New Releases by Nathan McCall

A Vintage Shorts Original Selection Twenty years ago, the publication of Nathan McCall’s groundbreaking memoir Makes Me Wanna Holler chronicled a black man’s passage from a life on the block to the prison yards to a journalism career that led to The Washington Post. McCall’s survival had been an act of defiance against a culture and political system designed to keep black men down. Today, from the halls of a revered university, McCall gives thought to how many white Americans remain conditioned to racial blindness and can’t see their way out. Our country’s promise of equality continues to ring hollow, as young black men are murdered on our streets and constrained behind bars in astonishing numbers. In this timely, intimate essay, Nathan McCall reflects on what it means to stand tall and fashion life on one’s own terms, and urges us to recognize that what will make America great is not growing its wealth or might overseas, but doing right by its people at home. An eBook short.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • One of our most visceral and important memoirs on race in America, this is the story of Nathan McCall, who began life as a smart kid in a close, protective family in a black working-class neighborhood. Yet by the age of fifteen, McCall was packing a gun and embarking on a criminal career that five years later would land him in prison for armed robbery. In these pages, McCall chronicles his passage from the street to the prison yard—and, later, to the newsrooms of The Washington Post and ultimately to the faculty of Emory University. His story is at once devastating and inspiring, at once an indictment and an elegy. Makes Me Wanna Holler became an instant classic when it was first published in 1994 and it continues to bear witness to the great troubles—and the great hopes—of our nation. With a new afterword by the author

With the same personal authority and exhilarating directness he brought to his account of his passage from a prison cell to the newsroom of The Washington Post, Nathan McCall delivers a series of front-line reports on the state of the races in today's America. The resulting volume is guaranteed to shake the assumptions of readers of every pigmentation and political allegiance. In What's Going On, McCall adds up the hidden costs of the stereotype of black athletic prowess, which tells African American teenagers that they can only succeed on the white man's terms. He introduces a fresh perspective to the debates on gangsta rap and sexual violence. He indicts the bigotry of white churches and the complacency of the black suburban middle class, celebrates the heroism of Muhammad Ali, and defends the truth-telling of Alice Walker. Engaging, provocative, and utterly fearless, here is a commentator to reckon with, addressing our most persistent divisions in a voice of stinging immediacy.

From the “mesmerizing storyteller” (The New Yorker) and author of the bestselling memoir Makes Me Wanna Holler presents a profound novel—in the tradition of Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth—that captures the dynamics of class and race in today's urban integrated communities. Barlowe Reed is a single, forty-something Black American who rents a ramshackle house on Randolph Street in Atlanta, just a stone’s throw from the historic birth home of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Barlowe, who works as a printer, otherwise passes the time reading and hanging out with other men at the corner store. He shares his home and loner existence with a streetwise, twentysomething nephew who is struggling to get his troubled life back on track. When Sean and Sandy Gilmore, a young white couple, move in next door, Barlowe and Sandy develop a reluctant, complex friendship as they hold probing—often frustrating—conversations over the backyard fence. Members of both households, and their neighbors as well, try to go about their business, tending to their homes and jobs. However, fear and suspicion build—and clashes ensue—with each passing day, as more and more new whites move in and make changes and once familiar people and places disappear. Using a blend of superbly developed characters in a story that captures the essence of this country’s struggles with the unsettling realities of gentrification, Nathan McCall has produced a truly great American novel.