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Wench

A Novel

Dolen Perkins-Valdez

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Wench
 

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Dolen Perkins-Valdez

Dolen Perkins-Valdez’s fiction has appeared in the Robert Olen Butler Prize Stories, the Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. Born and raised in Memphis, a graduate of Harvard, and a former University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow, she teaches creative writing at the University of Puget Sound



Photo Credit: Louie Escobar


 

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Like The Help, Wench immerses readers in its characters' complex emotional lives. . . . A deeply moving, beautifully written debut novel told from the heart.


- USA Today
"A heartbreaker, full of understated tragedy and lyrical prose. . . . Perkins-Valdez has woven a devastatingly beautiful account of a cruel past."


- People
"Perkins-Valdez manages to shed a poetic light on one of the ugliest chapters in American history."


- Essence
"Perkins-Valdez memorably portrays how the entwined destinies of chattel and master, increasingly related by blood, passion and hatred, prefigure the looming national conflict. This is an almost forgotten, but important, chapter in American history--recorded as fiction but nonetheless full of hard facts."


- Town & Country
"Absolutely phenomenal. . . . Wench is an excellent novel that will appeal to many readers. Debut author Dolen Perkins-Valdez has crafted a historical narrative that shouldn't be missed."


- Sacramento Book Review
"[A] memorable first novel . . . Readers of historical fiction centering on Southern women's stories like Lalita Tademy's Cane River or Lee Smith's On Agate Hill will be moved by the skillful portrayal of Lizzie's precarious situation and the tragic stories of her fellow slaves."


- Library Journal (starred review)
"Perkins-Valdez's power to imagine herself into the hearts and minds of slave mistresses and their masters is astonishing. A shattering story told with dignity, compassion, and some wicked humor. A brave, honest, beautifully written book that will shock and move readers to much new awareness."


- Sigrid Nunez, author of The Last of Her Kind and A Feather on the Breath of God
"A finely wrought story that explores the emotional lives of four slave women caught in the web of the Peculiar Institution."


- Lalita Tademy, author of Cane River and Red River
"Positively riveting. There will be obvious comparisons to classics like Beloved and Dessa Rose, obvious but deserved. Wench is risky, rich, confounding, maddening, satisfying, illuminating, and downright fascinating. Dolen Perkins-Valdez has created something fresh out of history known but hidden--something old, something new, something borrowed, and something definitely blue. But more, she has the audacity to challenge her readers to reimagine the Peculiar Institution of slavery in ways we Americans are only getting ready to face."


- Randall Kenan, the author of Let The Dead Bury Their Dead
"Perkins-Valdez crawls under your skin and probes most gracefully in clear, concise lyric prose, ultimately asking the question that only extraordinary fiction can ask--what would you have done? A superb and outstanding achievement."


- Jeffrey Lent, author of In the Fall and A Peculiar Grace