Book Description

An award-winning novel following two Black adolescents as they come of age in two vastly different neighborhoods of the same Southern California city. Winner of the 2012 James D. Houston Award, Keenan Norris’s first novel is a beautiful, gritty, coming-of-age tale about two young African Americans in the San Bernardino Valley—a story of exceptional power, lyricism, and depth. Erycha and Touissant live only a few miles apart in the city of Highland, but their worlds are starkly separated by the lines of class, violence, and history. In alternating chapters that touch and intertwine only briefly, Brother and the Dancer follows their adolescence and young adulthood on two sides of the city, the luminous San Bernardino range casting its hot shade over their separate tales in an unflinching vision of Black life in Southern California. Praise for Brother and the Dancer “Read Keenan Norris, an important new American writer. His Brother and the Dancer delivers everything we want from a first novel: a story we’ve never read before, a world we’ve never quite known, a vision we’re unfamiliar with. And yet it gives us the prose of a mature artist, and an understanding of the human heart that would seem nearly impossible in a writer so young. A fine and daring book.” —Andrew Winer, author of The Marriage Artist “American Letters has a bright, stirring and brilliant new voice.” —Micheline Aharonian Marcom, author of The Mirror in the Well “Keenan Norris is simply one of the most talented young writers around. Brother and the Dancer is his brilliantly realized debut. The story of Touissant and Erycha, their families, their homes, is somehow tender and unflinching, filled with insight and hard-earned wisdom—all of it written with a memorable richness.” —Victor LaValle, author of The Devil in Silver