…Straight beautifully blends the rhythmic cadence of the Creole patois with the down-and-dirty slang of the street.” — Library Journal.
Buy The Book
Cover Design by Toni Scott.
The Friskative Dog (2007)
“Beautifully-written narrative.”
— Kirkus Reviews
“Straight thoughtfully captures the 9-year-old girl’s ability to perceive her parent’s emotional struggles while dealing with feelings and questions of her own.”
— Booklist
“Readers will . . . be glad to see the quiet and persistent heroine rewarded not only with the love of a good dog but with the promise of a closer family.”
— The Bulletin
Buy The Book
A Million Nightingales (2006)
“Powerful and moving. . . . Written in language so beautiful you can almost believe the words themselves are capable of salving history’s wounds.”
— The New York Times Book Review
“Radiant. . . . Unforgettable, a classic haunting story of love, tragedy and perseverance.”
— The Miami Herald
“Moving. . . . Lush passages drip like Spanish moss from Straight’s prose [she] writes with nuance and insinuating grace.”
— The Seattle Times
“Intelligent and heartbreaking. . . . Celebrates the individual’s power to create a personal freedom within the most rigid social order.”
— The Portland Oregonian
Buy The Book
Highwire Moon (2001)
“Her gallery of misfits reminds one of Flannery O’Connor’s– but with a dash of sympathy and human goodness.”
— The Washington Post Book World
“An eye-opener of a novel, a road map to the real California. Straight turns headlines into poetry.”
— The New York Times Book Review
“Packed with the kind of detail about people, places and emotions that transport the reader to a different world.”
— San Francisco Chronicle
“One of America’s gutsiest writers … a polyglot with an astonishing ear for how people really talk in places we hardly remember they are living.”
— The Baltimore Sun
Buy The Book
The Gettin’ Place (1997)
“Straight gives that Godforsaken area of Southern California back some of its natural beauty…This is fine writing, and fine now means something different as well, something sparkling and glamorous, but with a big-hearted integrity born of much suffering.”
– Los Angeles Times
Buy The Book
Blacker than a Thousand Midnights (1995)
“Susan Straight opens up a whole world, which good writers do. In her case, however, it happens to be a world that many of us don’t really want to go to…It is a world where the language is often not lush but hard and rough as concrete.”
– Los Angeles Times
Buy The Book
I Been in Sorrow’s Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots (1993)
“Straight’s portrayal of a black woman’s life is nearly miraculous in its astonishing richness of detail, its emotional honesty and its breadth of human thought and feeling.”
– USA Today
Buy The Book
Aquaboogie (1990)
“Susan Straight is a remarkable writer— there is no new, emerging voice of the past decade more exciting, more surprising, and more richly and subtly human than she.”
— Joyce Carol Oates
“A book by a writer whose love for her characters infuses her work with the dignity and urgency they so clearly deserve.”
— New York Times Book Review
“Rarely is a black community so precisely, humanly, and searchingly delineated.”
— Minneapolis Star Tribune
“A world of pain and love and longing is contained in these stories.”
— Los Angeles Times Book Review