In Canterbury, Ran Walker reimagines The Canterbury Tales as a contemporary Black pilgrimage, where storytelling becomes both offering and survival. Thirty pilgrims-pastors, skeptics, sneakerheads, scholars, hustlers, dreamers, and witnesses-travel toward a shared destination, each taking a turn to speak. Their stories move through faith and doubt, humor and grief, realism and afrosurrealism, forming a chorus shaped by history and the present moment.
Structured across multiple rounds of tales, Canterbury honors Chaucer's original frame while transforming it into something distinctly American and unmistakably Black. These stories do not compete for entertainment alone; they wrestle with inheritance, visibility, belief, and the cost of movement in a world that rarely allows rest. Each voice stands on its own, yet together they reveal a collective truth: that the journey matters as much as the arrival.
By turns sacred, satirical, and quietly devastating, Canterbury is a book about motion, across roads and generations, between tradition and reinvention. It asks what it means to testify in public, to carry one's story alongside others, and to keep walking when the destination remains just out of reach.
