Brown was among a cadre of Black writers in the 1970s doing in print what Richard Pryor was doing on stage.
First published in 1978, this jazz-inflected novel reappears decades later as a prescient ancestor to today’s insurgent, boundary-breaching African American fiction.
Brown’s first and most celebrated novel comes across as a kind of compacted day-in-the-life spin of James Joyce’s Ulysses, only with one point of view at its center. It belongs to Melvin Ellington, who as the novel begins has just been paroled from prison, where he spent two years after refusing military induction to protest the Vietnam War. As he heads back to his family’s home in Queens, Melvin begins flashing back to various points in life, beginning with his days and weeks in stir, keeping at bay all manner of threats and assaults, especially from the rapacious con Chilly, while keeping his nose clean long enough to get out. Once back in his old neighborhood, Melvin’s reveries wander afield, as far back as school days with his childhood buddies, the swaggering Otis, demure Alice, and brash Pauline, and the collegiate years when he was swept up in political activism with its rallies, demonstrations, interracial parties called “freedom highs,” and even an act of “revolutionary suicide” by one of the activists. Things are no less volatile in Melvin’s post-parole life as he reunites with Otis, who, unlike Melvin, went into the Army and lost his right hand in Vietnam. The long day’s journey ends with Melvin, Otis, Alice, and Pauline party-hopping throughout New York and Otis’ bitterness at Melvin and life in general slow-boiling toward a violent climax. Brown’s coming-of-age novel, drawn from his own real-life experiences, explores a young Black man’s difficulties with negotiating his way to maturity during the tumultuous years of the civil rights era and its immediate aftermath. But the novel gets its energy and, ultimately, its staying power less from its plot or theme than from its style: discursive, scatological, ribald, and acerbic. It deserves rediscovery by a new generation of readers curious about where an earlier generation of Black protest came from and how they came through its challenges.
Brown was among a cadre of Black writers in the 1970s doing in print what Richard Pryor was doing on stage.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-944211-98-1
Page Count: 176
Publisher: McSweeney’s
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.
Three women deal very differently with vampirism in Schwab’s era-spanning follow-up to The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (2020).
In 16th-century Spain, Maria seduces a wealthy viscount in an attempt to seize whatever control she can over her own life. It turns out that being a wife—even a wealthy one—is just another cage, but then a mysterious widow offers Maria a surprising escape route. In the 19th century, Charlotte is sent from her home in the English countryside to live with an aunt in London when she’s found trying to kiss her best friend. She’s despondent at the idea of marrying a man, but another mysterious widow—who has a secret connection to Maria’s widow from centuries earlier—appears and teaches Charlotte that she can be free to love whomever she chooses, if she’s brave enough. In 2019, Alice’s memories of growing up in Scotland with her mercurial older sister, Catty, pull her mind away from her first days at Harvard University. And though she doesn’t meet any mysterious widows, Alice wakes up alone after a one-night stand unable to tolerate sunlight, sporting two new fangs, and desperate to drink blood. Horrified at her transformation, she searches Boston for her hookup, who was the last person she remembers seeing before she woke up as a vampire. Schwab delicately intertwines the three storylines, which are compelling individually even before the reader knows how they will connect. Maria, Charlotte, and Alice are queer women searching for love, recognition, and wholeness, growing fangs and defying mortality in a world that would deny them their very existence. Alice’s flashbacks to Catty are particularly moving, and subtly play off themes of grief and loneliness laid out in the historical timelines.
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.Pub Date: June 10, 2025
ISBN: 9781250320520
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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