Henry Dumas’s stories frequently take place in a United States much as we know it today, but in which the doors to other worlds are slightly more than ajar. This porousness lends a mythic shimmer to daily life ... And within this world of expanded possibilities and persistent, violent white supremacy, we often find Dumas’s men talking about what might happen next. This new edition of Echo Tree gives us the fullest sense of the writer’s stereoscopic vision, in which popular uprisings are provoked by acts of violence, and by the Great Depression ... Dumas’s vernacular writing is lustrous and well-worn ... Dumas was an accomplished poet, and when he gathers up for a moment of sublimity in his fiction, it is to underscore quiet isolation and the need to escape ... A new introduction by John Keene provides valuable coordinates for Dumas’s fables and highlights the importance of Dumas’s political convictions after the killing of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. But Keene might have gone further ... Certain kinds of renown – many readers will know how Dumas died before they have read a page of him – tend to flatten or caricature the work, encouraging readers to seek anticipatory echoes of a terminal struggle. One need not look very far for such echoes in Dumas’s fiction, but the nature of his writing is such that I doubt it can be flattened.

Afrosurrealism and science fiction shape parts of Dumas’ work ... In Dumas’ hands, the surreal might also be meshed with folktale traditions ... Echo Tree also shows Dumas working as a fiction realist ... Echo Tree, isn’t a black artistic product performing for whites who traditionally value such performative cultural output while disregarding the lives that produce it. Dumas freed himself to experiment with an exuberant hyper-candor that can still strike untruths dead with a lethal vibration.

With a new introduction by John Keene and a new foreword by editor Eugene B. Redmond, the second edition of Henry Dumas’s short story collection Echo Tree introduces his work to a new generation. Black culture and manhood take center stage in these stories. Men’s physicality, intellect, and perception, along with the ways men code-switch, the ways they learn to navigate being at home and in society, and how they develop strength and empathy, are explored in Dumas’s lyrical, brutal prose, which orients and propels his tales to resonant endings, signaling a mastery of craft ... The dexterity with which Dumas handles his themes transfers to the ways his stories take up space in several literary movements ... With a sharp eye that is both a credit to the original writing and the strength of its editing, these stories connect the past to the present. Echo Tree is a vibrant short story collection.

... a grab bag of forms, and its range reveals a writer given to experimentation. Eugene B. Redmond must be commended for his dogged 35-year dedication to the manuscripts that Dumas left behind at his death ... Given that the Dumas archive has already been so deeply mined, it is surprising to discover here a vein that was waiting to be tapped—seven previously unpublished stories, at least one of which ('Scout') is among Dumas’s finest ... Unfortunately, what Redmond has not given us, perhaps since Dumas had no chance to organize his papers and reveal such things, is a historical account of Dumas’s trajectory as a writer. The stories are organized along chains of thematic resonance—a set of Arkansas stories is grouped together, for example—but not in any kind of chronological order; there are no notes to document where a story first appeared in print, no notes to explain which tales were written in the early ’60s and which were written later (although most of the stories set in New York City feel very much post–Watts riots). And the stories themselves, running the gamut from visionary science fiction to well-wrought tales that end in Joycean anticlimax, do not offer up a clear sense of before and after. A sympathetic reader might say that the organization of Echo Tree reveals the open-ended nature of Dumas’s quest rather than any particular sequence of his solutions. But reading Echo Tree cover to cover is a disorienting experience; one is tossed from genre to genre without much sense of direction.

The work of a late, lamented, and influential icon of the 1960s Black Arts Movement is brought back into print to connect with a post-millennial Black Lives Matter generations of readers—and writers ... his poetry and fiction, steeped in folkloric imagery, magical realism, and a haunting, deeply evocative lyricism [...] was near music ... Most of the stories deal with the raw-nerve perils and spiritual crises that come from growing up in the rural South while others, such as “Harlem,” engage the hair-trigger tension of Black urban life in midcentury America. And there are times, as in “Devil Bird,” when Dumas’ phantasmagorical and metaphysical tendencies merge into wild and wicked farce. For all these stories’ spellbinding attributes, some of them seem to trail off as if waiting for yet another draft to amplify or add on to their details. The newer stories seem like variations, even repetitions of previous themes ... Dumas, who always seemed ahead of his own, albeit brief, time, was capable of advancing African American storytelling art even further than one previously suspected. Every couple of decades or so, we need to be reminded of what made writers like Toni Morrison call Henry Dumas a genius.

This vital collection gathers the thrilling, variegated short fiction of Dumas ... A pair of vigorous introductory essays by Redmond and John Keene cast Dumas as an immensely influential writer, an heir to African and Black arts movements who sought to forge a new, emancipatory aesthetic. Dumas’s work exhibits a wide stylistic range, from realism, allegory, and folklore to trippy supernaturalism ... This collection resounds with a piercing voice that demands to be heard.