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Title details for Tragic Magic by Wesley Brown - Available

Tragic Magic

by Wesley Brown
Erica Vital-Lazare
ebook
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Foreword by Ismail Muhammad
Tragic Magic is the story of Melvin Ellington, a.k.a. Mouth, a Black, twenty-something, ex-college radical who has just been released from a five-year prison stretch after being a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War. Brown structures this first-person tale around Ellington's first day on the outside. Although hungry for freedom and desperate for female companionship, Ellington is haunted by a past that drives him to make sense of those choices leading up to this day.
Through a filmic series of flashbacks, the novel revisits Ellington's prison experiences, where he is forced to play the unwilling patsy to the predatory Chilly and the callow pupil of the not-so-predatory Hardknocks; then dips further back to Ellington's college days, where again he is led astray by the hypnotic militarism of the Black Pantheresque Theo, whose antiwar politics incite the impressionable narrator to oppose his parents and to choose imprisonment over conscription; and finally back to his earliest high school days, where we meet in Otis, the presumed archetype of Ellington's "tragic magic" relationships with magnetic but dangerous avatars of black masculinity in crisis. But the effect of the novel cannot be conveyed through plot recapitulation alone, for its style is perhaps even more provoking than its subject.
Originally published in 1978, and edited by Toni Morrison during her time at Random House, this Of the Diaspora edition of Tragic Magic features a new introduction by author Wesley Brown.
" Tragic Magic is a tremendous affirmation. .One hell of a writer."
- James Baldwin
" . . .wonderfully wry."
- Donald Barthelme
About Of the Diaspora:
McSweeney's Of the Diaspora is a series of previously published works in Black literature whose themes, settings, characterizations, and conflicts evoke an experience, language, imagery and power born of the Middle Passage and the particular aesthetic which connects African-derived peoples to a shared artistic and ancestral past. Wesley Brown's Tragic Magic, the first novel in the series, was originally published in 1978 and championed by Toni Morrison during her tenure as an editor at Random House. This Of the Diaspora edition features a new introduction written by Brown for the series. Tragic Magic will be followed by Paule Marshall's novel of a Harlem widow claiming new life. Praisesong for the Widow was originally published in 1983 and was a recipient of the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award. The series is edited by writer Erica Vital-Lazare, a professor of creative writing and Marginalized Voices in literature at the College of Southern Nevada. Published in collectible hardcover editions with original cover art by Sunra Thompson, the first three works hail from Black American voices defined by what Amiri Baraka described as strong feeling "getting into new blues, from the old ones." Of the Diaspora-North America will be followed by series from the diasporic communities of Europe, the Caribbean and Brazil.

  • Creators

  • Series

    Of the Diaspora

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    April 20, 2021

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9781952119262

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9781952119262
      • File size: 317 KB

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Kirkus

      February 15, 2021
      First published in 1978, this jazz-inflected novel reappears decades later as a prescient ancestor to today's insurgent, boundary-breaching African American fiction. Brown's first and most celebrated novel comes across as a kind of compacted day-in-the-life spin of James Joyce's Ulysses, only with one point of view at its center. It belongs to Melvin Ellington, who as the novel begins has just been paroled from prison, where he spent two years after refusing military induction to protest the Vietnam War. As he heads back to his family's home in Queens, Melvin begins flashing back to various points in life, beginning with his days and weeks in stir, keeping at bay all manner of threats and assaults, especially from the rapacious con Chilly, while keeping his nose clean long enough to get out. Once back in his old neighborhood, Melvin's reveries wander afield, as far back as school days with his childhood buddies, the swaggering Otis, demure Alice, and brash Pauline, and the collegiate years when he was swept up in political activism with its rallies, demonstrations, interracial parties called "freedom highs," and even an act of "revolutionary suicide" by one of the activists. Things are no less volatile in Melvin's post-parole life as he reunites with Otis, who, unlike Melvin, went into the Army and lost his right hand in Vietnam. The long day's journey ends with Melvin, Otis, Alice, and Pauline party-hopping throughout New York and Otis' bitterness at Melvin and life in general slow-boiling toward a violent climax. Brown's coming-of-age novel, drawn from his own real-life experiences, explores a young Black man's difficulties with negotiating his way to maturity during the tumultuous years of the civil rights era and its immediate aftermath. But the novel gets its energy and, ultimately, its staying power less from its plot or theme than from its style: discursive, scatological, ribald, and acerbic. It deserves rediscovery by a new generation of readers curious about where an earlier generation of Black protest came from and how they came through its challenges. Brown was among a cadre of Black writers in the 1970s doing in print what Richard Pryor was doing on stage.

      COPYRIGHT(2021) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Formats

  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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