Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick: Stories from the Harlem Renaissance

Foreword by Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage Edited with an introduction by Genevieve West, professor and chair of the English, Speech, and Foreign Languages department at Texas Woman’s University A collection of remarkable stories of the Harlem Renaissance from “one of the greatest writers of our time” (Toni Morrison) Zora Neale Hurston. In May 1925, Zora Neale Hurston—then a fledgling writer—was living in New York, “desperately striving for a toe-hold on the world.” For the next decade, she wrote short works that captured the zeitgeist of African American life and transformed her into one of the central figures of the Harlem Renaissance. Nearly a century later, this singular talent is recognized as one of the most influential and revered American artists of the modern period. Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick is an outstanding collection of stories that flash with Hurston’s biting, satiric humor, as they share revelations about love and migration, gender and c