50 Indispensable African-American Novels

[rich]

I'd add Divine Days by Leon Forrest. it's long but wonderful

rich

Fabulous, wildly comic, and Ulysses-like, Divine Days explores the
mythical world of Leon Forrest's literary kingdom, Forest County. It
is a huge oratorio of the sacred and the profane, set in bars,
churches, and barbershops over a crucial seven-day period in the life
of would-be playwright Joubert Jones during February 1966. Divine Days
creates a profound microcosm of African-American life. It is the most
prodigious literary creation since Ellison's Invisible Man forty years
ago. Joubert Jones - playwright, journalist, bartender, lover -
confronts and transcends the power of a fantastic group of bar
denizens whose personalities run the gamut of classical myths,
Shakespearean heros, Shakespearean villains, religious true-believers,
and ghetto dwellers. Joubert is evolving a memory from the yeasty
material of his friend and mentor Sugar-Groove into a play.
Sugar-Groove is a world traveler, a mythical lover, who has twenty
nicknames connected with his prowess. He is trickster-as-angel.
Joubert's volatile and fragile girlfriend, Imani, is desperately
searching for her abandoned siblings, a meaningful self-definition of
her Blackness, and a place to settle her warring spirit. Joubert also
encounters the powerful presence of his Aunt Eloise and the
ever-haunting phantasmagoric W. A. D. Ford, the demonic trickster and
manipulator of bodies and souls. Ford is the Mephistopheles of Forest
County, and he comes to represent the forces of cosmic evil in the
world. The neighborhood of Joubert's imagination becomes a theater
enraptured with the voices of the living and the dead, acted out in
Aunt Eloise's Night Light Lounge. The critic John Cawelti has called
this novel: "the Ulysses of the South Side." In the tradition of
Joyce's Dedalus, Ellison's invisible narrator, Bellow's Augie March,
and Heller's Yossarian, Joubert's voice emerges clearly upon Divine
Days's ebullient stage.(less)

On Thu, Sep 22, 2011 at 7:17 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen
<lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
>
> 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/
>>>>
>>
>
>