A Room of One's Own is thrilled to welcome author Rickey Fayne in celebration of his debut novel The Devil Three Times. He will be joined in conversation with Jay Lowe.
This is an in-person event at A Room of One's Own Bookstore.
About the book
“A debut of enormous ambition” spanning eight generations of a Black family in West Tennessee as they are repeatedly visited by the Devil (Nathan Harris, New York Times bestselling author of The Sweetness of Water)
Yetunde awakens aboard a slave ship en route to the United States with the spirit of her dead sister as her only companion. Desperate to survive the hell that awaits her at their destination, Yetunde finds help in an unexpected form—the Devil himself. The Devil, seeking a way to reenter the pearly gates of heaven, decides to prove himself to an indifferent God by protecting Yetunde and granting her a piece of his supernatural power. In return, Yetunde makes an incredible sacrifice.
Their bargain extends far beyond Yetunde's mortal lifespan. Over the next 175 years, the Devil visits Yetunde's descendants in their darkest hour of need: Lucille, a conjure woman; Asa, who passes for white; Louis and Virgil, who risk becoming a twentieth-century Cain and Abel; Cassandra, who speaks to the dead; James, who struggles to make sense of the past while fighting to keep his family together; and many others. The Devil offers each of them his own version of salvation, all the while wondering: can he save himself, too?
Steeped in the spiritual traditions and oral history of the Black diaspora, The Devil Three Times is a baptism by fire and water, heralding a new voice in American fiction.
Jay Lowe (he/they) is a Literary Studies PhD student at UW-Madison and the Assistant Director of Madison Writing Assistance, a free service that offers one-to-one writing support for community members at various Madison Public Library branches and the Meadowood Neighborhood Center. They study contemporary film and literature through the lenses of queer theory, trans studies, and postcolonial studies. They are also a bookseller here at A Room of One's Own.
Rickey Fayne is a fiction writer from rural West Tennessee whose work has appeared in the New York Times, American Short Fiction, Guernica, The Sewanee Review, and The Kenyon Review, among other magazines. He holds an MA in English from Northwestern University and an MFA in Fiction from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas. His writing embodies his Black, Southern, over-churched upbringing in order to reimagine and honor his ancestors' experiences. He has received support for his writing from Tin House, Community of Writers, Kimbillio, Sewanee, Bread Loaf, Yaddo, MacDowell and Willapa Bay. Currently, he teaches fiction writing at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
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