The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter

Praise

“The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter is a stunning novel. Kia Corthron plunges us into generations of American history, moving with force and subtlety through the charged realities of race, gender and region. It is a novel of ideas and politics, of psychological complexity and of vibrant, kinetic language.” —Margo Jefferson, Negroland

“Big, ambitious, challenging … It tells the 20th-century history of the United States through the intersecting lives of two white brothers and two black brothers. It is, by turns, tender, brutal and redemptive.” —Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Sympathizer in a Q&A in the New York Times Book Review

“There are whole chunks of writing here that are simply sublime, places in which one gets swept away by the way she subverts the rhythm of language to illuminate the familiar and allow it to be seen fresh. …  [Corthron] blindsides you. She sneaks up from behind. Sometimes, it is with moments of humor, but more often with moments of raw emotional power—moments whose pathos feels hard-earned and true. … [The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter] succeeds admirably in a novel’s first and most difficult task: It makes you give a damn. It also does well by a novel’s second task: It sends you away pondering what it has to say.” —Leonard Fitts Jr., The New York Times Book Review (Editor’s Choice)

“Kia Corthron’s first novel is a stunning achievement by any measure—a riveting saga of two twentieth-century American families trapped inside the quotidian contradictions and compulsions of race, disability, and sexuality.  The untidiness of history is conveyed through experiences, dreams, and inevitable eruptions of violence, yet also unexpected patterns of escape and possible orbits of justice.” —Angela Y. Davis, UC Santa Cruz

“When I first read it, I was stunned. It’s a haunting and devastating tale, leavened with humor and hope … I believe [The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter] is the most important piece of writing about twentieth-century America since James Baldwin’s Another Country.” —playwright Naomi Wallace quoted in Elle magazine

“In vivid, often breathtaking language, she reveals a changing world where love and sex and violence can rain down in the same cloudburst, and laughter and terror mingle easily, where the color line is not merely a barrier but a jump rope, a noose, a sign, and above all a tether that binds her characters and this country together.” —Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (2009)

“Corthron’s narrative voice makes it easy for readers to immerse themselves in the book, rarely coming up for air.” —Publishers Weekly

“Written by an accomplished playwright, it is a magnificently odd and passionate saga of two Black brothers during the second half of the 20th century. The thematic range and almost Faulknerian sprawl here deserve more attention.” —John McWhorter