Dis/Integration is not gentle, and it’s not trying to be. William Melvin Kelley—whose work was somehow lost and found again—wrote with the kind of clarity that feels like both a revelation and a wound. This collection is raw, fragmented, unfinished in the way life is unfinished. It holds fiction, nonfiction, and notes that read like the outlines of unwritten futures.

Kelley is best known for A Different Drummer, but Dis/Integration digs deeper into the fractures beneath even that. The pieces here are saturated with rage, intellect, and a sense of betrayal—by whiteness, by the American project, by the act of storytelling itself. And yet there’s also deep craft. Even when a piece is barely a few paragraphs, it cuts with precision.

One essay knocked the wind out of me: “Why I Stopped Writing.” It’s not just personal; it’s a diagnosis. Of the publishing industry. Of performative liberalism. Of the expectation that a Black writer must only exist in translation for white comfort. Kelley saw it clearly, and early. And the fact that his words still feel current is not a compliment to the times we live in.

This isn’t a book you read in one sitting. It’s the kind of collection you sit with, argue with, take breaks from, and come back to changed. There’s brilliance here, and grief, and something holy in the way Kelley refuses to flinch from truth—even when the structure of the piece collapses under the weight of it.

If you’re looking for clean arcs and polished resolutions, look elsewhere. But if you want to witness a mind refusing to be tamed, Dis/Integration is essential. Not pretty. Not tidy. Just necessary.

This was a good book! A little difficult read for me at the time but overall I enjoyed . Thank you!!