KARIN CECILE DAVIDSON: The first lines of “We Cast a Shadow” introduce the nameless Narrator and set the stage for how he identifies himself: unrecognized, unrealized, a specter and an illusion, lost inside a skin that he himself rejects by novel’s end.

Maurice Carlos Ruffin, “We Cast a Shadow” All you need to know is that I’m a phantom, a figment, a man who was mistaken for waitstaff twice that night. His work has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, AGNI, The Kenyon Review, The Massachusetts Review, and Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas. Winner of an Iowa Review Award in fiction and a Faulkner-Wisdom Creative Writing Competition for Novel-in-Progress, Maurice Carlos Ruffin is a graduate of the University of New Orleans Creative Writing Workshop and is a member of the Peauxdunque Writers Alliance. Language that flies, whip-smart and stunning, uncovers a cracked and unjust society and calls up moments of magnified family love. That kind of love looks and feels a lot like violence.” Sweeping ideas of inheritance, pride, injustice, humanity standing back-to-back with inhumanity, survival, and devotion swarm and abound in these pages. As Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah writes in his New York Times review of “We Cast a Shadow,” “The Narrator shows us over and over again what happens when love is pushed out into the world from a source that does not love itself. In his desperation, he strives to protect his son from racial violence, and yet, it becomes clear that he has fallen into the trap of this very same violence by pushing this “protection” onto his son. Our unnamed Narrator, a black lawyer at a white-glove firm, is obsessed with the possibility of advancement in order to afford this procedure for his biracial son. In New Orleans’ author Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s much acclaimed debut novel, “ We Cast a Shadow,” we find ourselves in a near-future southern city, where white supremacy reigns and the process of “demelanization”-a medical procedure to remove all characteristics of blackness-has become popular.

The Dystopia is Now: An Interview with Maurice Carlos Ruffin by Karin Cecile Davidson

We cast a shadow a novel