Echo Tree

African futurism, gothic romance, ghost story, parable, psychological thriller, inner-space fiction—Dumas’s stories form a vivid, expansive portrait of Black life in America.

Henry Dumas’s fabulist fiction is a masterful synthesis of myth and religion, culture and nature, mask and identity, the present and the ancestral. From the Deep South to the simmering streets of Harlem, his characters embark on real, magical, and mythic quests. Humming with life, Dumas’s stories create a collage of mid-twentieth-century Black experiences, interweaving religious metaphor, African cosmologies, diasporic folklore, and America’s history of slavery and systemic racism.

Publication date: May 4, 2021 

Format: Trade Paper

Dimensions: 5.5 x 8.5

Page count: 424 pages

ISBN: 9781566896078

Thanks to a 2013 ADA Access Improvement Grant administered by VSA Minnesota for the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, this title is also formatted for screen readers which make text accessible to the blind and visually impaired. To purchase this title for use with a screen reader please email us at info@coffeehousepress.org.

Henry Dumas was born in Sweet Home, Arkansas, in 1934 and moved to Harlem at the age of ten. He joined the Air Force in 1953 and spent a year on the Arabian Peninsula. After returning, Dumas became active in the civil rights movement, married Loretta Ponton, had two sons, attended Rutgers University, worked for IBM, and taught at Hiram College in Ohio and at Southern Illinois University’s Experiment in Higher Education in East St. Louis. In 1968, at the age of thirty-three, he was shot and killed by a New York City Transit Authority police officer.

A Literary Hub Most Anticipated Book of 2021

A Kirkus Best Fiction of 2021

“This vital collection gathers the thrilling, variegated short fiction of Dumas. . . . This collection resounds with a piercing voice that demands to be heard.”

—Publishers Weekly , starred review

“This new edition of Echo Tree gives us the fullest sense of Dumas’s stereoscopic vision.”

—David Hobbs, Times Literary Supplement

“Every couple of decades or so, we need to be reminded of what made writers like Toni Morrison call Henry Dumas a genius.”

—Kirkus, starred review

“Black culture and manhood take center stage in these stories, explored in Dumas’s lyrical, brutal prose, which orients and propels his tales to resonant endings, signaling a mastery of craft. . . . ”

—Foreword Reviews, starred review

“Dumas freed himself to experiment with an exuberant hyper-candor that can still strike untruths dead with a lethal vibration.” 

—Ron Slate, On the Seawall

“[Echo Tree] surely does underscore Dumas’s talent as a writer of fiction, although at the same time reminding us that he was so barbarously prevented from fully harvesting that talent.”

—Daniel Green, Full Stop

“[A]ffectingly aching and absolutely arresting. . . . Henry Dumas’ stories are a freedom song and an angry cry.”

—Ron Jacobs, Counterpunch

“Trust me, Reader, Dumas is electric, with writing that pulses through the vein, pumping straight for your heart.”

—Rasheeda Saka, Literary Hub

“He was doing Lovecraft Country decades before it went viral. If there were such a thing as an Afro-Gothic school of artists, included would be Thelonious Monk, Horace Pippin, Albert Ayler, Betye and Lezley Saar—and Henry Dumas, a legend while living and a legend in the afterlife.”

—Ishmael Reed

“Echo Tree arrives at the moment in our culture when we need Dumas’s daring imagination the most.”

—Jeffrey B. Leak, author of Visible Man: The Life of Henry Dumas

“Dumas left us a body of work that ensures his place as one of the best writers America has ever known. The literary canon is dishonest without him, and this collection of his stories should be read and cited as widely as Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and James Baldwin are—this is our music.”

—Harmony Holiday, author of Maafa