{"product_id":"9780472022106","title":"Grand River and Joy","description":"\u003cp\u003e\"With unsparing candor, Susan Messer thrusts us into a time when racial tensions sundered friends and neighbors and turned families upside down. The confrontations in \u003ci\u003eGrand River and Joy\u003c\/i\u003e are complex, challenging, bitterly funny, and---painful though it is to acknowledge it---spot-on accurate.\"\u003cbr\u003e ---Rosellen Brown, author of \u003ci\u003eBefore and After\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eHalf a Heart\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e\"\u003ci\u003eGrand River and Joy\u003c\/i\u003e is a rare novel of insight and inspiration. It's impossible not to like a book this well-written and meaningful---not to mention as historically significant, humorous, and meditative.\"\u003cbr\u003e ---Laura Kasischke, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Life Before Her Eyes\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eBe Mine\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e  \u003cp\u003eHalloween morning 1966, Harry Levine arrives at his wholesale shoe warehouse to find an ethnic slur soaped on the front window. As he scavenges around the sprawling warehouse basement, looking for the supplies he needs to clean the window, he makes more unsettling discoveries: a stash of Black Power literature; marijuana; a new phone line running off his own; and a makeshift living room, arranged by Alvin, the teenaged tenant who lives with his father, Curtis, above the warehouse. Accustomed to sloughing off fears about Detroit's troubled inner-city neighborhood, Harry dismisses the soaped window as a Halloween prank and gradually dismantles “Alvin's lounge” in a silent conversation with the teenaged tenant. Still, these events and discoveries draw him more deeply into the frustrations and fissures permeating his city in the months leading up to the Detroit riots.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eGrand River and Joy,\u003c\/i\u003e named after a landmark intersection in Detroit, follows Harry through the intersections of his life and the history of his city. It's a work of fiction set in a world that is anything but fictional, a novel about the intersections between races, classes and religions exploding in the long, hot summers of Detroit in the 1960s. \u003ci\u003eGrand River and Joy\u003c\/i\u003e is a powerful and moving exploration of one of the most difficult chapters of Michigan history.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eSusan Messer's fiction and nonfiction have appeared in numerous publications, including \u003ci\u003eGlimmer Train Stories,\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003eNorth American Review,\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eColorado Review.\u003c\/i\u003e She received an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in prose, an Illinois Arts Council literary award for creative nonfiction, and a prize in the Jewish Cultural Writing Competition of the Dora Teitelboim Center for Yiddish Culture.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eCover photograph copyright © Bill Rauhauser and Rauhauser Photographic Trust\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"University of Michigan Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47105879474416,"sku":"9780472022106","price":16.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9780472022106_p0.jpg?v=1763707911","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9780472022106","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}