This Is Just Exactly Like You

This Is Just Exactly Like You

"Richly imagined, beautifully written, and completely absorbing. I found myself spellbound, turning pages well past my bedtime. What a fine, fine book." -Tim O'Brien After Jack Lang impulsively buys the house directly across the street from his own, his wife, Beth, has finally had enough. She leaves him- and their six-year-old autistic son, Hendrick-for Jack's best friend, Terry Canavan. Jack tries telling everyone he's okay, but even he's not so sure. When Hendrick, who rarely talks, starts speaking in fluent Spanish, Jack knows he's in uncharted territory. But once Canavan's ex- girlfriend Rena turns up at his door to see how things are going, Jack begins to suspect the world could be far more complicated than he'd ever believed. Set against a landscape of defunct putt-putt courses and karaoke bars, parenthood and infidelity, This Is Just Exactly Like You is a wise and witty debut novel with captivating insights into marriage, autism, suburban fiasco, and life's occasional miracles.

Department of Transportation and Related Agencies Appropriations for 1997

Colored Women Sittin’ on High

From blue-note turmoil to grace-note power, Black women preachers stand tall. In Colored Women Sittin' on High, Melanie R. Hill offers a new perspective on the art of the sermon in African American literature, music, and theology. Drawing on the womanist cadence of Alice Walker in literature and the rhythmical flow of named womanist theologians, Hill makes interventions at the intersections of African American literary criticism, music, and religious studies. Pushing against the patriarchal dominance that often exists in religious spaces, Hill argues that Black women’s religious practice creates a “sermonic space” that thrives inside and outside the church, allowing for a critique of sexism and anti-Black racism. She examines literature by writers such as Zora Neale Hurston and James Baldwin, music by Aretha Franklin and Ms. Lauryn Hill, and sermons by theologians Ruby Sales and Vashti M. McKenzie, and she takes readers into a sermonic artwork of artists, preachers, and freedom movement activists who are, as Hill contends, the greatest “virtuosic alchemists” of our time.