National Book Award winner and MacArthur Genius Fellow Charles Johnson shares life lessons for the next generation in this accessible distillation of wisdom, stories, and philosophy on being a grandparent.
An award-winning novelist, philosopher, essayist, screenwriter, professor, and cartoonist, Charles Johnson has held numerous impressive titles over the course of his incomparable career. Now, for the first time, with his trademark wisdom and philosophical generosity, he turns his attention to his most important role yet: grandparent.
In Grand, Johnson shares stories from his life with his six-year-old grandson Emery, weaving in advice and life lessons that stand the test of time. Johnson offers profound meditations on family, race, freedom, and creativity.
Joyful, lucid, and deeply comforting, Grand is Johnson at his most accessible and profound, an indispensable compendium for new grandparents and growing grandchildren alike, from one of America's most revered thinkers.
About the Author :
Charles Johnson is a novelist, essayist, literary scholar, philosopher, cartoonist, screenwriter and professor emeritus at the University of Washington in Seattle. A MacArthur Fellow, his fiction includes Night Hawks, Dr. King's Refrigerator, Dreamer, Faith and the Good Thing and Middle Passage, for which he won the National Book Award. In 2002 he received the Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Seattle. Ron Butler is a Los Angeles-based actor, Earphones Award-winning audiobook narrator, and voice artist with over a hundred film and television credits. Most kids will recognize him from the three seasons he spent on Nickelodeon's True Jackson, VP. He works regularly as a commercial and animation voice-over artist and has voiced a wide variety of audiobooks. He is a member of the Atlantic Theater Company and an Independent Filmmaker Project Award winner for his work in the HBO film Everyday People.
Review :
"One feels honored to be in the presence of Johnson's witty philosophical mind, and, not incidentally, stunned by the graceful virtuosity of his sentences."
-- "New York Times Book Review, praise for the author"
"Charles Johnson's deep intelligence, joyful rigor and refreshing iconoclasm are evident in every subject he covers."
-- "Dana Spiotta, author of Stone Arabia, praise for the author"
"Johnson's writing, filled with the sort of long, layered sentences you can get happily lost in, conveys a kindness; a sense that all of us...have our own stories."
-- "Seattle Times, praise for the author"
"Those of us who put pen to paper for a living have known of Charles Johnson for a very long time. He is one of America's greatest literary treasures. He is a skilled wordsmith, superb craftsman, master of understatement, philosopher, cartoonist, and deeply talented novelist whose 1991 novel Middle Passage (which won the National Book Award for fiction) predates the current surfeit of Underground Railroad novels by a good two decades. Like the great Ralph Ellison to whom he is often compared, he will forever cast a long shadow over us who follow in his wake."
-- "James McBride, #1 New York Times bestselling author, praise for the author"
