Books by Amiri Baraka
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Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music (Volume 13)
by Amiri Baraka
For almost half a century, Amiri Baraka has ranked among the most important commentators on African American music and culture. In this brilliant assemblage of his writings on music, the first such collection in nearly twenty years, Baraka blends autobiography, history, musical analysis, and political commentary to recall the sounds, people, times, and places he's encountered. As in his earlier classics, Blues People and Black Music, Baraka offers essays on the famous―Max Roach, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, John Coltrane―and on those whose names are known mainly by jazz aficionados―Alan Shorter, Jon Jang, and Malachi Thompson. Baraka's literary style, with its deep roots in poetry, makes palpable his love and respect for his jazz musician friends. His energy and enthusiasm show us again how much Coltrane, Albert Ayler, and the others he lovingly considers mattered. He brings home to us how music itself matters, and how musicians carry and extend that knowledge from generation to generation, providing us, their listeners, with a sense of meaning and belonging.
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S O S: Poems 1961-2013
by Amiri Baraka
A New York Times Editors' Choice One of the New York Times Book Review's 100 Notable Books
Fusing the personal and the political in high-voltage verse, Amiri Baraka—"whose long illumination of the black experience in America was called incandescent in some quarters and incendiary in others" (New York Times)—was one of the preeminent literary innovators of the past century. Selected by Paul Vangelisti, this volume comprises the fullest spectrum of Baraka's rousing, revolutionary poems, from his first collection to previously unpublished pieces composed during his final years.
Throughout Baraka’s career as a prolific writer (also published as LeRoi Jones), he was vehemently outspoken against oppression of African American citizens, and he radically altered the discourse surrounding racial inequality. The environments and social values that inspired his poetics changed during the course of his life, a trajectory that can be traced in this retrospective spanning more than five decades of profoundly evolving subjects and techniques. Praised for its lyricism and introspection, his early poetry emerged from the Beat generation, while his later writing is marked by intensely rebellious fervor and subversive ideology. All along, his primary focus was on how to live and love in the present moment despite the enduring difficulties of human history.
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S O S: Poems 1961-2013
by Amiri Baraka
One of the New York Times Book Review's 100 Notable Books
WITH AN APPENDIX OF NEVER-BEFORE-PUBLISHED WORK
Fusing the personal and the political in high-voltage verse, Amiri Baraka was one of the preeminent literary innovators of the past century. This volume comprises the fullest spectrum of his rousing, revolutionary poems, from his first collection to unpublished pieces composed during his final years.
Throughout Baraka’s career as a prolific writer in several genres (also published under the name LeRoi Jones), he was vehemently outspoken against oppression of African American citizens, and he radically altered the discourse surrounding racial inequality. His legacy in world literature is matched by his widespread influence as an activist and cultural leader. Praised for its lyricism and introspection, his early poetry emerged from the Beat generation, while his later writing is marked by the Black Arts Movement's intensely rebellious fervor and subversive ideology. All along, his primary focus was on how to live and love in the present moment despite the enduring difficulties of human history.
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Tales of the Out & the Gone
by Amiri Baraka
Controversial literary legend Amiri Baraka’s new short story collection―anEssence Magazinebest-seller―will shock and awe.
“Baraka is a poet down to his bones . . . [The stories] evoke a mood of revolutionary disorder, conjuring an alternative universe in which a dangerous African-American underground, or a dangerous literary underground―hell, any kind of an underground―still exists . . . In his prose as in his poetry, Baraka is at his best a lyrical prophet of despair who transfigures his contentious racial and political views into a transcendent, ‘outtelligent’ clarity.” ―New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice
“These stories are so out there that at times they leave you wondering what you just read, but in a good, this is how a truly singular voice sounds way . . . The difficulty and strength of Baraka’s writing is its sincerity. It is the memory of all that has passed, reflecting all he has seen and been told . . .” ―San Francisco Chronicle
Comprising short fiction spanning the early 1970s to the twenty-first century―most of which has never been published―Tales of the Out & the Gone reflects the astounding evolution of America’s most provocative literary anti-hero.
The first section of the book, "War Stories," offers six stories enmeshed in the volatile politics of the ’70s and ’80s; the second section, Tales of the Out & the Gone, reveals Baraka’s increasing literary adventurousness, combining an unpredictable language play with a passion for abstraction and psychological exploration.
Throughout, Baraka’s unique and constantly changing literary style will educate readers on the evolution of one of America’s most accomplished literary masters of the past four decades.
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The System of Dante's Hell (AkashiClassics: Renegade Reprint Series)
by Amiri Baraka
A reissue of a 1965 novel, a remarkable narrative of childhood and youth, spiraling out of Dante's Inferno.
“Much of the novel is an expression of the intellectual and moral lost motion of the age . . . the special agony of the American Negro.” ―New York Times Book Review
“A fevered and impressionistic riff on the struggles of blacks in the urban North and rural South, as told through the prism of The Inferno. . . . Other writers addressed race more directly, but for all its linguistic slipperiness, Baraka’s language conveys the feelings of fear, violation, and fury with a surprising potency. A pungent and lyrical portrait of mid-’60s black protest.” ―Kirkus Reviews
With a new introduction by Woodie King Jr.
This 1965 novel is a remarkable narrative of childhood and youth, structured on the themes of Dante’s Inferno: violence, incontinence, fraud, treachery. With a poet’s skill, Baraka creates the atmosphere of hell, and with dramatic power he reconstructs the brutality of the black slums of Newark, a small Southern town, and New York City. The episodes contained within the novel represent both states of mind and states of the soul―lyrical, fragmentary, and allusive.
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Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing
The defining work of the Black Arts Movement, Black Fire is at once a rich anthology and an extraordinary source document. Nearly 200 selections, including poetry, essays, short stories, and plays, from over 75 cultural critics, writers, and political leaders, capture the social and cultural turmoil of the 1960s. In his new introduction, Amiri Baraka reflects nearly four decades later on both the movement and the book.
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Somebody Blew Up America and Other Poems
by Amiri Baraka
Product Description
Poetry. African American Studies. Fifth printing. "The publication of Amiri Baraka's SOMEBODY BLEW UP AMERICA & OTHER POEMS makes one more mark in the development in modern Black radical & revolutionary cultural reconstruction... Readers of course will want as quick as possible to read for them-self the now controversial title poem..., but check-out, among the others, 'In Town'—pure-pure dark post-Plantation molasses..."—Kamau Brathwaite.
Review
'... In the US today, poetry can still rouse passions and lead to political action.' --Kwame Dawes, USA
About the Author
Amiri Baraka, born in 1934, in Newark, New Jersey, USA, is the author of over 40 books of essays, poems, drama, and music history and criticism, a poet icon and revolutionary political activist who has recited poetry and lectured on cultural and political issues extensively in the USA, the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe.
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Eulogies
by Amiri Baraka
Poetry. African-American studies. Reprint. For 200 years, the eulogy has been a vital, though rarely studied, form of African-American expression. Here Baraka gathers in a volume the eulogies he has spoken and written, in poetry and prose, over the last 30 years. Those eulogized by Baraka include political leaders such as Malcolm X, musicians like John Coltrane, and Baraka's friends and family members. "For me, writing a eulogy is very much part of a writer's central purpose, which is not supposed to be serving as a spontaneous reflector of one's self, but as an investigator of a useful shared vision" -from the Foreword by Baraka.
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