“The Color Purple is an American novel of permanent importance.” —Newsweek
Open Road Integrated Media announces the ebook publication of three titles by celebrated author Alice Walker, including her novel The Color Purple, which won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, and was subsequently adapted into an Academy Award–nominated film starring Whoopi Goldberg and Danny Glover. Walker is known for her deep and unflinching explorations of black life in America, particularly the experiences of black women. In her public life, Walker has worked to address problems of injustice, inequality, and poverty as an activist, teacher, and public intellectual.
In The Color Purple Walker writes about the life of Celie, a young black woman living in the segregated South who undergoes a sexual and spiritual awakening. The 1983 novel represented a major breakthrough for mainstream African-American fiction, inviting favorable comparisons to the work of William Faulkner and prompting the New York Times Book Review to declare Walker a “lavishly gifted writer.”
Joining The Color Purple in this release is its follow-up, The Temple of My Familiar, in which characters Celie and Shug from The Color Purplesubtly shadow the lives of dozens of characters, all dealing in some way with the legacy of the African experience in America. Also included in the release is Possessing the Secret of Joy, in which Walker exposes the abhorrent practice of female genital mutilation, as the protagonist must come to terms with the circumcision she endured as a child in Africa. On November 22, 2011, eight more titles will join the Alice Walker ebook collection from Open Road Media. They will include novels The Third Life of Grange Copeland and Meridian; poetry collections Revolutionary Petunias,Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful, and Once; short story collections You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down and In Love & Trouble; and essay collection Living by the Word.
