Elbow Room (Pulitzer Prize winner) [MM0005]

1993 MMPB printing of the 1977 original. Pulitzer Prize Winner. A beautiful collection of short stories that explores the 1970s African American experience, Elbow Room is alive with warmth and humor. Bold and very real, these twelve stories examine a world we all know but find difficult to define. Whether a story dashes the bravado of young street toughs or pierces through the self-deception of a failed preacher, challenges the audacity of a killer or explodes the jealousy of two lovers, James Alan McPherson has created an array of haunting images and memorable characters in an unsurpassed collection of honest, masterful fiction. "She said,"I'm black. I've accepted myself as that. But didn't I make some elbow room, though?" She tapped her temple with her forefinger. "I mean up here!"― James Alan McPherson, Elbow Room.

From recent Amazon/GoodReads reviews: "The first Pulitzer winner from an African American author. I like short stories and these are great. The titular story is set in San Francisco, and the form is interesting and slightly experimental."; "McPherson's fiction is not a critique of racial oppression in America like you find in Richard Wright and James Baldwin. McPherson wanted to tell stories about African Americans in their great diversity of character and situation. The freedom he wants, as is declared in his experimental, ruminative story "Elbow Room," is the freedom to tell his own stories as he sees fit."; "In the introduction, James Alan McPherson refers to the fact that in the countryside, people have more Elbow Room and this is where most of the stories the place, outside the cities. Most of the tales are hilarious, often in their absurdity, such as the one where a competition is organized and participants are invited to offer solutions for better navigation on a water canal, and the most grotesque, pathetic ideas are presented..."; "The stories were contemporary for their time, which made a unique reading experience for me reading it now, in 2024. I found them to be just as meaningful today as the Pulitzer committee did in the late 1970s."