Truth: Four Stories I Am Finally Old Enough to Tell - Rilegato

Now that she has outlived those who might have objected to her telling four family secrets, Ellen Douglas does just that.

A novelist revered for her storytelling, here she crosses over into the mirror world of historical fact to tell four stories in which she seeks the truth--about herself, about her white Mississippi forebears, about their relationships to black Mississippians, and ultimately, about their guilt as murderers of helpless slaves. In collection, they make a book its author describes as "about remembering and forgetting, seeing and ignoring, lying and truth-telling. It's about secrets, judgements, threats, danger, and willful amnesia. It's about the truth in fiction and the fiction in 'truth.'"

Josephine Haxton, who took the pseudonym Ellen Douglas in 1962 to protect her family's privacy upon publication of her first novel, is the author of seven previous books, all fiction. Two of them, A Family's Affair and Black Cloud, White Cloud were both included in the New York Times Book Review's Year's Ten Best listings. Her fourth novel, Apostles of Light, was a finalist for the National Book Award. At seventy-seven, Douglas has won respect as a novelist who dared to chip away at the wall blocking communication between Southern Whites and blacks.

Now she turns her extraordinary powers of observation directly onto events that involve her own blocked communications and the struggle to make sense of them. The result is perhaps this complex and important writer's most complex and important work. As USA Today has said of her work, "Racism is not simply a failure to understand others, Douglas suggests, but most profoundly a failure to understand one's own condition. To find a so subtle and important an idea...is as rare and welcome a thing as wisdom."

"She attacks with unladylike power and gusto, with a style at once cheerful and sardonic, with a kind of black-hearted good humor, and with an inventiveness which puts some outlandish folk up to some wondrous doings." -- Walker Percy

"Unsettling. Brilliant. Urgent and relentless in her search for truth--a truth." -- Ursula Hegi

"For all her deceptively quiet manner and muted ton, her own perception is fierce." -- Elizabeth Spencer

"She demonstrates a mastery of technique that brings to mind the exquisite texture of Philip Roth. But finally, she is like nobody else." -- *Michael Dorris

"It's possible to think that some people were simply born to write. Ellen Douglas is just such a writer." -- Richard Ford