This "thoroughly engaging" third novel by the author of Beetlecreek ("[a] quiet masterpiece" —Kirkus Reviews) follows a Black journalist in the 1970s whose bourgeois life is turned upside down by the subject of his writing assignment.
In the midst of the tumultuous 1970s, Edwards, a freelance writer and Black Studies professor at a small college in New York City, is assigned a story for New Black Woman magazine: a profile of Mona Pariss, an aging former singer whose popularity once rivaled Josephine Baker’s. With his creditors at the door, Professor Edwards beats a path to the crumbling Harlem apartment house where Mona Pariss, once the toast of Europe for her singing, now lives in squalid obscurity. As his interviews progress, Edwards is gradually drawn into Mona’s strange world. At the same time, he finds himself entering into an affair with Hortense, a beautiful young assistant at New Black Woman. From revolutionary downtown poetry readings to a hospital bed on the Continent and back, becoming entangled in the lives of both women might turn Edwards’s bourgeois life upside down for good.
“Thoroughly engaging. . . . Witty and sensible.” —Kirkus Reviews
“[Demby is] a true artist.” —Arna Bontemps, author of Black Thunder
“One of the great novelists of the last 100 years.”—Ishmael Reed, author of Mumbo Jumbo
William Demby was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on December 25, 1922, and attended college in Clarksburg, West Virginia, before enlisting in World War II and serving in Italy. He graduated from Fisk University in 1947 then moved abroad to Rome, where he spent the next two decades working as a novelist, journalist, and script translator and screenwriter for the Italian cinema. In the late 1960s, Demby joined the faculty at The College of Staten Island, dividing his time between the United States and Italy. His works include Beetlecreek, The Catacombs, Love Story Black, and King Comus. In 2006, he was the recipient of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Lifetime Achievement. He died in Sag Harbor, New York, in 2013.
View titles by William Demby
This "thoroughly engaging" third novel by the author of Beetlecreek ("[a] quiet masterpiece" —Kirkus Reviews) follows a Black journalist in the 1970s whose bourgeois life is turned upside down by the subject of his writing assignment.
In the midst of the tumultuous 1970s, Edwards, a freelance writer and Black Studies professor at a small college in New York City, is assigned a story for New Black Woman magazine: a profile of Mona Pariss, an aging former singer whose popularity once rivaled Josephine Baker’s. With his creditors at the door, Professor Edwards beats a path to the crumbling Harlem apartment house where Mona Pariss, once the toast of Europe for her singing, now lives in squalid obscurity. As his interviews progress, Edwards is gradually drawn into Mona’s strange world. At the same time, he finds himself entering into an affair with Hortense, a beautiful young assistant at New Black Woman. From revolutionary downtown poetry readings to a hospital bed on the Continent and back, becoming entangled in the lives of both women might turn Edwards’s bourgeois life upside down for good.
Reviews
“Thoroughly engaging. . . . Witty and sensible.” —Kirkus Reviews
“[Demby is] a true artist.” —Arna Bontemps, author of Black Thunder
“One of the great novelists of the last 100 years.”—Ishmael Reed, author of Mumbo Jumbo
William Demby was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on December 25, 1922, and attended college in Clarksburg, West Virginia, before enlisting in World War II and serving in Italy. He graduated from Fisk University in 1947 then moved abroad to Rome, where he spent the next two decades working as a novelist, journalist, and script translator and screenwriter for the Italian cinema. In the late 1960s, Demby joined the faculty at The College of Staten Island, dividing his time between the United States and Italy. His works include Beetlecreek, The Catacombs, Love Story Black, and King Comus. In 2006, he was the recipient of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Lifetime Achievement. He died in Sag Harbor, New York, in 2013.
View titles by William Demby
