"This handsome book is trumpeted as "the most comprehensive and ambitious collection of African American folktales ever published". It makes good on the claim with 150 stories ranging from the Brer Rabbit tales to fables retrieved from before the American revolution that originated with newly arrived slaves."
- New Statesman,
"Edited with a foreword, introduction and notes by Henry Louis Gates Jr and Maria Tatar, these nearly 150 African American folktales animate our past and reclaim a lost cultural legacy to redefine American literature."
- The Voice,