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Informationen zum Autor Ernest J. Gaines was born on a plantation in Pointe Coupee Parish, Louisiana, which is the Bayonne of all his fictional works. His novels include The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, Of Love and Dust, Catherine Carmier, Bloodline, A Gathering of Old Men and In My Father's House. Attica Locke is the author of Heaven, My Home , a Waterstones Thriller of the Month, Bluebird, Bluebird which won the CWA Steel Dagger and an Edgar Award; Pleasantville , which won the 2016 Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction and was longlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction; Black Water Rising , which was nominated for an Edgar Award and shortlisted for the Orange Prize; and The Cutting Season , a national bestseller and winner of the Ernest Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. Attica Locke has worked on the adaptation of Celeste Ng's Little Fires Everywhere and Ava DuVernay's Netflix series about the Central Park Five , When They See Us. A native of Houston, Texas, Attica lives in Los Angeles, California, with her husband and daughter. Klappentext An Oprah Book Club selection Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize In a small Cajun community in the late 1940s, a young black man named Jefferson witnesses a liquor store shootout in which three men are killed. The only survivor, he is convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Gaines explores the deep prejudice of the American South in the tradition of Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird and Toni Morrison's Beloved . A Lesson Before Dying is a richly compassionate and deeply moving novel, the story of a young black man sentenced to death for a murder he did not commit, and a teacher who hopes to ease his burden before the execution. Award-winning classic novel of prejudice, community and what it means to be a man in the American South. New edition with an introduction by Attica Locke. Leseprobe A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. GainesLeadtext: I WAS NOT THERE, yet I was there. No, I did not go to the trial, I did not hear the verdict, because I knew all the time what it would be. Still, I was there. I was there as much as anyone else was there. Either I sat behind my aunt and his godmother or I sat beside them. Both are large women, but his godmother is larger. She is of average height, five four, five five, but weighs nearly two hundred pounds.Once she and my aunt had found their places - two rows behind the table where he sat with his court - appointed attorney - his godmother became as immobile as a great stone or as one of our oak or cypress stumps. She never got up once to get water or go to the bathroom down in the basement. She just sat there staring at the boy's cleancropped head where he sat at the front table with his lawyer.Even after he had gone to await the jurors' verdict, her eyes remained in that one direction. She heard nothing said in the courtroom. Not by the prosecutor, not by the defense attorney, not by my aunt. (Oh, yes, she did hear one word - one word, for sure: "hog.") It was my aunt whose eyes followed the prosecutor as he moved from one side of the courtroom to the other, pounding his fist into the palm of his hand, pounding the table where his papers lay, pounding the rail that separated the jurors from the rest of the courtroom. It was my aunt who followed his every move, not his godmother. She was not even listening. She had gotten tired of listening. She knew, as we all knew, what the outcome would be. A white man had been killed during a robbery, and though two of the robbers had been killed on the spot, one had been captured, and he, too, would have to die. Though he told them no, he had nothing to do with it, that he was on his way to the White Rabbit Bar and Lounge when Brother and Bear drove up beside him and offered him a ride. A...
