Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader

Amiri Baraka - dramatist, poet, essayist, orator, and fiction writer - is one of the preeminent African-American literary figures of our time. The Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader provides the most comprehensive selection of Baraka's work to date, spanning almost 40 years of a brilliant, prolific, and controversial career, in which he has produced more than 12 books of poetry, 26 plays, eight collections of essays and speeches, and two books of fiction. This updated edition contains over 50 pages of previously unpublished work, as well as a chronology and full bibliography.

Publishers Weekly

In his eulogy of James Baldwin--one of this anthology's previously unpublished works--Baraka writes that Baldwin was ``turned all the way up, receiving and broadcasting . . . .'' The same can be said of Baraka. For more than 30 years he has been one of our most self-revising, self-assertive writers. Culling representative samples of his oeuvre, this expertly edited volume reflects Baraka's bold ventures and about-faces. The poems of 1964's The Dead Lecturer tick like small explosives. Selections from 1963's Blues People and 1968's Black Music reveal Baraka as a superb, learned critic. With remarkable candor, an excerpt from Baraka's 1984 autobiography scrutinizes his Black Arts period. Notable among the new pieces is ``Why's / wise,'' a long poem that unfolds the story of how African-Americans' appropriation of English led to the rich oral languages of blues and jazz, from which so much of Baraka's own work proceeds. The story of Baraka's metamorphoses is itself part of the story of contemporary literature's development. Anyone seeking to understand either will find this volume indispensable. Harris wrote The Poetry and Poetics of Amiri Baraka. (June)

Amiri Baraka is a critic, poet, playwright, and activist. He lives in Newark, NJ. William J. Harris is associate professor of English at SUNY-Stony Brook.