Showing posts with label Rudolph Fisher. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rudolph Fisher. Show all posts

Monday, May 26, 2008

What I'm Reading Now

Not that you asked, but here's what I'm reading (and I usually have 5-6 books going at once, a practice that drives some people with different reading habits figuratively crazy):

The Long Loneliness, Dorothy Day's autobiography--of interest to those wanting to know more not just about her but about radical politics in the early 20th century (socialism, anarchist-movements, organized labor, "distributism," anti-war movements, etc.), the Catholic Worker movement, whether politics and religion can intermingle effectively, women and religion, working-class life in Chicago and New York City, and the progressive/populist strain in Catholicism. Oddly enough, Day experienced the great S.F. earthquake, although she and her family were living in Berkeley, so their home wasn't destroyed. Apparently, the quake-proper lasted over 2 minutes. Of course, animals felt it coming as early as the evening before, she and others report.

Early Christian Rhetoric, Amos Wilder--older brother of Thornton.

The Beggar, by Naguib Mahfouz--Egyptian novelist, winner of the Nobel Prize.

The Walls of Jericho, a novel by Harlem Renaissance writer Rudolph Fisher. This partly for work, as I agreed to write an article on Fisher.

Selected Poems, A.R. Ammons. He was born in North Carolina but is associated, too, with New England. Free verse, but highly attentive to sound; rooted in everyday life, as W.C. Williams's poetry is, but Ammons strays from imagism and often writes tight little conceptual or meditative poems. I rather like this philosophical aspect of his poetry. He's also a master of very short poems. He can be whimsical, like cummings.

My books were finally paroled from storage, but they are in a half-way house situation--still sitting in boxes, awaiting the construction of shelves. More slowly than the tortoise, I'm cataloguing them on LibraryThing.

That's my bookish update. I'll leave you (or someone) with an epigram from Oscar Wilde: "A cynic knows the price of everything but the value of nothing."

Friday, February 1, 2008

African American Books Slightly Under the Radar

I'm staying in the Black History Month (officially it started today) groove.

African American literature has become central to American literature, so the names Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and James Baldwin have the same literary heft as Mark Twain, Emily Dickinson, and Ernest Hemingway.

At the edges of the limelight, however, are some fine books; they're not so well known, and maybe the same is true of their authors. In no particular order . . .:

The Conjure-Man Dies: A Mystery Tale of Dark Harlem, by Rudolph Fisher. If you like detective fiction, you may already know this book, but if you somehow missed it, give it a read. Its plot is wonderfully structured, it mixes realism, comedy, and a bit of the gothic well, it has two (arguably, three) great detectives, and it present a memorable picture of Harlem in the 1930s. In addition to being a fine writer, Fisher was a physician. Unfortunately, he was a pioneer in X-ray technology, experimented on himself when the effects were still unknown, and contracted cancer, dying before he was thirty. Otherwise, a series would have developed from this novel. I've recommended the book on LibraryThing in several venues, and I may have noted it on the blog before, but another recommendation can't hurt. If you're a mystery-reader, are in one of those phases where you can't find "a good one" to read, and haven't read this one: go for it. A nice treat in Winter.

From the same era, Plum Bun, by Jessie Redmon Fauset. It's one of the better novels on the theme of passing, in my opinion, and its dissection of social class, desire, ambition, and romance (as well as racism) is worthy of Jane Austen; the book is that strong.

The poetry of Countee Cullen, also from the Harlem Renaissance. "Yet Do I Marvel" used to get taught in high schools, but I'm not sure it does anymore.

If Beale Street Could Talk, by James Baldwin. I think it's fair to say this is one of his least well known novels and books in general, but its quality is as good as that of Giovanni's Room and Another Country. He takes a chance by using a young woman as both protagonist and first-person narrator, but he just nails the narrative voice.

Black Ice, by Lorene Cary. An autobiography, much of which concerns her experience at an almost-all-white, extremely exclusive East Coast prep-school, at which she had earned a scholarship. The book's about 15 years old now, I think, but it is--among other things--highly pertinent to current presidential politics, where ethnicity, gender, and class are mixing it up in fascinating ways.

Harlem Redux, by Persia Walker. This is regarded as more of a popular novel than a literary one (whatever that distinction may mean). It came out around 2000, maybe a wee bit earlier, but it's set in the 1920s in Harlem, so it's an historical detective novel, with rich social texture. It may not be heavy enough for a reader fresh from a Morrison novel, but it's well written, smart, and immensely entertaining. Still available in paperback as far as I know.