In order to move current disputes over the allocation of health care resources to an equitable solution, this book advocates a return to the principles of Jewish teachings regarding community and the ethics of conversational encounter.

At once criminal and savior, clown and creator, antagonist and mediator, the character of trickster has made frequent appearances in works by writers the world over. Usually a figure both culturally specific and transcendent, trickster leads the way to the unconscious, the concealed, and the seemingly unattainable. This book offers thirteen interpretations of trickster in American writing, including essays on works by African America, Native America, Pacific Rim, and Latino writers, as well as an examination of trickster politics. This collection conveys the trickster's imprint on the modern world.

Winner • NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work (Fiction) Winner • Anne Izard Storytellers’ Choice Award Holiday Gift Guide Selection • Indiewire, San Francisco Chronicle, and Minneapolis Star-Tribune These nearly 150 African American folktales animate our past and reclaim a lost cultural legacy to redefine American literature. Drawing from the great folklorists of the past while expanding African American lore with dozens of tales rarely seen before, The Annotated African American Folktales revolutionizes the canon like no other volume. Following in the tradition of such classics as Arthur Huff Fauset’s “Negro Folk Tales from the South” (1927), Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men (1935), and Virginia Hamilton’s The People Could Fly (1985), acclaimed scholars Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Maria Tatar assemble a groundbreaking collection of folktales, myths, and legends that revitalizes a vibrant African American past to produce the most comprehensive and ambitious collection of African American folktales ever published in American literary history. Arguing for the value of these deceptively simple stories as part of a sophisticated, complex, and heterogeneous cultural heritage, Gates and Tatar show how these remarkable stories deserve a place alongside the classic works of African American literature, and American literature more broadly. Opening with two introductory essays and twenty seminal African tales as historical background, Gates and Tatar present nearly 150 African American stories, among them familiar Brer Rabbit classics, but also stories like “The Talking Skull” and “Witches Who Ride,” as well as out-of-print tales from the 1890s’ Southern Workman. Beginning with the figure of Anansi, the African trickster, master of improvisation—a spider who plots and weaves in scandalous ways—The Annotated African American Folktales then goes on to draw Caribbean and Creole tales into the orbit of the folkloric canon. It retrieves stories not seen since the Harlem Renaissance and brings back archival tales of “Negro folklore” that Booker T. Washington proclaimed had emanated from a “grapevine” that existed even before the American Revolution, stories brought over by slaves who had survived the Middle Passage. Furthermore, Gates and Tatar’s volume not only defines a new canon but reveals how these folktales were hijacked and misappropriated in previous incarnations, egregiously by Joel Chandler Harris, a Southern newspaperman, as well as by Walt Disney, who cannibalized and capitalized on Harris’s volumes by creating cartoon characters drawn from this African American lore. Presenting these tales with illuminating annotations and hundreds of revelatory illustrations, The Annotated African American Folktales reminds us that stories not only move, entertain, and instruct but, more fundamentally, inspire and keep hope alive. The Annotated African American Folktales includes: Introductory essays, nearly 150 African American stories, and 20 seminal African tales as historical background The familiar Brer Rabbit classics, as well as news-making vernacular tales from the 1890s’ Southern Workman An entire section of Caribbean and Latin American folktales that finally become incorporated into the canon Approximately 200 full-color, museum-quality images

This two-volume collection of folktales represents some of the finest examples of American oral tradition. Drawn from the largest archive of American folk culture, the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, this set comprises magic tales, legends, jokes, tall tales and personal narratives, many of which have never been transcribed before, much less published, in a sweeping survey. Eminent folklorist and award-winning author Carl Lindahl selected and transcribed over 200 recording sessions - many from the 1920s and 1930s - that span the 20th century, including recent material drawn from the September 11 Project. Included in this varied collection are over 200 tales organized in chapters by storyteller, tale type or region, and representing diverse American cultures, from Appalachia and the Midwest to Native American and Latino traditions. Each chapter begins by discussing the storytellers and their oral traditions before presenting and introducing each tale, making this collection accessible to high school students, general readers or scholars.

Reading Sankofa, Daughters of the Dust, & Eve's Bayou as Histories

Jarmon (English, U. of Tennessee, Martin) studies the history and attempts to trace the origins of several prevalent themes in African American folklore, using folk tale collections from the US and Africa. The themes link subjects with symbolic content, such as tar baby with binding and transcription and the skull with presence and propriety. An introduction presents Jarmon's methodology; her thesis is that these narratives are a type of modal discourse that is symbolized by the motifs of the wishbone and crossroads which she sees as emblematic of the concept of margins and reflective of a mood of indeterminacy. ^^^^ Annotation (c)2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).