This study attempts to place jazz and the blues within the context of American social history. The author, Leroi Jones - also known as the poet Amiri Baraka - combines a knowledge of black American culture with his direct contact with many of the musicians who have provided the backbone to this vital strand of American 20th-century culture. This edition includes an introduction by the author in which he updates the book in order to take account of developments made in the past 30 years.

Blues People

Arts & Photography

LeRoi Jones

Music

Payback Press

Corner Boy

Literature & Fiction

Herbert Simmons

Contemporary

This riveting tale of compulsion and murder bears comparison in its inexorability to Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me. Set in the world of Brooklyn gangsters and juvenile delinquents, Portrait of a Young Man Drowning reveals a character caught in a whirlpool of street crime and Oedipal passion, driven by circumstances beyond his control into acts of self-destruction and twisted sexuality.

Portrait of a Young Man Drowning

Charles Perry

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Spooks, spies and private eyes: black mystery, crime and suspense fiction

Biographies & Memoirs

WOODS, Paula L (ed)

Historical

Raymond Douglas was born in St Louis on the day of the great hurricane that tore down half the city and marked the death of the blues singer Florence Mill. Music and violence became the major forces in his life. Herbert Simmons won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship in 1957 for "Corner Boy".

Man Walking On Eggshells

As with all of his work, these tales are marked by Cooper's insistence in portraying a side to American life rarely seen in print, as he probes deep into the underbelly of black America to reveal the black urban experience.

Black: The Dark Messenger / Yet Princes Follow / Not We Many

Clarence L. Cooper Jr.

Giveadamn Brown

Pharr, Robert Deane

The Jones Men

Smith, V.

Spanning a wide geographical range, this collection features many of the first generation of African writers, including Chinua Achebe, Bessie Head and Wole Soyinka. It also includes a new generation of writers, such as Ben Okri, Veronique Tadjo and Ken Saro-Wiwa.

Under African Skies: Modern African Stories: An Anthology

Charles R. Larson

These stories probe deep into the dark underbelly of American life. "The Syndicate" is about syndicate hitman Andy Sorrell's attempt to locate those responsible for a New Jersey bank heist. "Weed" is a more communal look at the lives of those whose aspirations are tempered by poverty and drugs.

"Weed" and "The Syndicate"

Clarence Cooper

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