<div>&ldquo;A clutch of early stories from the poet, playwright, and provocateur, infused with jazz and informed by racial alienation&rdquo; (Kirkus Reviews). &ldquo;Baraka was, without question, the central figure of the Black Arts Movement, and was the most important theorist of that movement&rsquo;s expression of the &lsquo;Black Aesthetic,&rsquo; 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&rsquo;s great impact on African American literature of the 1950s and 1960s. Tales is a critical volume in Amiri Baraka&rsquo;s oeuvre, and an important testament to his remarkable literary legacy.&rdquo; &mdash;Henry Louis Gates Jr. The sixteen artful and nuanced stories in this reissue of Amiri Baraka&rsquo;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&mdash;provocative, witty, and, at times, bitter and aggressive.</div>

Tales

<div>&ldquo;A richness of language and observation pervades this collection of short stories by a black writer about real black people&rdquo; (The New York Times Book Review). Award-winning playwright Ed Bullins received the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for his play The Taking of Miss Janie, and is also renowned for such works as In the Wine Time and Clara&rsquo;s Ole Man. In this collection of his early short fiction, he explores themes of loneliness and despair and the African American experience in beautifully crafted stories. &ldquo;For true students and fans of American and African American literature of the 1960s and &rsquo;70s, Ed Bullins is one of our indisputable heavyweight champs.&rdquo; &mdash;Kevin Powell, author and activist</div>

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The Hungered One

<div>&ldquo;A fevered and impressionistic riff on the struggles of blacks in the urban North and rural South, as told through the prism of The Inferno.&rdquo; &mdash;Kirkus Reviews This 1965 novel is a remarkable narrative of childhood and youth, structured on the themes of Dante&rsquo;s Inferno: violence, incontinence, fraud, and treachery. With a poet&rsquo;s skill, Baraka creates the atmosphere of hell, and with dramatic power he reconstructs the brutality of the black slums of Newark, a small Southern town, and New York City. The episodes contained within the novel represent both states of mind and states of the soul&mdash;lyrical, fragmentary, and allusive. With an introduction by Woodie King Jr. &ldquo;Much of the novel is an expression of the intellectual and moral lost motion of the age . . . the special agony of the American Negro.&rdquo; &mdash;The New York Times Book Review &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a tortured nightmare, excruciatingly honest and alive, painful and beautiful . . .&rdquo; &mdash;Michael Rumaker, author of A Day and a Night at the Baths</div>

The System of Dante's Hell

<div>Stories spanning over three decades, many previously unpublished, from “a keen observer of the outlandish and outrageous in politics and human behavior” (Booklist). Comprising short fiction from the early 1970s to the twenty-first century—most of which has never been published—Tales of the Out &amp; the Gone reflects the astounding evolution of America’s most provocative literary anti-hero. The first section of the book, “War Stories,” offers six stories enmeshed in the volatile politics of the 1970s and 1980s. The second section, “Tales of the Out &amp; the Gone,” reveals Amiri Baraka’s increasing literary adventurousness, combining an unpredictable language play with a passion for abstraction and psychological exploration. Throughout, Baraka’s unique and constantly changing style will enlighten readers on the evolution of one of America’s most accomplished literary masters of the past four decades.</div>

Tales of the Out & the Gone

<div>&ldquo;S O S provides readers with rich, vital views of the African American experience and of Baraka&rsquo;s own evolution as a poet-activist&rdquo; (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&rsquo;s rousing, revolutionary poems, from his first collection to previously unpublished pieces composed during his final years. Throughout Baraka&rsquo;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&rsquo; Choice &ldquo;A big handsome book of Amiri Baraka&rsquo;s poetry [that gives] us word magic, wit, wild thoughts, discomfort, and pleasure.&rdquo; &mdash;William J. Harris, Boston Review &ldquo;The most complete representation of over a half-century of revolutionary and breathtaking work.&rdquo; &mdash;Claudia Rankine, The New York Times Book Review</div>

Amiri Baraka
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Books By Amiri Baraka (4 Books)

Tales

The System of Dante's Hell

Tales of the Out & the Gone

S O S

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Amiri BarakaFollow this author

Books By Amiri Baraka (4 Books)

Tales

The System of Dante's Hell

Tales of the Out & the Gone

S O S

RELATED POSTS ABOUT AMIRI BARAKA

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© 2024 OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

Amiri Baraka
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