Crabcakes: A Memoir - Softcover

Felipe Nieves The Cleveland Plain Dealer As in the dazzling stories of Elbow Room...the writing is clean and crisp....The imagery is spare and on occasion disarmingly moving in its evocative power. Mimi McFarland The Bloomsbury Review Crabcakes proves once again that James Alan McPherson continues to be of incomparable value, not only to literature but to each of us. V. R. Peterson People magazine A thoughtful argument for valuing the rituals which sustain communities. Ploughshares This beautiful book resonates as a personal meditation on race, self, and community. N. Graham Nesmith Philadelphia Inquirer Crabcakes is an inspirational story of an individual who gains wisdom from his arduous decisions. Lev Raphael Detroit Free Press All are likely to be moved by [McPherson's] prose, which at times recalls the passion and precision of James Baldwin.

With the same grace and lyrical precision that distinguish his vibrant short stories, James McPherson surveys the emotional upheaval of his last twenty-one years. From Baltimore, Maryland, to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Iowa and Japan, Crabcakes witnesses McPherson's confrontation with the past, and his struggle to make sense of it and to bind it, peacefully, to the present. His elliptical search for meaning -- and his ultimate understanding of what makes us human -- finds in Crabcakes a powerful and enduring voice.