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Virtual Event – Juneteenth by Ralph Ellison with John F. Callahan and Charles Johnson
June 21, 2021 @ 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Magic City Books is proud to present a virtual program in celebration of Juneteenth by Ralph Ellison with John F. Callahan, Ralph Ellison’s literary executor and National Book Award-winning author Charles Johnson moderated by Magic City Books co-founder, Jeff Martin.
Vintage has published a new edition of the essential novel by Oklahoma native, Ralph Ellison featuring an introduction by Charles Johnson.
This free event will be hosted on the Zoom platform and Facebook Live. To register in advance for the event on Zoom visit: https://magiccitybooks.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_XoYUmqZoTFGuPokONEeNnA.
After registering you will receive a confirmation email with details on how to join the event on Monday June 21 at 7:00 pm CT.
Juneteenth is available now at Magic City Books or online at: https://magiccitybooks.square.site/product/juneteenth/548.
About Juneteenth
The radiant, posthumous second novel by the visionary author of Invisible Man, featuring an introduction and a new postscript by Ralph Ellison’s literary executor, John F. Callahan, and a preface by National Book Award-winning author Charles Johnson
“Ralph Ellison’s generosity, humor and nimble language are, of course, on display in Juneteenth, but it is his vigorous intellect that rules the novel. . . . A majestic narrative concept.”–Toni Morrison
In Washington, D.C., in the 1950s, Adam Sunraider, a race-baiting senator from New England, is mortally wounded by an assassin’s bullet while making a speech on the Senate floor. To the shock of all who think they know him, Sunraider calls out from his deathbed for Alonzo Hickman, an old black minister, to be brought to his side. The reverend is summoned; the two are left alone. “Tell me what happened while there’s still time,” demands the dying Sunraider.
Out of their conversation, and the inner rhythms of memories whose weight has been borne in silence for many long years, a story emerges. Senator Sunraider, once known as Bliss, was raised by Reverend Hickman in a black community steeped in religion and music (not unlike Ralph Ellison’s own childhood home) and was brought up to be a preaching prodigy in a joyful black Baptist ministry that traveled throughout the South and the Southwest. Together one last time, the two men retrace the course of their shared life in an “anguished attempt,” Ellison once put it, “to arrive at the true shape and substance of a sundered past and its meaning.” In the end, the two men confront their most painful memories, memories that hold the key to understanding the mysteries of kinship and race that bind them, and to the senator’s confronting how deeply estranged he had become from his true identity.
In Juneteenth, Ralph Ellison evokes the rhythms of jazz and gospel and ordinary speech to tell a powerful tale of a prodigal son in the twentieth century. At the time of his death in 1994, Ellison was still expanding his novel in other directions, envisioning a grand, perhaps multivolume, story cycle. Always, in his mind, the character Hickman and the story of Sunraider’s life from birth to death were the dramatic heart of the narrative. And so, with the aid of Ellison’s widow, Fanny, his literary executor, John Callahan, has edited this magnificent novel at the center of Ralph Ellison’s forty-year work in progress–its author’s abiding testament to the country he so loved and to its many unfinished tasks.
Ralph Ellison was born in Oklahoma City in 1914. He is the author of the novel Invisible Man (1952), winner of the National Book Award and one of the most important and influential American novels of the twentieth century, as well as numerous essays and short stories. He died in New York City in 1994.
John F. Callahan is the Emeritus Professor at Lewis & Clark College. He has been the editor or writer of numerous volumes related to African American and twentieth-century literature. As Ralph Ellison’s literary executor, Callahan edited the Modern Library edition of The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison.
Charles Johnson is the National Book Award-winning author of Middle Passage and Dreamer.