A comic journey into the ultimate land of whiteness by an unlikely band of African American adventurers. Jaynes is obsessed with Edgar Allan Poe's only novel ; when he discovers a crude slave narrative that seems to confirm the reality of Poe's fiction, he resolves to seek out Tsalal, imagining it to be a key to his personal salvation.

A large, stirring novel of suspense that is, at the same time, a work of brilliantly astute social observation. Set in two privileged worlds, the upper crust African American society of the eastern seaboard and the inner circle of an Ivy League law school, it tells the story of a complex family with a single, seductive link to the shadowlands of crime. Judge Oliver Garland has just died suddenly. A brilliant legal mind, conservative and famously controversial,...

Harvard professor Wilson Chaney's position in life is hanging by a thread: his marriage, his reputation, not to mention his tenure at Harvard, are in the hands of a blackmailer, someone threatening to sell Chaney's secrets at very high prices.