Passing
Nella Larsen author Maggie Lily illustrator
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Restless Books
Published:23rd Oct '18
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

When childhood friends Clare Kendry and Irene Redfield come across each other at a white-only restaurant, Irene learns her estranged friend has severed all ties to their African American community and is now married to a bigoted white man unaware of her heritage. Swinging between allure and repulsion, their revived relationship becomes a stage upon which questions of identity, sexuality, belonging, and self-invention play out.
“Nella Larsen’s Passing is one of those American classics that I’ve always meant to get around to. A new edition is out today from Restless Books, with a handsome cover (and interior illustrations, all by Maggie Lily) and an introduction by the novelist and critic Darryl Pinckney. If I’m going to tackle a classic, I like to have a teacher to help me along the way…. It’s a remarkable book, and Maggie Lily’s dark illustrations end up feeling very appropriate.”
-- Rumaan Alam * The New York Times *"Quicksand and Passing are novels I will never forget. They open up a whole world of experience and struggle that seemed to me, when I first read them years ago, absolutely absorbing, fascinating, and indispensable."
-- Alice Walker“[Passing] is about changing definitions of concepts like race and gender, and the inextricable relationship between whiteness and blackness. It is a meditation on the uneasy dynamic between social obligation and personal freedom. It dramatizes the impossibility of self-invention in a society in which nuance and ambiguity are considered fatal threats to the social order.”
-- Emily Bernard * Electric Literature *“I have read and re-read Passing more than a dozen times. Each time I think I can hear Larsen's own voice more clearly: asking, demanding really, that each of us abandon the labels we've been assigned and celebrate the story that we are.”
-- Heidi W. Durrow * NPR *“Passing broke literary ground as the story of two racially and sexually ambiguous women written by another. Social boundaries can be permeated, but not without cost."
-- Natalie Cate * The Guardian, 1000 novels everyone must reISBN: 9781632062024
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
160 pages