NEWS & EVENTS | Reviews
Praise for Scarlett
“Scarlett faces a difficult history head-on, showing how slavery continues to reverberate in the lives of all Americans.”
—Jason Young, author of Rituals of Resistance: African Atlantic Religion in Kongo and the Lowcountry Region of Georgia and South Carolina in the Era of Slavery
“Both elegant and heart-breaking … Leslie Stainton’s exquisite writing and personal transformation shine a sure and steady light.”
—Karen Branan, author of The Family Tree: A Lynching in Georgia, a Legacy of Secrets, and My Search for the Truth
“Leslie Stainton ‘gets it.’”
—Peter H. Wood, author of Black Majority: Race, Rice, and Rebellion in South Carolina, 1670–1740
“With history again being weaponized, the timing is perfect for the release of Leslie Stainton’s vital story.”
—Joseph McGill Jr., founder of the Slave Dwelling Project and co-author, with Herb Frazer, of Sleeping with the Ancestors: How I Followed the Footprints of Slavery
“Beautiful, elegiac, and urgent, Scarlett resonates with tidal force.”
— William G. Thomas III, author of A Question of Freedom: The Families Who Challenged Slavery from the Nation’s Founding to the Civil War
“Scarlett exemplifies the kind of candor and courage we so urgently need if we are ever to undo the cruelties and lies of racism and heal as a nation.”
—Thomas Norman DeWolf, author of Inheriting the Trade
“Leslie Stainton has given us a remarkable, brave, and beautifully written book.”
—Scott Ellsworth, author of Midnight on the Potomac: The Last Year of the Civil War, the Lincoln Assassination, and the Rebirth of America
“Stainton’s beautifully written and heartfelt personal memoir, … so intertwined with American slavery, should be read by all those interested in the complicated nature of America’s racial past.”
—Jonathan Daniel Wells, author of The Kidnapping Club: Wall Street, Slavery, and Resistance on the Eve of the Civil War
Praise for Lorca
“[A] meticulously annotated book, stuffed with astonishing pictures … but most importantly a sensitive appraisal of a dramatist who, firmly rooted in the past, turned the modern theater upside down.”
—Time Out
“It is to Leslie Stainton’s credit that she does not belabor the pathos in García Lorca’s life in her full-scale, measured and enjoyable biography.”
—New York Times
“It is to Leslie Stainton’s credit that she does not belabor the pathos in García Lorca’s life in her full-scale, measured and enjoyable biography.”
—New York Times
“Biography has become a messy, dishonourable pursuit. This maligned genre, however, has been somewhat redeemed by Leslie Stainton’s valuable, insightful book about a mercurial genius who died knowing his best work would be left undone.”
—The Irish Times
“The Lorca who emerges is still, like Wilde, the salon man par excellence, but more human—a fantastist and dissembler, and an egotist so romantic that his ambition often overreached his talent.”
—The Independent
Praise for Staging Ground
“Stainton’s book makes an important addition to the literature on American theater and culture.”
—Don B. Wilmeth, editor of Cambridge Studies in American Theatre and Drama
“Stainton packs her stage with real characters, the famous and the infamous, and events unfold in a tumult of action both tragic and comic and at times heartbreakingly poignant. This book is great theater—immediate, engrossing, cathartic.”
—Helen Sheehy, author of Just Willa