Defiant Acts: A Novel

Drawing on the author's experiences, this debut novel follows an interracial blended family living in Chicago in the 1990s. James Stewart III's powerful debut novel documents the life of a working-class interracial couple and their children in a Chicago suburb in the early 1990s. The father, Jim, is a Black man married to Connie, a white woman with two white sons from a previous marriage. Connie and Jim have three more children together, and the entire family lives in a cramped two-bedroom apartment in a well-to-do, predominantly white community. Defiant Acts follows the Stewarts through a year in which Jim fights to earn a promotion, the adolescent boys struggle to find themselves, one of the younger children becomes gravely ill, and the parents try to stay afloat in a shaky economy. Within the walls of the Stewarts' home, race doesn't factor, but when the family interacts with the outside world, it is inescapable, a basis for identity and inclusion as well as a spur for exclusion and abuse. Rooted in the tradition of Black authors from Chicago and drawing on the author's own experiences, Defiant Acts eschews a conventional plot, presenting a series of captured moments—past and present—and multiple perspectives to build a mosaic of the family's lives. In clear, concise prose, Stewart focuses on the complexities of human relationships and on race relations both in and outside the domestic space, placing emphasis on the values that bind this tight-knit family together: solidarity, care, and hope.

Table of Contents:
Contents Stronger Introductions Punk Inventory Superkick Blizzard Warmth North Dakota Defense Crock Pot Rodney Flooding The Kite Role Model Edges Deep Clean California Garage Saleing Giggin’ Dead Ends Fresh Cut The Fourth Adventure Quantum Leap The Paint Funeral Sticks & Stones Date Night Show & Tell A Little Visit Black Ranger Education Cold Winds Sick Complete Crash Good Brother Staying Awake

About the Author :
James Stewart III is a Black writer whose work has appeared in numerous literary journals, including Lampblack, Zone 3, Midwest Review, The Forge, and 580 Split. He is a cofounder of the reading series Exhibit B and board president of the Guild Literary Complex. Stewart lives with his wife and daughter at the end of DuSable Lake Shore Drive.

Review :
"Defiant Acts is a paean to working-class America, a carefully constructed tapestry of moments depicting a multiracial family and the bonds that hold them together. I fell in love with these characters, my heart in my throat as they navigated hard work and moves and illnesses, but also laughter and holidays and togetherness. This is a new classic in the storied tradition of Chicago novels, one I'll be thinking about for a long, long time." "Chicago novels, like Chicagoans themselves, are gritty, direct, and no-nonsense. The city can also be clannish, its neighborhoods insular, and its inhabitants suspicious of outsiders, especially of ones who aren’t like them. James Stewart’s debut, Defiant Acts, brings to life a side of the city that we rarely see—the spaces where the lives of people from different backgrounds and different neighborhoods intersect and connect, in harmony and also in conflict. Defiant Acts introduces us to the Stewarts (inspired by the author’s own family). In prose that both sears and illuminates, we watch them cobble together a life in the face crushing economic pressures, of unpredictable life turns, and of casual—and sometimes not so casual—daily hostilities. Defiant Acts is an unflinching look into multi-racial America—and it is an achievement." "Chicago is a forge for literary realism. Just for starters, Dreiser, Farrell, Brooks, Algren, Wright--a fierce tradition that James Stewart III extends with his debut novel, Defiant Acts. It’s a gripping story of an inter-racial working-class family surviving from paycheck to paycheck. The term working-class in this book comes with a description of work so palpable as to be memorable. Thanks to its agile, inventive design, the novel weighs in at under two hundred pages and reads with both richness and an underlying velocity that brings life to every page."