One of the great jazz novels of any era, A Drop of Patience tells the story of a blind horn player's journey through the themes of race, blindness, and music.At the age of five, Ludlow Washington is given up by his parents to a brutal white-run state institution for blind African American children, where everyone is taught music—the only trade by which they are expected to make a living. Ludlow is a prodigy on the horn and at fifteen is "purchased" out of ...

**An odyssey through time in which past and future combine and re-combine to give the arc of a full life, by the "brilliant" (The New Yorker) author of A Different Drummer."[A] lost giant of American literature." —The New Yorker**The linked "2 novelas, 3 stories, and a little play" that make up DIS//INTEGRATION follow the life journeys of Charles "Chig" Dunford from his Nanny Eva sermonizing from her front porch, when he is only seventeen, to his ...

The first and only short story collection by William Melvin Kelley, author of A Different Drummer, and the source from which he drew inspiration for his subsequent novels.Originally published in 1964, this collection of sixteen stories includes three linked sets of stories about the Carey, Bedlow, and Dunford families. They represent the earliest work of William Melvin Kelley and provided a rich source of stories and characters who were to fill out his lat...

WINNER OF THE AMERICAN BOOK AWARD • William Melvin Kelley's final work, a Joycean, Rabelaisian romp in which he brings back some of his most memorable characters in a novel of three intertwining stories."[A] lost giant of American Literature." —The New YorkerRide on out with Rab and Turt, two o'New Afriqueque's toughfast, ruefast Texnosass Arangers, as they battle Chief Pugmichillo and ricecure Mr. Charcarl Walker-Rider. Cut in on ...

A searing, provocative satire by one of the most important African-American novelists of the twentieth century that lays bare the abiding racism and the legacy of slavery on the psyche of white America.Mitchell Pierce is a well-off New York ad executive whose marriage is falling apart. He no longer feels any passion for his pregnant wife, Tam, and even feels estranged from his toddler son, Jake. Mitchell is trapped in an unrewarding and loveless life, and though do...

The stunning, thought-provoking first novel by a "lost giant of American literature" (The New Yorker)June, 1957. One hot afternoon in the backwaters of the Deep South, a young black farmer named Tucker Caliban salts his fields, shoots his horse, burns his house, and heads north with his wife and child. His departure sets off an exodus of the state’s entire black population, throwing the established order into brilliant disarray. Told from the points of vie...