The Complete Stories

I enjoyed the variety of short stories. My favorites are "The Gilded Six Bits and Their Eyes Are Watching God. My favorite passage from the Gilded Six Bits: "One night Joe came back home around midnight & complained of pains in the back. He asked Missie to rub him down with liniment. It had been three months since Missie had touched his body(her husband caught her in bed with another mad - Big Sistahs note) and it all seemed strange. But she rubbed him. Grateful chance. Before morning youth triumphed and Missie exulted." What a lovely way to say they had relations - Big Sistha Pat Their Eyes Are Watching God I simply love this book. I love the language. It is so poetic. The following passages stood out for me: "Naw. We been tuhgether round two years. If you kin see de light at day break, you don't keer if you die at dust. It's so many people never, seen de light at all. Ah wuz fumblin' round and God opened de door." This passage for me is so beautiful and true. So many people die having not experienced real love. Big Sistah Pat. "The monstropolous beast had left his bed. The two hundred miles an hour wind had lose his chains. He seized hold of his dikes and ran forward until he met the quarters; uprooted them like grass and rushed on after his supposed-to-be conquerors, rolling the dikes, rolling the houses, rolling the people in the houses a long with other timbers. The sea was walking the earth with a heavy heel." "De lake is comin

This was a great book. You should read it before reading Their Eyes were Watching God, it really helps you understand her style of writing.

Prior to Zora Neale Hurston, the rich well of black folklore was laargely written by white writers such as Joel Chandler Harris and Roark Bradford among others, with varying degrees of accuracy. Most literate and educated blacks were too ashamed of their folk cutlure to write about it until ZNH came on the scene. This is a fine collection of some of her best short fiction. "John Redding Goes to Sea," written during her college days, accurately describes the life of an intelligent young black man feeling trapped by the illiteracy around him. "The EatonVille Anthology" is a rich collection of anecdotes about her hometown of Eatonville, Fla. "Drenched in Light" is about a free-spirited young black girl and her exasperated mother. "The Bone of Contention" is an old handed-down folklore that inspired her aborted play with Langston Hughes MULE BONE. I could go on and on, but collections like this are of vital importance since Black folklore and stroytelling is in danger of being a dying art form. Read and keep the flame alive.

You won't be able to put this book down as you get into her story-telling. A movie was made of "Their Eyes Were Watching God"--a captivating short novel. She's hilarious and serious at the same time. Some of her stories are autobiographical.

The stories in this book cover just about everything from tales of alligator men to torrid love affairs. They provide a lot of insight into African American culture and history, and are even written in dialect. The forward included in this edition really helped me understand what I was reading when I started the book. Some of the stories are a little confusing though, because they are printed in two different versions in this book. There's a glossary of slang which is also really helpful. I'd reccomend it for anyone who's a fan of folklore or African American history or literature.