Phillip B. Williams is from Chicago, Illinois, and is the author of two collections of poetry: Thief in the Interior, which was the winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and a Lambda Literary Award, and Mutiny, which was a finalist for the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection and the winner of a 2022 American Book Award. Williams is also the recipient of a Whiting Award and fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the National Endowment for the Arts. He currently teaches in the MFA in creative writing program at New York University.
Praise for Ours:
“[An] ambitious debut . . . In lush, ornamental
prose, Williams, who is also a poet, traces many characters’
entwined journeys as they seek to understand the forces that
assemble and separate them. The novel is an inventive ode to
self-determination and also a surrealistic vision of Black life as
forged within the crucible of American history.” —The New
Yorker
“Transcendent.” —Time
“A captivating, complex debut.” —People
“Williams finds new ways to ask age-old questions: How do
we have both safety and freedom? What makes a ragtag group into a
community? And most important, how do we find the missing parts of
ourselves in other people?” —The Washington Post
“Deeply absorbing . . . Ours, for all its elements
of magic, fantasy, and mythology, is a realistic depiction of how
we might arrive at utopia: through people who are always trying to
become, always finding ways to navigate and survive harsh
realities, always reaching for moments of joy and intimacy.” —Los
Angeles Times
“There’s nothing that hits like a truly magnetic work of magical
realism, and Ours by Phillip B. Williams has all the makings of a
stunner. . . . Williams is unabashedly brilliant.”
—Elle
“Williams transports us back to the antebellum South—but with a
liberatory, supernatural twist. . . . Fans of The
Underground Railroad, The Water Dancer, and Let Us Descend will
devour this lyrical and surreal saga.” —Oprah Daily
“Ours joins a canon of similar works that have appeared in recent
years, such as Jesmyn Ward’s recent novel Let Us Descend and Colson
Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning 2016 The Underground
Railroad. . . . By taking such care to document the
horrors of slavery alongside the ‘freedom [his characters]
deserve,’ Williams seems to offer the possibility of a world beyond
trauma.” —Financial Times
“A transcendent and lyrical exploration of freedom that delivers a
fluid, spiritual and empowering meditation on the complexities of
reclaiming identity . . . Williams has assembled a vivid and
theatrical ensemble in ‘Ours’ and given them plenty of room to
access their humanity as their lives intersect and intertwine. The
result is a spiritual, redemptive and stirring look at the numerous
shapes autonomy takes.” —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“A multigenerational epic that will sweep you off of your
feet . . . Williams possesses a brilliant
imagination and understanding of
storytelling. . . . [He] uses his poet’s ear in
crafting his prose, and the words shine on every page.” —Book
Riot
“Phillip B. Williams establishes that his lyrical gifts, which work
so well in poetry, have the strength to support a nearly
six-hundred-page tome in his debut novel. . . . Ours
is a novel that touches several centuries, exploring the nature of
freedom, the limitations of safety, and the ways that love traps
and frees a soul.” —The Rumpus
“Ours is so vivid a glimpse into the lives of formerly enslaved
people that it reads with the beauty and urgency of a spoken-word
poem. . . . This is an important novel, peopled
with vivid characters literally and figuratively hidden from view.
Every scene portrays a people trying to understand themselves,
individuals trying to give and receive love, attempting to balance
hope with trauma.” —Star Tribune
“A sweeping, epic novel . . . remarkable.” —Town &
Country
“Shot through with themes of freedom versus bondage and empowerment
versus protection, Ours explores what happens when community
members dare to ask if their newfound safety is just a new type of
entrapment.” —Reader's Digest, “The 30 New Books We Can’t Wait to
Read in 2024”
“Ours enthralls from its earliest pages . . . Written in
distilled, distinct prose (author Phillip B. Williams is an
award-winning poet), Ours reads like mythology or folklore paired
with ethnography. The inhabitants of the town, their
relationships and routines, feel specific, lived-in and complex.
Questions about how to form a utopian community—if such an ideal is
even attainable—reverberate throughout. Unlike many stories that
grapple with slavery, Ours is refreshingly focused on freedom.”
—Buy Side from The Wall Street Journal
“Award-winning poet and writer Phillip Williams has crafted a
mesmerizing, mythical, multilayered portrait of a unique Black
American community formed by an omnipresent witchy woman named
Saint . . . Williams' prose is graceful and eloquent in a
story that is big and beautiful as it probes the terms and
conditions of true freedom. Don't miss it.” —The Bay Area
Reporter
“Now, this, this is the one. . . . The
narrative, bolstered by effervescent prose, Black spirituality,
mythology, and surrealism, sweeps over four decades, showing what
love can do to you.” —Book Riot
“Williams has a voice that soars across each page, breathing life
into his dazzling array of characters—the lovers and the
malcontents, the queer and the mystical, the brazen and the
cautious. At an incredible six hundred pages long, Ours is
nevertheless a novel worth savoring.” —Shelf Awareness (starred
review)
“A gorgeously written, evocative saga of Black American survival
and transcendence, blending elements of fantasy, mythology, and
multigenerational history . . . resonant [and]
wildly imaginative . . . As in the magical
realist sagas of Latin America or the grand fictions of Russian
literature, time itself becomes a morphing, enigmatic character in
Williams’s novel. . . . What keeps you
attentive, and the sweeping narrative anchored, are the rich
characterizations and, most of all, the often-startling impact of
Williams’s poetically illuminated language. A multilayered,
enrapturing chronicle of freedom that interrogates the nature of
freedom itself.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Ambitious and lyrical . . . Williams’s
accomplished narrative leaves readers with much to ponder.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Ours is the epic and lyrical debut novel by poet Phillip B.
Williams, featuring unforgettable characters woven together with
folklore and humanity’s search for freedom.” —B&N Reads
“A beautifully written and ambitious epic about the complexity of
freedom. Williams crafts an expansive, original world filled with
characters who linger long after the final page.” —Brit Bennett,
New York Times–bestselling author of The Vanishing Half
“In Ours, Phillip B. Williams creates a fictional town with a
complicated, magical history that is as thrilling to explore as the
Macondo of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.
The mysteries at the heart of this novel are deeply considered, as
is the concept of freedom itself. With a poet’s precision of
language and a seasoned storyteller’s attention to character,
Williams has written a truly one-of-a-kind epic.” —Angela Flournoy,
author of The Turner House
“As consummate and compelling a storyteller as he is a poet, in
Ours Phillip B. Williams spins a stellar tale of resistance and
reconstruction that could school any U.S. history book. Crossing
rivers and decades, involving folk culture and the miraculous as a
matter of course, and centering on the mysterious Saint and the
secret community she creates in the midst of nineteenth-century
chattel slavery and the long battle for Black freedom, Ours speaks
to our past, present, and future with incomparable poetic verve.”
—John Keene, National Book Award–winning author of Punks: New and
Selected Poems
“Phillip Williams’s Ours is a radical re-creation of our pasts.
With a keen eye to historical detail and the expansive imagination
of a poet, Williams has constructed a jewel of a novel, a deeply
felt exploration of the strengthening ties and broken cords of kith
and kin under the weight of complicated histories. In the uncertain
future that awaits us, Ours illuminates a greater understanding of
what it means to be human and the complex, tangled lives and
afterlives of enslavement.” —Kaitlyn Greenidge, author of Libertie
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