The Confession of Copeland Cane with Keenan Norris

Join us for a virtual reading and discussion of The Confession of Copeland Cane on July 30th at 5:00pm on Zoom.

How to describe The Confession of Copeland Cane, the explosive new novel by Oakland-based author Keenan Norris? According to MacArthur Fellow Mike Davis, like “Thomas Pynchon, Nathaniel West and Ralph Ellison going into a bar where they decide to write a novel about the gentrification wars in the East Bay.” And yet Keenan Norris’s prose is all his own: dexterously lyrical, sharp, and skillful in reflecting our own moment. Set in East Oakland in a very near future, Keenan Norris’s The Confession of Copeland Cane is a vital dispatch to our present times. Copeland Cane V is a teenager with a predilection for flip phones, a finely developed sense of the absurd, and a spot at the nearby prep school even as he and his folks face eviction from their apartment. Meanwhile, property developers are waging war across Oakland, and the state has merged with the Soclear Broadcasting conglomerate to surveil and harass Cope’s neighborhood in the name of anti-terrorism. And in the aftermath of a protest rally against police violence, everything changes, and Cope finds himself a wanted man without a clear past or future. One boy’s coming of age story converges with an American history that has not yet occurred—but that all too easily could.

Keenan Norris teaches American literature and creative writing at San Jose State University. His novel Brother and the Dancer won the 2012 James D. Houston Award and he served as editor for the anthology Street Lit: Representing the Urban Landscape. His latest novel The Confession of Copeland Cane has been lauded by BuzzFeed Books as a defining work "at the intersection between Black Lives Matter and COVID-19."
He serves as guest editor for the Oxford African-American Studies. Norris was a 2020 Public Voices fellow and a 2017 Marin Headlands Artist-in-Residence fellow and a 2016 Callaloo fellow. His editorials have been published in LitHub, Alta, the Los Angeles Times and Los Angeles Review of Books.

Orca Books Co-op is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.

Topic: The Confessioin of Copeland Cane with Keenan Norris | Orca Books Co-op
Time: Jul 30, 2021 05:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)

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