J California Cooper Books In Order

Family

With a rare and passionate voice, the simplicity of Cooper’s prose and the depths of her insight strike at the heart and carry an intuitive wisdom. Her first novel is a poignant and richly evocative work which centers around the years just before and after the Civil War and tells the story of four generations of an African-American Family. Author reading tour.

In Search of Satisfaction

The folk flavor of her storytelling has earned her constant comparison to Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, but through four collections of short stories and two novels, J. California Cooper has proven that hers is a wholly original talent one that embraces readers in an ever widening circle from one book to the next. With In Search of Satisfaction, Cooper gracefully portrays men and women, some good and others wickedly twisted, caught in their individual thickets of want and need. On a once grand plantation in Yoville, ‘a legal town ship founded by the very rich for their own personal use,’ a freed slave named Josephus fathers two daughters, Ruth and Yinyang, by two different women. His desire, to give Yinyang and himself money and opportunities, oozes through the family like an elixir, melding with the equally strong yearnings of Yoville’s other residents, whose tastes don’t complement their neighbors’. What Josephus buries in his life affects generations to come. J. California Cooper’s unfettered view of sin, forgiveness, and redemption gives In Search of Satisfaction a singular richness that belies its universal themes.

The Wake of the Wind

A dramatic and thought provoking novel of one family’s triumph in the face of the hardships and challenges of the post Civil War South.

The Wake of the Wind, J. California Cooper’s third novel, is her most penetrating look yet at the challenges that generations of African Americans have had to overcome in order to carve out a home for themselves and their families. Set in Texas in the waning years of the Civil War, the novel tells the dramatic story of a remarkable hero*ine, Lifee, and her husband, Mor. When Emancipation finally comes to Texas, Mor, Lifee, and the extended family they create from other slaves who are also looking for a home and a future, set out in search of a piece of land they can call their own. In the face of constant threats, they manage not only to survive but to succeed their crops grow, their children thrive, they educate themselves and others. Lifee and Mor pass their intelligence, determination, and talents along to their children, the next generation to surge forward. At once tragic and triumphant, this is an epic story that captures with extraordinary authenticity the most important struggle of the last hundred years.

Some People, Some Other Place

J. California Cooper returns with a sweeping novel about love and heartbreak, perseverance and luck, telling her tale with an insight and grace that reaffirms Alice Walker’s words of praise for her previous works: Her style is deceptively simple and direct and the vale of tears in which her characters reside is never so deep that a rich chuckle at a person s foolishness cannot be heard. In her acclaimed novels and short stories, J. California Cooper has created moving portraits of people striving to make their way in a hard, often unjust world. Whether it explores the blatant racial and class biases of nineteenth century America or the more subtle forms of discrimination that exist today, It is the universality of her themes that has made Ms. Cooper s work popular, as the Dallas Morning News has written. Some People, Some Other Place is Cooper s biggest, most far reaching novel to date. A multigenerational tale, it is set in a town called Place, on a street named Dream Street. In the words of the novel s narrator, the block surely had about it a feeling of long accumulation of history, of life, of many lives intertwined. As she chronicles the interlocking lives of the residents of Dream Street, Cooper places the stories of the individuals and their families within the wider context of America s social and economic history. We meet the narrator s great grandparents, who left the poverty of the Deep South in 1895 and made their way to a farm in Oklahoma; her grandparents, who continued the northward journey with their eyes on the promised jobs of the industrial Midwest but were forced to settle without reaching their goal; and her mother, who finishes the journey and discovers that life at 903 Dream Street carries new burdens as well as rewards. The neighbors on the block are people of all colors, all striving to overcome personal troubles and disappointments, and all holding fast to their dreams of a better life.

