Listen free for 30 days

Listen with offer

Offer ends May 1st, 2024 11:59PM GMT. Terms and conditions apply.
£7.99/month after 3 months. Renews automatically.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Three Days Before the Shooting... cover art

Three Days Before the Shooting...

By: Ralph Ellison, John F. Callahan - editor, Adam Bradley - editor
Narrated by: Dominic Hoffman, Arthur Morey
Get this deal Try for £0.00

Pay £99p/month. After 3 months pay £7.99/month. Renews automatically. See terms for eligibility.

£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £16.99

Buy Now for £16.99

Pay using card ending in
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.

Listeners also enjoyed...

Perchance to Dream cover art
Dreamland cover art
Calamity cover art
A Tyranny of Petticoats cover art
The Hunger and Other Stories cover art
The Long List Anthology cover art
'Forty, Counting Down' and 'Twenty-One, Counting Up' cover art
Oz Reimagined cover art
Juneteenth cover art
Invisible Man cover art
Blessed Child cover art
The Last Warner Woman cover art
Folk of the Fringe cover art
Miss Lonelyhearts cover art
The Line cover art
Dust Tracks on a Road cover art

Summary

At his death in 1994, Ralph Ellison left behind roughly 2000 pages of his unfinished second novel, which he had spent nearly four decades writing. Long awaited, it was to have been the work Ellison intended to follow his masterpiece, Invisible Man. Five years later, Random House published Juneteenth, drawn from the central narrative of Ellison’s unfinished epic.

Three Days Before the Shooting... gathers together in one volume, for the first time, all the parts of that planned opus, including three major sequences never before published. Set in the frame of a deathbed vigil, the story is a gripping multigenerational saga centered on the assassination of the controversial, race-baiting US senator Adam Sunraider, who’s being tended to by “Daddy” Hickman, the elderly Back jazz musician turned preacher who raised the orphan Sunraider as a light-skinned Black in rural Georgia. Presented in their unexpurgated, provisional state, the narrative sequences form a deeply poetic, moving, and profoundly entertaining book, brimming with humor and tension, composed in Ellison’s magical jazz-inspired prose style and marked by his incomparable ear for vernacular speech.

Beyond its richly compelling narratives, Three Days Before the Shooting... is perhaps most notable for its extraordinary insight into the creative process of one of this country’s greatest writers. In various stages of composition and revision, its typescripts and computer files testify to Ellison’s achievement and struggle with his material from the mid-1950s until his death 40 years later. Three Days Before the Shooting... is an essential, fascinating piece of Ralph Ellison’s legacy, and its publication is to be welcomed as a major event for American arts and letters.

©2010 Ralph Ellison (P)2018 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“Less a conventional novel than the prose equivalent of a jazz solo, or a series of solos...some of [Ellison’s] finest prose.” (Malcolm Jones, Newsweek)
 

“Stirring...a deeply complex, even epic, story...rendered as majestically as you would expect from Ellison.” (Associated Press)

“[This book is] more than a novel. It’s a literary experience.” (Ebony)

What listeners say about Three Days Before the Shooting...

Average customer ratings

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.