The Last Bluesman

"Ran Walker brings the blues into the 21st century and shows us how we can never forget our roots as long as we keep the love in our hearts. Thank you, Ran, for picking up the guitar of fiction and fretting together characters of such warmth, depth, and humanity."

Tyehimba Jess, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Olio and Leadbelly

"Ran Walker's The Last Bluesman plays an authentic Blues song on the page, filled with all the sorrow, heartache, and beauty that entails. This layered, haunting book is worth listening to."

Mat Johnson, author of Pym and Loving Day

"In The Last Bluesman, readers encounter a modern-day blues novel, complete with a forgotten musician and a historically disenfranchised past. Walker's clarity of style and smooth, mellifluous language render this effort one to be proud of. This work places him among the cadre of new black voices budding with fresh, ripe tales of a past and present yet to untold."

Daniel Black, author of Perfect Peace and Twelve Gates to the City

"This multi-layered, multi-faceted story is utterly captivating, and in Morris Jones the author has created the most rounded, well-written character that I've encountered."

Richard Wall, author of Fat Man Blues

"The blues is a strange beast. Unpredictable; blindsiding. Ran Walker's The Last Bluesman stitches blues with a literary style that is smart, accessible, and unexpected. A collection that resonates like the songs of Blind Willie Johnson, Son House, Albert King, Stevie Ray Vaughan and others. Serious, humorous, sexual, intelligent, and descriptive, The Last Bluesman is what makes blues good and novels great."

Van G. Garrett, author of HOG and Water Bodies

"The characters become so familiar, their conflicts so realistic, and their dilemmas and dreams so tangible, that as a reader you will feel as though you were in the Mississippi Delta along with them."

Sabin Prentis, author of Better Left Unsaid and Compared to What