Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments

Ambitious, original...a beautiful experiment in its own right.--Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts A startling, dazzling act of resurrection...Hartman has granted these forgotten, 'wayward' women a new life...[She] challenges us to see, finally, who they really were: beautiful, complex, and multidimensional--whole people--who dared to live by their own rules, somehow making a way out of no way at all.--Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow [Hartman] uses the weapons of lyric and literature to steal 'colored women' away from the grasp of white lawmen and the clinical gaze, and along the way gives history what it lacks and wants--black women as secret agents of destiny, deep lives from the unnamed crowd, and underground sinners as the true sponsors of social change.--Edward Ball, author of Slaves in the Family A love song to the wayward, a riotous poem, a lyrical homage to the minor...This book changes everything.--Jack Halberstam, author of Female Masculinity and The Queer Art of Failure A masterpiece...The wayward lives and beautiful experiments in which Hartman is interested can only be described...by joining the experiment, by engaging in its hard-won freedoms, its autonomous profligacies, its shifting directions...A truly great and groundbreaking book.--Fred Moten, coauthor of The Undercommons and author of The Feel Trio Lucid and original--of considerable interest to students of the African-American diaspora and American social and cultural history. Lyrical and novelistic....This passionate, poetic retrieval of women from the footnotes of history is a superb literary achievement.--Publishers Weekly (starred review) Exhilarating....A rich resurrection of a forgotten history....[Hartman's] rigor and restraint give her writing its distinctive electricity and tension....This kind of beautiful, immersive narration exists for its own sake but it also counteracts the most common depictions of black urban life from this time.--Parul Sehgal Wayward Lives is a series of adventure stories that takes the reader through the travails and triumphs of a multitude of black women as they negotiate the perilous path of self-discovery at the turn of the twentieth century. In her impeccably researched new book, Hartman breathes glorious life into these true survival tales with the precision and invention of a master storyteller.--Lynn Nottage, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Sweat and Ruined

Saidiya Hartman is the author of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route and Scenes of Subjection. She a Guggenheim Fellow and has been a Cullman Fellow and Fulbright Scholar. She is a professor at Columbia University and lives in New York.