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Member Reviews

These publishers have done a good service by publishing this 1967 work, a vital addition to the literary production of the Black Arts Movement. I'd only read William Melvin Kelley’s other book, A Different Drummer, and was so taken by this author and his beautiful and accessible prose, even when he is describing difficult subjects. With this book (and with A Different Drummer), I recommend reading the recent New Yorker article about the author's fascinating and tragic life: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/01/29/the-lost-giant-of-american-literature

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I am so happy that Kelley's stuff is being reissued. This book is intelligent and ambitious in ways that I feel like it's almost unfashionable for fiction writers to attempt (or else, more likely, I'm paying attention to the wrong contemporary writers). Kathryn Schulz has compared it to novels like "Portnoy's Complaint," the sort of suppressed rage of the angry midcentury middling-successful white guy, and I think it belongs there, but Kelley has framed that type of novel in such a way as to make it a tool for understanding so much about the place of miscegenation anxiety in American history. Also, the punchline of the novel came so late and so quick that I actually had to stop reading for like two minutes to appreciate how ingenious it was. I hope to God a lot of people buy the WMK reissues so that someone will bring out his unpublished later fiction.

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