Let the Dead Bury Their Dead — Randall Kenan (Pre-Order)
Let the Dead Bury Their Dead — Randall Kenan (Pre-Order)
Published 5 November 2026. Pre-orders are charged now and posted to arrive on or before publication day.
“Nothing short of a wonder-book.”
A place of myth and national reckoning
Tim's Creek exists somewhere between rural idyll and forgotten backwater, but through Kenan's deft excavation of Southern life it becomes something larger. Moving between traditional folk cadence, scholarly oral history and lyric realism, LET THE DEAD BURY THE DEAD gathers an unforgettable chorus of Black and white, rich and poor, the living and the long-departed.
For readers of William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers, Octavia Butler and Jesmyn Ward.
A three-year-old child becomes a vessel for the voices of the dead.
A demagogue preacher raises an army from the grave.
A mother is undone by a drowning that may have been no accident.
A pig speaks.
“Randall Kenan is an American master.”
“Kenan's grasp of his lightly fictionalized home's history, geography, and culture was as keen as Faulkner's.”
“One of America's finest writers.”
Randall Kenan
Randall Kenan was the former chancellor of the Fellowship of Southern Writers and a professor at the University of North Carolina. His work brought the Southern Black, gay experience into literary fiction — one of the very few writers to do so. He won the Lambda Literary Award, a Whiting Award and the John Dos Passos Prize, and was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship and the Prix de Rome. He died in 2020.
This edition is introduced by Alane Salierno Mason, vice president and executive editor at W. W. Norton & Company.
Dead Ink’s resurrection ground for the strange, the silenced, and the outcast
We bring back books that were censored, overlooked or quietly allowed to go out of print. We invite you to step out of the mainstream and into something more interesting.
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Pre-orders, posting, and the small print
Pre-orders are posted to arrive on or before publication day, 5 November 2026.
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