An engrossing novel based on the true story of the 1946 lynching of two Black couples in Georgia.
Witness to a lynching in 1946, Lonnie is compelled to understand the brutal event and investigate his own culpability. Set in Georgia and drawn from real events, Anthony Grooms imagines his story from the perspectives of both the victims and the perpetrators. The Vain Conversation depicts a conversation in which all Americans must be engaged. A foreword is provided by American poet, painter, and novelist Clarence Major. An afterward is written by T. Geronimo Johnson, the bestselling author of Welcome to Braggsville and Hold It 'Til It Hurts.
An engrossing novel based on the true story of the 1946 lynching of two Black couples in Georgia.
Witness to a lynching in 1946, Lonnie is compelled to understand the brutal event and investigate his own culpability. Set in Georgia and drawn from real events, Anthony Grooms imagines his story from the perspectives of both the victims and the perpetrators. The Vain Conversation depicts a conversation in which all Americans must be engaged. A foreword is provided by American poet, painter, and novelist Clarence Major. An afterward is written by T. Geronimo Johnson, the bestselling author of Welcome to Braggsville and Hold It 'Til It Hurts.
An engrossing novel based on the true story of the 1946 lynching of two Black couples in Georgia.
Witness to a lynching in 1946, Lonnie is compelled to understand the brutal event and investigate his own culpability. Set in Georgia and drawn from real events, Anthony Grooms imagines his story from the perspectives of both the victims and the perpetrators. The Vain Conversation depicts a conversation in which all Americans must be engaged. A foreword is provided by American poet, painter, and novelist Clarence Major. An afterward is written by T. Geronimo Johnson, the bestselling author of Welcome to Braggsville and Hold It 'Til It Hurts.
Anthony Grooms is the author of Bombingham and Trouble No More: Stories, both winners of the Lillian Smith Book Award for fiction. Born in Charlottesville, Virginia, he taught writing and American literature at universities in Ghana and Sweden and, since 1994, at Kennesaw State University in Georgia.
What People are Saying About This
Edward P. Jones
Grooms has always had a precise and sure and precious way with words, and he does not disappoint those who have come to love his work, his way of seeing and hearing the world. We ask many things of the writers we have taken to our hearts—honesty, sincerity, sensitivity, old verities to borrow Faulkner's phrase. I suspect that those are things Grooms did not have to learn because they were already in his blood before he wrote his first words.
Gray Stewart
Anthony Grooms is a master storyteller, hands down. Here he confronts the Jim Crow lynching—the most brutal of subjects in American literature, one that is all too-frequently abstracted and stereotyped. With expert prose and emotional complexity he looks through the eyes of witness, victim, and member of the mob to explore themes of redemption, salvation, and universal love. Considering headlines these days, The Vain Conversation is not just timely, it's important.
Ravi Howard
The Vain Conversation chronicles the shared places of the American South, where the beauty of the landscape can often mask the entanglements of an unresolved past. With historical sharpness and striking prose, Anthony Grooms again introduces us to characters who navigate the questions and dangers on the road toward progress. The vividly conjured memories turn histories into ghosts. They beckon as well as warn in this exquisitely textured novel.
Ron Rash
The Vain Conversation vividly evokes the horrors of American racism, but Anthony Grooms never denies the humanity of his characters, whether black or white, young or old. His novel achieves what only the best literature can give us: it refuses too-easy consolations or too-easy condemnations. When we finish the last page, the book is not finished with us. It will haunt us.
