William Melvin Kelley Knihy

At the age of five, a blind African-American boy is handed over to a brutal state home. Here Ludlow Washington will suffer for eleven years, until his prodigious musical talent provides him an unlikely ticket back into the world. The property of a band, playing for down-and-outs in a southern dive, Ludlow's pioneering flair will take him to New York and the very top of the jazz scene - where his personal demons will threaten to drag him back down to the bottom. A Drop of Patience is the story a gifted and damaged man entirely set apart - by blindness, by race, by talent - who must wrestle with adversity and ambition to generate the acceptance and self-worth that have always eluded him.

A collection of seventeen stories, from the author of A Different Drummer.

William Melvin Kelley's final work, a Joycean, Rabelaisian romp in which he brings back some of his most memorable characters in a novel of three intertwining stories.

A searing, provocative satire by one of the most important African-American novelists of the twentieth century that lays bare the abiding racism and the legacy of slavery on the psyche of white America. Mitchell Pierce is a well-off New York ad executive whose marriage is falling apart. He no longer feels any passion for his pregnant wife, Tam, and even feels estranged from his toddler son, Jake. Mitchell is trapped in an unrewarding and loveless life, and though domestic violence isn't in his character, it is never very far away, either. Mitchell's life will irrevocably change one day, though, when a young man appears at his apartment door to pick up the family's black maid, Opal, for a date. Cooley it turns out is not a stranger to the household. The twins that Tam is carrying are a result of superfecundation—the fertilization of two separate ova by two different males. So when one child is born black and the other white, Mitchell goes on a quest to find Cooley and make him take his baby. In the tradition of Brer Rabbit trickster tales, dem enacts a modern-day fable of turning the tables on the white oppressor and inverting the history of miscegenation and subjugation of African Americans.

William M. Kelleys Uit de maat is een van de scherpzinnigste allegorieën van de black struggle in Amerika. In het diepe Zuiden van Amerika, anno 1957, in een slaperig stadje in een fictieve staat die verdacht veel lijkt op Mississippi, neemt de zwarte deelpachter Tucker Caliban, nazaat van een legendarische slaaf, op een dag een opvallend besluit. Hij strooit zout over zijn akkers, steekt zijn huis in brand, en vertrekt met vrouw en kind richting het Noorden. Van de ene op de andere dag volgt de hele zwarte bevolking van het stadje, en vervolgens van de hele staat, in zijn voetsporen. De blanke bewoners blijven verbijsterd achter. Wat heeft Tucker Caliban, en met hem in zijn kielzog ‘hun’ zwarten, tot deze uittocht bewogen? Het verhaal is verteld vanuit de wisselende perspectieven van de blanke achterblijvers – destijds een unicum voor een zwarte schrijver.