Recommendations
Books Like Three Days Before the Shooting by Ralph Ellison
For readers of Ellison's complete posthumous manuscripts
If you loved Three Days Before the Shooting — the complete manuscripts of Ellison's forty-year second novel, the full scope of the Hickman-and-Bliss story, and the extraordinary editorial work of Callahan and Bradley — these books share the same formal ambition, the same engagement with the weight of American history, and the same interest in what the greatest American writers were attempting when they pushed the novel to its limits.
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Buy on AmazonInvisible Man
by Ralph Ellison
Ellison's masterpiece and the essential companion — the National Book Award-winning novel that is the only completed work of his fiction career.
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Buy on AmazonJuneteenth
by Ralph Ellison
The abridged companion edition — the reduced version focusing on the Hickman-and-Bliss story; the entry point for most readers to Ellison's posthumous work.
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Buy on AmazonBeloved
by Toni Morrison
Morrison's Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning novel — the companion in African American literary fiction about the most ambitious engagement with American racial history.
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Buy on AmazonGravity's Rainbow
by Thomas Pynchon
Pynchon's National Book Award-winning novel — the companion in American literary fiction of the same era in terms of sheer formal ambition; both Pynchon and the Ellison of Three Days Before the Shooting are working at the outermost limits.
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Buy on AmazonThe Sound and the Fury
by William Faulkner
Faulkner's masterpiece — the companion in American fiction about a major writer's most ambitious and formally demanding work.
- 6Buy on Amazon
The Shadow and the Act
by Ralph Ellison
Ellison's collected essays — the intellectual context for the fiction he was writing in the forty years of the manuscript; essential for understanding what he was attempting.
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Buy on AmazonGoing to the Territory
by Ralph Ellison
Ellison's second essay collection — the companion nonfiction from his late career; the essays about American identity show his thinking in the decades of the manuscript.
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Buy on AmazonThe Tunnel
by William H. Gass
Gass's novel — the companion in American literary fiction about a great novelist's extremely long, extremely ambitious project that became its author's life work; The Tunnel took Gass 26 years, Three Days Before the Shooting took Ellison 40.
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