Maud Martha (Faber Editions)

Review Such a wonderful book. Utterly unique, exquisitely crafted and quietly powerful. I loved it and want everyone to read this lost literary treasure. ― Bernardine Evaristo The quotidian rises to an exquisite portraiture of black womanhood in the hands of one of America's most foundational writers. -- Claudia Rankine Incredible ... She is a quietly radical seer, she is literature itself, a person in the world. It's a rare kind of perfect! -- Max Porter One of the major American poets of the 20th century. She was a writer of great power and great empathy, and wrote lines and sentences as good as anybody's - better, really, than almost everybody's ...Sentence by sentence, chapter by chapter, Brooks shows herself to be a prose stylist of the first order. ***** ― Telegraph Extraordinary ... Delights in sensory and emotional details ... Luminous ... Maud Martha doesn't deny racism's power, but she denies its power to rule her life. -- Margo Jefferson Maud Martha finds beauty in the brutal formative moments that make us. It is one of my favorite depictions of how a woman comes to trust her eyes. -- Raven Leilani, author of Luster Reveals the poetry, power and splendour of an ordinary life. -- Tayari Jones One of the most spatially poetic novels ever. Each room Maud Martha lives in is grown by the very cautious and awesome pace of her language. -- Eileen Myles Alive, reaching, and very much of today. -- Langston Hughes The pauses, the unsaids cause internal bleeding ... A new movement and energy, intensity, richness, power of statement and a new stripped, lean, compressed style. -- Toni Cade Bambara (author of The Salt Eaters) I read [it] with absolute delight from start to finish, delight in the beautiful structure of the book, delight in the way Maud Martha comes alive as a person caught up in timeless elemental situations. -- Ann Petry (author of The Street) A real poet ... She takes hold of reality as it is, and renders it faithfully. -- Richard Wright Extraordinary ... Full of living. ― New York Times I love its tactile language and how it jumps. It's a deeply pleasurable book-funny, profound, compressed, filled with the intimate texture of physical life. -- Kathryn Scanlan Brooks achieved more than her fair share of 'firsts' in a vocation that spanned eight decades ... [Maud Martha] is a significant precursor of more recent fiction by African-American women. -- Margaret Busby ― Guardian Product Description The stunning only novel by the celebrated poet and first Black author to win a Pulitzer Prize, introduced by Margo Jefferson. 'Such a wonderful book. Utterly unique, exquisitely crafted and quietly powerful. I loved it and want everyone to read this lost literary treasure.' Bernardine Evaristo 'Maud Martha finds beauty in the brutal formative moments that make us. It is one of my favorite depictions of how a woman comes to trust her eyes.' Raven Leilani 'The quotidian rises to an exquisite portraiture of black womanhood in the hands of one of America's most foundational writers.' Claudia Rankine 'Maud Martha reveals the poetry, power and splendor of an ordinary life.' Tayari Jones 'Incredible ... She is a quietly radical seer, she is literature itself, a person in the world. It's a rare kind of perfect!' Max Porter What, what, am I to do with all of this life? Maud Martha Brown is a little girl growing up on the South Side of 1940s Chicago. Amidst the crumbling taverns and overgrown yards, she dreams: of New York, romance, her future. She admires dandelions, learns to drink coffee, falls in love, decorates her kitchenette, visits the Jungly Hovel, guts a chicken, buys hats, gives birth. But her lighter-skinned husband has dreams too: of the Foxy Cats Club, other women, war. And the 'scraps of baffled hate' - a certain word from a saleswoman; that visit to the cinema; the cruelty of a department store Santa Claus- are always there . Written in 1953 but never published in Britain, Maud Martha is a poetic