Classic, much-lauded title that feels fresh rather than archival. Dumas’s voice will bring necessary insight to conversations about dismantling white supremacy and abolishing state-sanctioned violence against Black people.
These stories are exceptional on a sentence level, playing with genre, form, jazz, and elements of Afrofuturism.
This reissue of our 2003 edition will have gorgeous new cover art by Gail Anderson and a new foreword by John Keene. For years, booksellers have requested an edition of Echo Tree that would feel more contemporary and less academic—this new package should make offering Dumas's work to customers a much easier sell.
Dumas’s influence on the Black Arts Movement and on contemporary Black literature would be hard to overstate. Toni Morrison championed, edited, and eventually published much of Dumas’s poetry posthumously. Ta-Nehisi Coates prefaced the third volume of his Black Panther comic-book series for Marvel with a Dumas excerpt. We’re pursuing prominent authors for endorsements for this new edition.
Beyond overlapping with the audiences of writers like James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, and Ralph Ellison, Dumas’s short stories will appeal to readers of Afrofuturistic fantasy like Marlon James (Black Leopard, Red Wolf) and N.K. Jemisin, and modern short story geniuses like James McBride (Five-Carat Soul), Zadie Smith (Grand Union), and Kathleen Collins (Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?).
