Flying Home: Seven Stories of the Secret City

by David Nicholson

The characters in FLYING HOME live in the real Washington, D.C., worlds away from the heroic statues, the white marble monuments, and the broad, tree-lined avenues. They are ordinary working men and women maids, taxi drivers, janitors, barbers, and handymen. Theirs is a city of neighborhoods and back-porch summer nights, a city where men swap lies in barber shops, toasts are proclaimed on street corners, and fathers struggle to teach their children right from wrong. It's a city beset by change. And, in remembering it, David Nicholson has taken to heart what novelist Harper Lee said of her hometown : I believe there is something universal in this little world, something decent to be said for it, and something to lament in its passing. David Nicholson, like his literary ancestors Ralph Ellison, James Alan McPherson, and Bernard Malamud, illuminates the mythic in the everyday lives of Americans whose stories are all too rarely deemed worthy of art. The peach tree in an old woman s yard in urban Washington glows with nearly magical fruit that tempts a young man to a betrayal he knows will rot his soul. A chorus of middle-aged black men in a barber shop hold a symposium on the nature of love. James Brown and Jimi Hendrix walk Nicholson s streets, but so, too, do anonymous heroes such as a black handyman who once pitched to Babe Ruth, a janitor struggling to maintain his dignity despite financial reverses, a disheveled beggar woman whose mere survival strikes us as a miracle. In Flying Home, David Nicholson shines his compassion and wisdom on them all. Eileen Pollack, author of In the Mouth and Breaking and Entering

David Nicholson is such a gifted, assured storyteller that I read FLYING HOME in a single sitting, pulled from one beautifully written, wise, and moving story to the next, so enchanted by the lives he explores in the secret city, and by his skill, that I was unaware of the passage of time. This is superbly crafted, memorable writing that will leave readers hungering for more. CHARLES JOHNSON, National Book Award-winning author of MIDDLE PASSAGE

David Nicholson, in FLYING HOME, his evocative and potent fiction debut, tells stories so grounded in specifics as to seem folkloric, delivering folklore on pavement. He writes in unhurried and assured prose, with sentences that can, when called for, become flowing, full of eddies and swirls. Dizzy Gillespie once said that it took him a lifetime to learn what not to play, and I believe Nicholson heard him and has also done that very thing. DANIEL WOODRELL, author of WINTER S BONE

David Nicholson, and all those people I mentioned to You should talk to them. Really, go talk to them. Get a book out about them. Find a way to cultivate a larger audience for them. James Alan McPherson, Pulitzer Prize winning author of ELBOW ROOM

In FLYING HOME, David Nicholson, the dauntless founder of BLACK FILM REVUEW, gives us a series of absorbing stories, captured for the reader in a linguistical version of CinemaScope, along with a most playful riff on Ralph Ellison s narrative style. Intimate yet wide-angled, imaginative and probing, Nicholson s collection is, as its last tale reveals, full of the inspiration and longing that come with having seen Hendrix perform live on the grandest of stages when music and society were on the edge of revolution. Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University

Genres: Short Stories, Dc Comics

160 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 2, 2015

Reviews

[Norman Metzger · Rating 5 out of 5]

The subtitle is "seven stories of the secret city," and "secret" is ironic, meaning secret to many of us who really don't know the history of black Washington and of its expressively unique neighborhoods -- Shaw, U Street, Bloomingdale, Stronghold....David Nicholson writes about the people who lived there, those who lived out their lives there and others who left but (for a brief visit) came back. Nicholson writes about all them with understanding, often with love for them coming through, with no hints of false sympathy but with full empathy -- and in prose that is carefully crafted with descriptions that to me (in effect an outsider to the world he writes about) ring pitch perfect. And dialogue that There is never a false note; dialogue is often funny, many times ribald, and driven by the reality of lives lived at the edge and that the strength each character has is someone else -- even if it is the men who gather almost daily in a barber shop to exchange insults, tell stories (some may be true), and talk of course about the women in their lives, not always in a PC way. and Each of the stories are terrific and I hesitate to favor any one of them, but for me "Seasons" and "Carolina is Dancing" are two that are eternal for me.

[Jerry · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the few books that can make me cry. A great book for anyone, DC resident or not. "Seasons" and "Flying Home" are my two favorite stories in this collection, full of regret and meaning.

[Akeiisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

An intimate portrait of the DC of yesterday, parceled out in stories mostly from the perspective of black men raised in and making a living in a city that was and is more than just politics and seat of government. Overall 3.5 out of 5

[Dee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Started this on a metro ride to Navy Yard in Southeast DC, finished this on an overnight trip to suburban Detroit.

[Ellen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Extraordinary writing. I need to buy this book and read it often enough to understand the deeper meanings. Thanks, David.

[Kenneth Cooper · Rating 4 out of 5]

A neighborhood-level view of the part of Washington, D.C. beyond officialdom. I learned a lot about a city where I once lived.