About the Author

DARRYL PINCKNEY, a longtime contributor to The New York Review of Books, is the author of a novel, High Cotton, and Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature. He has worked for Robert Wilson on various theatrical projects, most recently an adaptation of Daniil Kharms's The Old Woman.

Reviews

A capacious and mind-opening experience awaits within. Publishers Weekly starred review Praise for Darryl Pinckney An extraordinary achievement... This tender, often droll portrait of one young life is also an arrestingly mature, original account of the condition of being black through several generations and of America in the sixties-a major part of our history. [High Cotton] is also beautifully written, exhilaratingly intelligent, and a joy to read. -- Susan Sontag With High Cotton, Pinckney joins the first ranks of American writers... A major achievement. Henry Louis Gates Jr. The essays [in Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature] are full of great personal feeling, intellectual curiosity, and original, groundbreaking research...He is simultaneously sympathetic, skeptical, and analytical. -- Lorrie Moore "Darryl Pinckney...has a distinctive voice and vision." -- Edmund White, The New York Times "With his combination of whimsy, eloquence, mournful nostalgia, self-disparagement, and razor-sharp irony, Pinckney creates a tone, and a persona, that are peculiarly astringent and affecting, at once charming and ever so slightly chilly. Here, we feel, is a witness, at once reporter and participant-observer, who seduces much of the time with wit, whose ambitions are always literary, whose observations never thicken into complacency." -- Robert Boyers In his formalism, one sees a mind that's viewing things from a distance, [with] irony and danger and wit and darkness. But in the darkness there is this humor, a kind of joyous light. Robert Wilson