"This 'thoroughly engaging' novel by the author of Beetlecreek ('[a] quiet masterpiece' -Kirkus Reviews) follows a Black journalist in the 1970s whose bourgeois life is turned upside down by the subject of his writing assignment.
"One of the great novelists of the last 100 years." -Ishmael Reed, author of Mumbo Jumbo
In the midst of the tumultuous 1970s, Edwards, a freelance writer and Black Studies professor at a small college in New York City, is assigned a story for New Black Woman magazine: a profile of Mona Pariss, an aging former singer whose popularity once rivaled Josephine Baker's. With his creditors at the door, Professor Edwards beats a path to the crumbling Harlem apartment house where Mona Pariss, once the toast of Europe for her singing, now lives in squalid obscurity. As his interviews progress, Edwards is gradually drawn into Mona's strange world. At the same time, he finds himself entering into an affair with Hortense, a beautiful young assistant at New Black Woman. From revolutionary downtown poetry readings to a hospital bed on the Continent and back, becoming entangled in the lives of both women might turn Edwards's bourgeois life upside down for good. A smart satire with a biting wit, Love Story Black is an unmissable novel by one of the masters of midcentury American fiction."
"Past and present collide in this posthumous, semiautobiographical masterpiece by the author of Beetlecreek.
"One of the great novelists of the last 100 years." -Ishmael Reed, author of Mumbo Jumbo
In the present day, a Black American expat to Rome named D. reconnects with his former Army friend, Tillman, and their former commanding officer, Joe Stabat, to organize a gospel summit for the singer Little Antioch. In the 1940s, as D. becomes enmeshed in Tillman's large and boisterous family for the first time, Tillman recounts the story of his fabled ancestor King Comus. And in the early nineteenth century, master musician King Comus embarks on a grand journey to freedom from enslavement.
In this time-bending tale of survival and kinship, the product of more than twenty years of literary labor, William Demby weaves elements of the neo-slave narrative and Afrofuturism into a panoramic vision encompassing the forces of empire, race, gender, and religion."
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