Including6 Persons, a previously unpublished novel; The System of Dante's Hell; and Tales, this collection also features four uncollected short stories.
“A clutch of early stories from the poet, playwright, and provocateur, infused with jazz and informed by racial alienation” (Kirkus Reviews). “Baraka was, without question, the central figure of the Black Arts Movement, and was the most important theorist of that movement’s expression of the ‘Black Aesthetic,’ which took hold of the African American cultural imagination in earnest in the late sixties. While known primarily for his plays, poems, and criticism of black music, Baraka was also a master of the short story form, as this collection attests. Tales first appeared in 1967 and is an impressionistic and sometimes surrealistic collection of short fiction, showcasing Amiri Baraka’s great impact on African American literature of the 1950s and 1960s. Tales is a critical volume in Amiri Baraka’s oeuvre, and an important testament to his remarkable literary legacy.” —Henry Louis Gates Jr. The sixteen artful and nuanced stories in this reissue of Amiri Baraka’s seminal 1967 collection fall into two parts: the first nine concern themselves with the sensibility of a hip, perceptive young black man in white America. The last seven stories endeavor to place that same man within the context of his awareness of and participation in a rapidly emerging and powerfully felt negritude. They deal, it might be said, with the black man in black America. Yet these tales are not social tracts, but absolutely masterful fiction—provocative, witty, and, at times, bitter and aggressive.
Poet and playwright Amiri Baraka is best known as one of the African American writers who helped ignite the Black Arts Movement. This book examines Baraka's cultural approach to Black Power politics and explores his role in the phenomenal spread of black nationalism in the urban centers of late-twentieth-century America, including his part in the election of black public officials, his leadership in the Modern Black Convention Movement, and his work in housing and community development. Komozi Woodard traces Baraka's transformation from poet to political activist, as the rise of the Black Arts Movement pulled him from political obscurity in the Beat circles of Greenwich Village, swept him into the center of the Black Power Movement, and ultimately propelled him into the ranks of black national political leadership. Moving outward from Baraka's personal story, Woodard illuminates the dynamics and remarkable rise of black cultural nationalism with an eye toward the movement's broader context, including the impact of black migrations on urban ethos, the importance of increasing population concentrations of African Americans in the cities, and the effect of the 1965 Voting Rights Act on the nature of black political mobilization.
For almost half a century, Amiri Baraka has ranked among the most important commentators on African American music and culture. In this brilliant assemblage of his writings on music, the first such collection in nearly twenty years, Baraka blends autobiography, history, musical analysis, and political commentary to recall the sounds, people, times, and places he's encountered. As in his earlier classics, Blues People and Black Music, Baraka offers essays on the famous—Max Roach, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, John Coltrane—and on those whose names are known mainly by jazz aficionados—Alan Shorter, Jon Jang, and Malachi Thompson. Baraka's literary style, with its deep roots in poetry, makes palpable his love and respect for his jazz musician friends. His energy and enthusiasm show us again how much Coltrane, Albert Ayler, and the others he lovingly considers mattered. He brings home to us how music itself matters, and how musicians carry and extend that knowledge from generation to generation, providing us, their listeners, with a sense of meaning and belonging.
Amiri Baraka-dramatist, poet, essayist, orator, & fiction writer-is perhaps the preeminent African-American literary figure of our time. Yet, until now, it has been impossible to find the full range of his work represented in one volume. The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader provides the most comprehensive selection of Baraka's work to date, spanning more than thirty years of a brilliant, prolific, & controversial career in which he has produced a dozen books of poetry, twenty-six plays, eight collections of essays & speeches, & two books of fiction. This essential anthology also contains previously unpublished work-including essays on Jesse Jackson & James Baldwin-as well as a chronology & a full bibliography. The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader includes poems from Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, The Dead Lecturer, Black Magic, Hard Facts, It's Nation Time, & Poetry for the Advanced; the plays Dutchman, Great Goodness of Life, & What Was the Relationship of the Lone Ranger to the Means of Production?; essays from Blues People, Social Essays, Black Music, Daggers & Javelins, & The Music: Reflections on Jazz & Blues; & much, much more.
Poet, dramatist, essayist, fiction writer and political activist, Amiri Baraka is considered by many to be the most influential and preeminent African-American literary figures of our time. Transbluesency reveals a writer shaping a body of poetry that is as well a body of knowledge--a passionate reflection upon the cultural, political, and aesthetic questions of his time.
“S O S provides readers with rich, vital views of the African American experience and of Baraka’s own evolution as a poet-activist” (The Washington Post). Fusing the personal and the political in high-voltage verse, Amiri Baraka whose long illumination of the black experience in America was called incandescent in some quarters and incendiary in others was one of the preeminent literary innovators of the past century (The New York Times). Selected by Paul Vangelisti, this volume comprises the fullest spectrum of Baraka’s rousing, revolutionary poems, from his first collection to previously unpublished pieces composed during his final years. Throughout Baraka’s career as a prolific writer (also published as LeRoi Jones), he was vehemently outspoken against oppression of African American citizens, and he radically altered the discourse surrounding racial inequality. The environments and social values that inspired his poetics changed during the course of his life, a trajectory that can be traced in this retrospective spanning more than five decades of profoundly evolving subjects and techniques. Praised for its lyricism and introspection, his early poetry emerged from the Beat generation, while his later writing is marked by intensely rebellious fervor and subversive ideology. All along, his primary focus was on how to live and love in the present moment despite the enduring difficulties of human history. A New York Times Editors’ Choice “A big handsome book of Amiri Baraka’s poetry [that gives] us word magic, wit, wild thoughts, discomfort, and pleasure.” —William J. Harris, Boston Review “The most complete representation of over a half-century of revolutionary and breathtaking work.” —Claudia Rankine, The New York Times Book Review