Name: Tragic Magic: (of the Diaspora - North America): 1
Price: 24.48 EUR
Availability: InStock
Author: Brown, Wesley ; Vital-Lazare, Erica ; Morrison, Toni
ISBN: 9781944211981

portada Tragic Magic: (of the Diaspora - North America): 1

Tragic Magic: (of the Diaspora - North America): 1

Type

Physical Book

Author

Illustrated by

Publisher

Year

2020

Language

English

Pages

176

Format

Hardcover

Dimensions

21.1 x 14.7 x 2.0 cm

Weight

0.38 kg.

ISBN13

9781944211981

Synopsis "Tragic Magic: (of the Diaspora - North America): 1 "

Foreword by Ismail Muhammad Tragic Magic is the story of Melvin Ellington, a.k.a. Mouth, a Black, twenty-something, ex-college radical who has just been released from a five-year prison stretch after being a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War. Brown structures this first-person tale around Ellington's first day on the outside. Although hungry for freedom and desperate for female companionship, Ellington is haunted by a past that drives him to make sense of those choices leading up to this day. Through a filmic series of flashbacks, the novel revisits Ellington's prison experiences, where he is forced to play the unwilling patsy to the predatory Chilly and the callow pupil of the not-so-predatory Hardknocks; then dips further back to Ellington's college days, where again he is led astray by the hypnotic militarism of the Black Pantheresque Theo, whose antiwar politics incite the impressionable narrator to oppose his parents and to choose imprisonment over conscription; and finally back to his earliest high school days, where we meet in Otis, the presumed archetype of Ellington's "tragic magic" relationships with magnetic but dangerous avatars of black masculinity in crisis. But the effect of the novel cannot be conveyed through plot recapitulation alone, for its style is perhaps even more provoking than its subject. Originally published in 1978, and edited by Toni Morrison during her time at Random House, this Of the Diaspora edition of Tragic Magic features a new introduction by author Wesley Brown. Tragic Magic is a tremendous affirmation. .One hell of a writer. - James Baldwin . . .wonderfully wry. - Donald Barthelme About Of the Diaspora: McSweeney's Of the Diaspora is a series of previously published works in Black literature whose themes, settings, characterizations, and conflicts evoke an experience, language, imagery and power born of the Middle Passage and the particular aesthetic which connects African-derived peoples to a shared artistic and ancestral past. Wesley Brown's Tragic Magic, the first novel in the series, was originally published in 1978 and championed by Toni Morrison during her tenure as an editor at Random House. This Of the Diaspora edition features a new introduction written by Brown for the series. Tragic Magic will be followed by Paule Marshall's novel of a Harlem widow claiming new life. Praisesong for the Widow was originally published in 1983 and was a recipient of the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award. The series is edited by writer Erica Vital-Lazare, a professor of creative writing and Marginalized Voices in literature at the College of Southern Nevada. Published in collectible hardcover editions with original cover art by Sunra Thompson, the first three works hail from Black American voices defined by what Amiri Baraka described as strong feeling getting into new blues, from the old ones. Of the Diaspora-North America will be followed by series from the diasporic communities of Europe, the Caribbean and Brazil.

Toni Morrison

(Illustrated by)

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(Ohio, 1931 - New York, 2019) Chloe Ardelia Wofford, known under the pseudonym Toni Morrison, is an African American storyteller. She alternated her job as a Humanities professor at Princeton University with literary activity. In her works, she addressed the issues of the black population in the United States, especially the situation of women. She was the first black woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. She died in August 2019 in the small New York village of Grand View-on-Hudson at the age of eighty-eight.

In her works, she addressed the issues of the black population in the United States, as well as other themes such as identity, memory, racism, or cultural resistance. Among her most notable novels are Beloved, with which she won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize, The Bluest Eye, and Song of Solomon.

Her literary style combines deep psychological introspection with unique lyricism, marking a before and after in American literature. Through her work, Morrison left a timeless legacy, giving voice to silenced stories and challenging dominant power structures.

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