Randall Kenan dazzled the literary world with his 1989 debut novel, A Visitation of Spirits, about the inhabitants of a Southern rural black community, including a gay man whose internalized homophobia leads him to tragedy. Three years later his first collection of stories, Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, earned even greater acclaim for another empathetic look at the townsfolk of his imagined Tims Creek, North Carolina. Kenan has won a Guggenheim fellowship, a Whiting Writers award, a John Dos Passos award, a Sherwood Anderson award, and a Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, but he hasn't published any other books of fiction in 18 years. Instead, he wrote a short YA biography of his idol James Baldwin, collected 200 interviews for his 688-page oral history Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century, riffed on Baldwin in a 149-page essay called The Fire This Time, and edited Baldwin's uncollected writings in The Cross of Redemption. He teaches at his alma matter, UNC Chapel Hill.
Especially for the Nabokov family, fiction is truer than bare fact. Read Paul Russell's award-winning novel about Vladimir's gay brother, The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov
[Kindle] and his conversation about him with Christopher Bram over at The Millions.
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