50 Indispensable African-American Novels

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

And there's neither a novel by Chip Delany nor one by Ishmael Reed!

Of Delany, who was a favourite author of Rolf Dieter Brinkmann (who 
already read "V" in
the mid 1960s and praised the novel's 'carnivalistic way of writing' in 
public defense of
Leslie Fiedler who was touring Germany in 1968 and had to face largely 
hostile reactions),
I read two books with pleasure during the 1990s but forgot the titles. 
With my regained
interest in SciFi, I'm thinking about going back to this author. Any 
recommendations?

To readers of "Gravity's Rainbow" another missing author comes to mind. 
Actually Ishmael
Reed is the only living colleague Pynchon makes mention of im Regenbogen 
der Schwerkraft:

"Well, and keep in mind where those Masonic Mysteries came from in the 
first place. (Check
out Ishmael Reed. He knows more about it than you'll ever find here.)"  
GR, p. 588

Though this sounds in my ears a little patronizing, it certainly helped 
Reed to sell books.

"What did Freud mean by The Black Tide of Mud? Why were there later to 
be assassinations
of cultural heroes? In 1914 Scott Joplin, who, after announcing that 
ragtime will 'hypnotize
this nation, is taken to Ward Island where they fritter away his powers 
with shock therapy.
Scott Joplin has healed many with his ability to summon this X factor, 
the Thing that Freud
saw, the indefinable quality that James Weldon Johnson called 'Jes Grew.'
'It belonged to nobody,' Johnson said. 'Its words were unprintable but 
its tune irresistible.'
Jes Grew, the Something or Other that led Charlie Parker to scale the 
Everests of the Chord.
Riff fly skid dip soar and gave his Alto Godspeed. Jes Grew that touched 
John Coltrane's Tenor;
that tinged the voice of Otis Redding and compelled Black Herman to 
write a dictionary to
Dreams that Freud would have envied."  (Ishmael Reed: Mumbo Jumbo, Epilogue)

Here's a personal anecdote on Pynchon/Reed. During my one and only 
university course in
Amerikanistik - yes, it was about Pynchon - Ishmael Reed happened to be 
in Hamburg. Not
that I saw him personally, but Professor Joseph Schöpp told us about his 
video project where
he is interviewing lots of contemporary US-authors. When he said this, 
he had just interviewed
Ishmael Reed and gave us a short introduction into his work. After a 
while the room went
quite and everybody startet to think the same. Eventually somebody asked 
the crucial question:
"A-and  how about Pynchon? Do you have him caught  on tape too?" Mister 
Schöpp obviously
enjoyed the question, remained silent for a couple of moments and then 
said "no" with a smile.



On 22.09.2011 05:22, alice wellintown wrote:

> Other than WTF? What idiots, the list sucks. Mostly junk.
>
> On Wed, Sep 21, 2011 at 11:19 PM, alice wellintown
> <alicewellintown at gmail.com>  wrote:
>> Novels? WTF? What idiots. Frederick Douglass wrote novels. _The Heroic
>> Slave_ is an importnat work, not indispensable. His narrative, like
>> the other narratives included on this stupid ass list of "novels" is
>> indispensable, the best and most importnat narrative of its kind,
>> though Jacobs has recently been elevated to nearly his equal she and
>> her narrative are far from indispensable.
>>
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Sep 21, 2011 at 12:08 PM, Dave Monroe
>> <against.the.dave at gmail.com>  wrote:
>>> http://www.blackisonline.com/2011/09/50-indispensable-african-american-novels/
>>>
>