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4.5
On Witness and Respair
ByPublisher Description
The collected creative nonfiction of a singular American writer, Jesmyn Ward, including widely shared classics, three never-before-published speeches, and an introductory essay.
Respair (noun, obsolete), fresh hope after despair.
From the two-time National Book Award winner and New York Times bestselling author Jesmyn Ward, this collection of essays documents more than a decade of work in the life of a singular writer often lauded as “the heir apparent to Toni Morrison” (LitHub). Beginning with her upbringing in a multigenerational household in rural Mississippi, the cradle of both her youth and her gift for storytelling, Ward brings her keen wisdom and hauntingly lyrical prose to a range of topics, following in her grandmother Dorothy’s footsteps when she promises always to “Tell it straight. Tell it all.”
True to her word, in these pages Ward contemplates the writers and novels of her youth and adulthood—the transformative power of discovering Octavia Butler as a twenty-something, the mirror that Richard Wright’s novels held up to her own childhood, and of course, her lifelong love for Toni Morrison. Ward ruminates on her approach to both fiction and life, reflecting on the power of the novel, how to raise a Black son in an era of rising divisiveness and cruelty, as well as her own personal tragedies—including the titular essay of the collection, which tells the story of her partner’s sudden death on the eve of the COVID-19 epidemic. Every bit as piercing and moving as her fiction, On Witness and Respair is a testament to Ward’s powers as “one of America’s finest living writers” (San Francisco Chronicle) and is a monument to hope, beauty, and personal and collective resilience.
Respair (noun, obsolete), fresh hope after despair.
From the two-time National Book Award winner and New York Times bestselling author Jesmyn Ward, this collection of essays documents more than a decade of work in the life of a singular writer often lauded as “the heir apparent to Toni Morrison” (LitHub). Beginning with her upbringing in a multigenerational household in rural Mississippi, the cradle of both her youth and her gift for storytelling, Ward brings her keen wisdom and hauntingly lyrical prose to a range of topics, following in her grandmother Dorothy’s footsteps when she promises always to “Tell it straight. Tell it all.”
True to her word, in these pages Ward contemplates the writers and novels of her youth and adulthood—the transformative power of discovering Octavia Butler as a twenty-something, the mirror that Richard Wright’s novels held up to her own childhood, and of course, her lifelong love for Toni Morrison. Ward ruminates on her approach to both fiction and life, reflecting on the power of the novel, how to raise a Black son in an era of rising divisiveness and cruelty, as well as her own personal tragedies—including the titular essay of the collection, which tells the story of her partner’s sudden death on the eve of the COVID-19 epidemic. Every bit as piercing and moving as her fiction, On Witness and Respair is a testament to Ward’s powers as “one of America’s finest living writers” (San Francisco Chronicle) and is a monument to hope, beauty, and personal and collective resilience.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesOn Witness and Respair Reviews
4.5
“Jesmyn Ward is my favorite kind of writer - honest, deep, curious. She writes so the past is not forgotten and repeated. She keeps her ancestors alive by sharing their stories.
This book is a collection of essays that reads, to me, like a memoir. I enjoyed learning about what motivates Jesmyn Ward to write. I am a white woman, so I cannot relate to what it means to be black and seen as less than human, but I do my best to understand and innately I know that it isn’t right and it has to be faced and fixed. I want to hear the truth, especially when it isn’t pretty, because most likely if someone is writing about it, there’s hope involved too.
I recommend this book to everyone. Everyone should read it!
Thank you to Scribner & to NetGalley for the free ARC in exchange for my honest review.”
“Thank you to NetGalley and Scribner for the advanced reader copy! All thoughts are my own:
A collection of essays from Jesmyn Ward about her upbringing in rural Mississippi and the novels and writers that influenced her own storytelling.
I’m pretty selective with my nonfiction reads. I requested this one on NetGalley since it’s from my favorite author (and Mississippi native) and I’ve got tickets to attend her talk on this book at my local bookstore in May. Man am I glad to have read it.
The way Ward writes about Mississippi, the good and the bad, is the most accurate account ive ever read. In every one of her books ive read. The influence of these other authors she writes about here is clear throughout her other writings too.
I’ve found no one in literature that writes creative nonfiction as well as Ward. This book does a lot of things but at the top of that list for me is that it does Mississippi justice.
(The only nonfiction book I’ve ever read in one sitting [over like 150 pages, that is])”
About Jesmyn Ward
Jesmyn Ward received her MFA from the University of Michigan and has received the MacArthur Genius Grant, a Stegner Fellowship, a John and Renee Grisham Writers Residency, the Strauss Living Prize, and the 2022 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. She is the winner of two National Book Awards for Fiction for Sing, Unburied, Sing and Salvage the Bones. She is also the author of the novel Where the Line Bleeds and the memoir Men We Reaped, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize and the Media for a Just Society Award. She is currently a professor of creative writing at Tulane University and lives in Mississippi.
Other books by Jesmyn Ward
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