Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick

Twenty-one stories from across Hurston's career, arranged in the order she wrote them — beginning with "John Redding Goes to Sea," her first published fiction — and including eight Harlem Renaissance stories recovered from periodicals and archives that had never been collected in a book. The young Hurston of Eatonville and Harlem is here in full: love, conjure, pulpits, rent parties, and the folk speech she insisted was literature. Editor M. Genevieve West supplies an introduction, and Tayari Jones a foreword framed as a love letter and testimony to Hurston's example. The title is the folk saying for making do — striking a straight blow with the crooked tool at hand.

Author: Zora Neale Hurston; edited by M. Genevieve West · Original publisher: Amistad (New York), 2020