The Sleeper Wakes: Harlem Renaissance Stories by Women

This is a vital addition to the growing shelf of African American literature. Readers will be pleased to discover such writers as Jessie Redmon Fauset, who served as an editor of the Crisis , an influential literary journal of the 1920s and '30s from which many of these stories are taken. Her story about two young people in love who discover they are siblings and her tale of a black woman who ``passes'' until she can no longer tolerate living with her racist white husband echo a familiar theme in this collection: identity. Marita Bonner's tale unites that thread with another one: racism and its consequences. Bonner's young male hero unwittingly kills his father and loses the power of speech as a result of unknown parentage and racism. Angelina Weld Grimke's story, reprinted, oddly, from Birth Control Review , describes a mother who loses her brother to a lynch mob. Not wanting to raise her child in such a world, she smothers him. Zora Neale Hurston contributes perhaps the finest work--a young man with wanderlust floats out to sea, dead, and citizens of a small town hold a bizarre, humorous trial attempting to imitate white justice. Knopf is a freelance editor. (May)