Cyrus Colter

This is the reissue of the award-winning stories of one of America's great authors. Set mostly on Chicago's South Side, these eighteen stories describe ordinary people whose lives are transformed by small acts of chance or will. From depictions of the ordered urban enclaves of the black middle class to the dank and dirty tenements of the lonely city's poor, Colter's sharp, spare prose etches perceptive portraits of people who endure and overcome the most severe threats to their spirits. This edition of The Beach Umbrella also contains four stories originally published in the collection The Amoralists. A distinguished attorney and public servant, Cyrus Colter took up writing in midlife and, after retiring from the law, devoted himself not only to his art but also to teaching.

A cautionary tale of revolutionary dreams, bitter realities, and the persistence of both hope and falsehood. A kind of historical fable about the possibilities and perils of black revolution within and against twentieth-century white America, this novel is brilliantly structured and voiced.

Cyrus Colter's third and most ambitious novel follows the fortunes of John Calvin Knight - the fiery, driven leader of the Black Peoples Congress, a man whose life and career have developed as much in reaction to his father and the views of an earlier generation as to the awakening civil rights movements of his own era. But no matter how far John Calvin tries to separate himself from his father, it is his father's wisdom about his family's history - and that of all African Americans - that first inflames and ultimately engrosses the son, determining his own life and its possible successes or failures.

When the bombs that stopped the species war tore holes in the veil between this world and the next, they allowed entry to the Others-demons, wraiths, and death spirits who turned the shadows into their hunting grounds. Now, a hundred years later, humans and shifters alike live in artificially lit cities designed to keep the darkness at bay ...