Life Is Short But Wide

Beloved writer J. California Cooper has won a legion of loyal fans and much critical acclaim for her powerful storytelling gifts. In language both spare and direct yet wondrously lyrical, Life Is Short But Wide is an irresistible story of family that proves no matter who you are or what you do, you are never too old to chase your dreams.
Like the small towns J. California Cooper has so vividly portrayed in her previous novels and story collections, Wideland, Oklahoma, is home to ordinary Americans struggling to raise families, eke out a living, and fulfill their dreams. In the early twentieth century, Irene and Val fall in love in Wideland. While carving out a home for themselves, they also allow neighbors Bertha and Joseph to build a house and live on their land. The next generation brings two girls for Irene and Val, and a daughter for Bertha and Joseph. As the families cope with the hardships that come with changing times and fortunes, and people are born and pass away, the characters learn the importance of living one’s life boldly and squeezing out every possible moment of joy.
Cooper brilliantly captures the cadences of the South and draws a picture of American life at once down to earth and heartwarming in this as her wise narrator will tell you strange, sad, kind a beautiful, life story. It is a story about love that leads to the ultimate realization that whoever you are, and whatever you do, life is short, but it is also wide.

A Piece of Mine

Back in print after more than five years, this is the extraordinary first short story collection by the author of Family.

Homemade Love

In one of the best loved volumes of her work, J. California Cooper tells exuberant tales full of wonder at the mystery of life and the hardness of fate. Awed, bedeviled, bemused, all of Cooper’s characters are borne up by the sheer power of life itself.

Some Soul To Keep

J. California Cooper writes with a transparent clarity and such exuberant energy that her characters leaop off the page, bursting with the stories they’ve got to tell stories of simple people, stories of families and fate, of love and marriage, of death and the triumph of the human spirit. Cooper is that most rare and wondrous thing: a true storyteller whose tales trace the energies of life itself.

Some Love Some Pain Sometime

Whether through her stories or her legendary readings, J. California Cooper has an uncanny ability to reach out to readers like an old and dear friend. Her characters are plain spoken and direct: simple people for whom life, despite its ever present struggles, is always worth the journey. In Some Love, Some Pain, Sometime, Cooper’s characteristic themes of romance, heartbreak, struggle and faith resonate. We meet Darlin, a self proclaimed femme fatale who uses her wiles to try to find a husband; MLee, whose life seems to be coming to an end at the age of forty until she decides to set out and see if she can make a new life for herself; Kissy and Buddy, both trying and failing to find them until they finally meet each other; and Aberdeen, whose daughter Uniqua shows her how to educate herself and move up in the world. These characters and others offer inspiration, laughter, instruction and pure enjoyment in what is one of J. California Cooper’s finest story collections.

The Matter Is Life

A fourth collection of stories by the award winning author.

The Future Has a Past

From the beloved author of Family and A Piece of Mine comes a dazzling new collection of stories featuring ordinary women who discover that love sometimes comes when you least expect it.

Vinnie is an overworked and self sacrificing single mother who gets a second chance at love and independence, in ‘The Eagle Flies.’ In ‘A Shooting Star’ a happily married mother of two laments the fate of her beautiful friend Lorene, whose naivete about desire has deadly consequences. In ‘A Filet of Soul,’ Luella’s luck soon changes when her mother leaves her a modest inheritance, but not as soon as she initially imagines. And in ‘The Lost and Found,’ Irene confronts her womanizing boyfriend with the one piece of information that will bring him to his knees. Bursting with earthy wisdom and humor, these warmly engaging tales are a testament to Cooper’s gifts as a storyteller.

Wild Stars Seeking Midnight Suns

In stories that are simple yet elegant, hard hitting yet poignant, J. California Cooper writes about the search for fulfillment that propels people’s dreams and desires. In As Time Goes By a young woman named Futila Ways grows up focusing her dream of a better future on material wealth, only to discover that having everything she ever wanted cannot compensate for the emptiness in her heart. The Eye of the Beholder recounts the story of an unattractive young girl, Lily Bea, whose search for love leads her to embrace her own brand of freedom. And in Catch a Falling Heart a woman mildly crippled in a fall endures loneliness and solitude until she finds a man and provides a resting place for his love. Each story beautifully conveys the profound human need to seek some sort of satisfaction, just as a wild star seeks a midnight sun.J. California Cooper s insights into the hearts and souls of ordinary people and her irresistible storytelling voice have endeared her to fans and critics. As Ms. magazine wrote, Cooper s stories beckon. It is as if she is patting the seat next to us, enticing us to come sit and listen.