Marshall has described herself as a “very slow, painstaking, fussy writer.” She has authored five critically acclaimed novels over the years, beginning with Brown Girl, Brownstones in 1959, a book The Norton Anthology of African-American Literature described as “the novel that most black feminist critics consider to be the beginning of contemporary African-American women’s writings.” She has also published two collections of short stories.

Marshall will be reading from her most recent novel The Fisher King, which tells the story of multiple generations of two Brooklyn families. In the late 1940s, Everett “Sonny-Rett” Payne must break with his hardworking immigrant parents to pursue his talent as a jazz pianist. He runs away to find fame in Paris, bringing his future wife and a friend, and causing a bitter feud when each family blames the other for the loss of their children. Four decades later, Payne is dead, and his brother seeks to heal old wounds by inaugurating a neighborhood music hall with a concert in his honor. He brings Sonny-Rett’s eight-year-old grandson back to Brooklyn for the event, and the child’s presence prompts the family to reevaluate their ideas about themselves and their community. According to Publishers Weekly: “Marshall writes with verve, clarity and humor, capturing the cadences of black speech while deftly portraying the complexity of family relationships and the social issues that beset black Americans. A surprise twist at the end brings Marshall's finely tuned drama to a satisfying, redemptive close.”

The Fisher King

Everett Payne took his time paying his respects to the old Tin Pan Alley tune [he had chosen to play,] and once this was done, he hunched closer to the piano, angled his head sharply to the left, completely closed the curtain of his gaze, and with his hands commanding the length and breadth of the keyboard he unleashed a score of dazzling chords, brazen polyrhythms, and ideas, His music was an outpouring of ideas and feelings informed by his own brand of lyricism yet lit from time to time with flashes of the recognizable melody. Still paying his respects to the Broadway tune, while at the same time furiously recasting and reinventing it in an image all his own.

A collective in-suck of breath throughout the club.
“Cat got him a mean left hand, man. Can't nobody touch it,” they would say in praise of him over the years.

Interview

Five Questions for Paule Marshall

Q1. Was there an experience you had that made you want to be a writer?

A1. I grew up among storytellers. They were my mother and a small group of her friends, all of them immigrant women from the West Indies. They regularly met at my house in Brooklyn to reminisce about their island home and to tell stories. They were consummate storytellers; and from early on, I, too, wanted to possess if only a small measure of their power with words.

Q2. You’ve said it’s a gratifying experience for a writer when readers identify with one of her characters. Which of your characters do you identify with most, and why?

A2. Out of all my characters, I most treasure Merle Kinbona, the heroine of The Chosen Place, The Timeless People, my second novel. "Poet, revolutionary and saint," is the way one critic aptly described her. I think of Merle Kinbona as still being abroad in the land, busy championing the cause of those she called the "Little Fella," the marginalized and dispossessed of the world, and I love her deeply.

Q3. Which of your books was most difficult to write, and why?

A3. The Chosen Place, The Timeless People. Researching, writing and endlessly rewriting the book aged me permanently. Yet, when it was done--and done to my satisfaction, I gladly accepted the cost.

Q4. Who are your current favorite writers?

A4. The three books that have sustained me over the years and that I reread on a regular basis reflect the three great wings of the Black Diaspora. They are Ake by the Nobel laureate in Literature Wole Soyinka, a memoir of his childhood in Nigeria. The Dragon Can’t Dance by Earl Lovelace, a West Indian writer, and All God’s Dangers, the memoir of a sharecropper in the Deep South, which speaks volumes about the African-American experience.

Q5. What do you most encourage your students to do as writers?

A5. I urge my students a) to read constantly and analytically, always reminding them that as John Gardner insists in The Art of Fiction, "you can't hope to write well if you haven't learned how to analyze fiction.;" b) to carve out if only an hour or two each day that is devoted to writing, making that time sacrosanct in their lives; c) to accept the fact that writing fiction is a lifelong apprenticeship. We are always learning how to write better.

Biography

Paule Marshall has published five novels: the classic Brown Girl, Brownstones; The Chosen Place, The Timeless People; Praisesong for the Widow; Daughters; and most recently, The Fisher King. She has also published two collections of short fiction, Soul Clap Hands and Sing and Reena and Other Stories, and her stories have been widely published in magazines. Marshall has taught at Yale, Columbia, Cornell and Oxford universities and currently holds a distinguished chair at New York University’s Graduate Creative Writing Program. A past recipient of the MacArthur “Genius” Award, Marshall has won the John Dos Passos Award for Literature and an American Book Award, and she holds five honorary doctorate degrees including one from Rutgers University.