Product details
- ISBN 9781529438970
- Weight: 160g
- Dimensions: 128 x 198mm
- Publication Date: 24 Oct 2024
- Publisher: Quercus Publishing
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
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Dis//Integration, a previously unpublished work by William Melvin Kelley, author of A Different Drummer, is a notable and welcome addition to African American literature.
The linked "2 novelas, 3 stories, and a little play" that make up DIS//INTEGRATION follow the life journeys of Charles "Chig" Dunford from his Nanny Eva sermonizing from her front porch, when he is only seventeen, to his peripatetic studies in Reupeo (an anagram of Europe) as a college student, to his unsettled bachelorhood as an English professor at a small Vermont college, where he continues to struggle to finish his life-long study of the
Reupeonese author Dupukshamin and find true love.
Along the way, as Chig's sentimental education unfolds, we meet an array of memorable characters: John Hoenir, the Hemingway-esque expatriate novelist who takes Chig under his wing; Wendy Whitman, an actress passing for white, who breaks Chig's heart; Merry, his troubled teen-age niece who Chig, in middle-age, agrees to look after; Raymond Winograd, the villainous department chair; Renka Bravo, the alluring dancer who might just make Chig an honest man; and one hundred Africans mysteriously chained together in the lower decks of Chig's homeward-bound transatlantic liner.
DIS//INTEGRATION is an odyssey through time in which past and future combine and re-combine to give the arc of a full life.
WILLIAM MELVIN KELLEY was born in New York City in 1937 and attended the Fieldston School and Harvard. The author of four novels and a short story collection, he was a writer in residence at the State University of New York at Geneseo and taught at The New School and Sarah Lawrence College. He was awarded the Anisfield-Wolf Book
Award for lifetime achievement and the Dana Reed Prize for creative writing. He died in 2017.
