Лучшие книги Уильяма Мелвина Келли

Июнь 1957 года. В одном из штатов американского Юга молодой чернокожий фермер Такер Калибан неожиданно для всех убивает свою лошадь, посыпает солью свои поля, сжигает дом и с женой и детьми устремляется на север страны. Его поступок становится причиной массового исхода всего чернокожего населения штата. Внезапно из-за одного человека рушится целый миропорядок.…

Originally published in 1967, dem is a classic of the Black Arts Movement. This surrealistic satire lays bare the convoluted and symbiotic relationship between whites and blacks. Coffee House Press is pleased to bring back into print this widely unavailable work.
Upper-middle-class Manhattanite Mitchell Pierce and his wife Tamara enact the twists and turns of human relationships in this startling fable about the intersections of race, class, sex, love, and marriage. Kelley questions the nature and validity of subjective realities as he examines the constraints and consequences of prejudice.
Mitchell is convinced he has it made. With advancement at work, an attractive wife, and a comfortable apartment, he has achieved the 1960s version of the white man's American dream. Then, slowly but surely, that dream becomes a nightmare, and Mitchell can't seem to wake up. Did he really find his boss's wife and children dead in an upstairs bedroom of their suburban home? Did his wife really become pregnant after a brief fling with their black maid's boyfriend?
Notable as a satiric portrayal of white characters from an African American perspective, this milestone achievement tugs at our ability to suspend disbelief and forces us to reexamine stereotypes from the past and current images in America's racial divide.
William Melvin Kelley's other books include the novels A Different Drummer, A Drop of Patience, Dunfords Travels Everywheres, and the short story collection, Dancers on the Shore. Kelley attended the Fieldston School and Harvard, where he studied under Archibald MacLeish and John Hawkes. He lives in Harlem, is a professor of Creative Writing at Sarah Lawrence College, and regularly teaches seminars at the Taos Institute of Art in Taos, New Mexico.

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.

Ride 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 Carlyle Bedlowe, wrecker of marriage, saver of souls.
Or just along with Chig Dunford, product of Harlem and private schools, on the circular voyage of self-discovery that takes him from Europe’s Cafe of One Hand to Harlem’s Jack O’Gee’s Golden Grouse Bar & Restaurant.
Beginning on an August Sunday in one of Europe’s strangest cities, Dunfords Travels Everywheres but always returns back to the same point–the “Begending”–where Mr. Charcarl’s dream becomes Chig Dunford’s reality (the “Ivy League Negro” in the world outside the Ivory Tower).

There is no need of prophesying that Mr. Kelley will one day be among the best American short story writers. Dancers on the Shore proves that he already is' New York Herald Tribune
In 1964, two years after the critically lauded release of his debut novel A Different Drummer, William Melvin Kelley published his first collection of short stories, Dancers on the Shore. Reissued in a new edition by riverrun, these seventeen stories

At the age of five, a blind African-American boy is handed over to a brutal state home. Here Ludlow Washington will suffer for eleven years, until his prodigious musical talent provides him an unlikely ticket back into the world.

The property of a band, playing for down-and-outs in a southern dive, Ludlow's pioneering flair will take him to New York and the very top of the jazz scene - where his personal demons will threaten to drag him back down to the bottom.

A Drop of Patience is the story a gifted and damaged man entirely set apart - by blindness, by race, by talent - who must wrestle with adversity and ambition to generate the acceptance and self-worth that have always eluded him.