Saturday, July 15, 2006

Authors In Your Pocket Show - 07/16/06 - George Elliott Clarke, George and Rue (Graphically Enhanced)

Featuring Award Winning Canadian Poet turned Author George Elliott Clarke and his hauntingly beautiful book GEORGE and RUE.

GEORGE and RUE is about a death that brims with fierce vitality and dark humor. Infused with the sensual, rhythmic beauty that defines Clarkes writing, this is a literary debut that is marked by celebration and controversy. George Elliot Clarke was thirty four years old when, shortly before his mother's death, she told him for the first time the story of his matrilineal first cousins, George and Rufus Hamilton.

In a robbery gone wrong, the brothers committed a slug ugly crime on January 7, 1949, drunkenly bludgeoning to death a taxi driver for the money in his wallet. The brothers, partly descended from African American slaves and native Mikmaq, were both hanged for the killing later that year. GEORGE and RUE shifts seamlessly back into the killers pasts, recounting a bleak and sometimes darkly comic tale of victims of violence who became killers, a black community too poor and too ashamed to assist its downtrodden members, and a white community bent on condemning all blacks as dangerous outsiders.

Written in a lyrical, bluesy style that Clarke calls blackened English, GEORGE and RUE is an extraordinary debut novel about death that brims with a fierce vitality.

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