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“This is an adventure story and a romance, but in Gibbons’ hands, it’s that and much more. Exquisitely rendered and deeply felt, this is as astute and absorbing as fiction gets.”
—Booklist
SWEETBITTER (Jackleg Press; Publication: August 1, 2023) takes place in east Texas in 1910 during the time of white rule―not by law but by lynch mob. Amid the suffocating racism and fear, half-Choctaw, half-white Reuben Sweetbitter and Martha Clarke, a white woman, fall in love. This is an authentic, richly detailed novel with themes of sacrifice, fear and the loss of one’s identity inspired by Giddon’s family – who’s paternal grandfather half-Choktaw – and his experiences growing up in protestant evangelical Texas where racism and white supremacy was rampant. Library Journal writes: “Atypical of love stories, this realistic work maintains a historical perspective in lending the couple short-lived happiness.”
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PROLOGUE
Many generations ago Aba, the great spirit above, created many men, all Chahtah, who spoke the language of the Chahtah, and under- stood one another. They came from the heart of the earth and were made of clay, and before them no men had ever lived.
One day they all gathered and looking upward wondered what the blue of the sky and the white of the clouds were made of. They determined to try to reach the sky by building a great mound. They piled up rocks to build a mound that would reach the sky but at night the wind blew from above so strongly that the rocks fell down. The second day, too, they worked, building the mound but again that night the wind came while they slept and it pushed down their work. On the third day they began yet again. But that night the wind blew so hard it hurled the rocks of the mound down upon the builders themselves.
They were not killed, but when daylight came and they crawled out from beneath the rocks that had fallen on them and they began to talk to one another, they discovered that they could no longer understand each other. They spoke many languages instead of one. Some of them spoke the original language, the Chahtah language. Others, who no longer spoke this language, began to fight with those who did. Finally they separated. The Chahtah remained, the original people, and lived near nanih waya, the mound they had not been able to complete. And the others went north and east and west and encountered more tribes.
In this way or some other, all the peoples of the earth were created, each from some substance and thus of different appearance, and at times struggling against each other. This is what the Chahtah told to a white missionary. But this was only a little of what the Chahtah knew. It was not for that man to know everything. And then he wrote mistaken things about them.
Excerpted from SWEETBITTER by Reginald Gibbons © 2023 by Reginald Gibbons, used with permission from JackLeg Press.
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About Author Reginald Gibbons
Reginald Gibbons’ works include An Orchard In The Street (BOA Editions), Creatures Of A Day ( a Finalist in poetry for the National Book Award, LSU Press and his most recent book of poems Renditions (Four Way Books).
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MORE ABOUT REGINALD GIBBONS
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His translations include Selected Poems of Luis Cernuda (Sheep Meadow), Sophocles’ Selected Poems:
Odes and Fragments (Princeton University Press), and his co-translations include Sophocles’ Antigone and Euripides’ Bakkhai (both with the late Charles Segal, Oxford University Press).
Gibbons’ poems and short fiction have been published in Harper’s, The New York Times, The Atlantic,
The Paris, Review, Poetry, The Georgia Review, American Poetry Review, The Shanghai Review, Tikkun,
Ploughshares, Southern Review, Southwest Review, The Chicago Tribune, and many other magazines and periodicals. From 1981 to 1997, he was the editor of TriQuarterly magazine. His book about poetry, How Poems Think, is a gallery of aspects of poetry that combine feeling and poetic cognition
(University of Chicago Press). Gibbons has won fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, the
Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Center for Hellenic
Studies. He has received several prizes, including the Folger Shakespeare Library’s O. B. Hardison,
Jr., Poetry Prize, and the Fuller Award for lifetime achievement from the Chicago Literary Hall of
Fame. Since 1981, he has taught creative writing at Northwestern University, where he is an
emeritus Frances Hooper Professor of Arts and Humanities. From the 1980s till the 2010s, he also
taught at more than twenty residencies of the Warren Wilson MFA for Writers.
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ADDITIONAL PRAISE | SWEETBITTER
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“Gibbons writes with a poet’s graceful attention to language, limning and then blending lovely details of the East Texas landscape, its denizens, its woods, seasons and storms, with Reuben’s half-remembered, bastardized versions of Choctaw myth and Martha’s dreamy, at-arm’s-length relationship to the white world she can’t live in yet can’t do without.” —Washington Post Book World
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“A stately, lyrical meditation on turn-of-the-century Texas… As much a meditation on the American
destruction of aboriginal civilization as it is a story about star-crossed romance.” —Texas Observer
“A sweeping yet intimate first novel that tells the story of the Choctaw Indians through the troubled life of one Reuben S. Sweetbitter, half Choctaw, half white… An absorbing story.” —Publishers Weekly
“The gripping story of illicit love… in prose not easily forgotten… [A] lovely and captivating novel.”
—The Nation
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“Surprising in every way… The novel’s ending is as strong as its beginning—terrifying and beautiful, a true tour de force.” —Chicago Tribune
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“A story of dreams, of memory, of a search for identity, or love and all the senseless obstacles it sometimes must face.” —Dallas Morning News
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“A fictional world of great vividness and detail… Gibbons’ prose can be… descriptive, evocative, even
picaresque, but he does not forget how to tell a story in straightforward sentences.”
—Review of Contemporary Fiction
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PUBLICITY CONTACT:
Jennifer Harris, JackLeg Press
ON SALE: August 15, 2023 jharris@jacklegpress.org
SWEETBITTER, Reginal Gibbons | JackLeg Press | On Sale: August 1, 2023
ISBN: 978-1737513421 | 6×9 Paperback | 19.00 US | 452 Pages
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LEARN MORE | ORDER
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Reginald Gibbons| Jackleg Press | #SWEETBITTER
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Retail: Ingram Content Group | Libraries: Libraries (ingramcontent.com)
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JackLeg Press | JackLeg employs an environmentally sustainable publishing model and a rigorous
editorial process to bring the best new and familiar voices into the literary world. At JackLeg, we
stress authenticity, collaboration, and bold thinking.
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