Books by Ed Pavlic

Winners Have Yet to Be Announced: A Song for Donny Hathaway

by Ed Pavlic

This moving collection of prose poems about seventies soul singer Donny Hathaway presents a complex view of a gifted artist through imagined conversations and interviews that convey the voices, surroundings, and clashing dimensions of Hathaway's life.

Among mainstream audiences Hathaway is perhaps best known either as the syrupy voice singing with Roberta Flack in "Where Is the Love" or for his shocking death―he was found dead beneath the open thirteenth-story window of his New York hotel room in 1979 at the age of thirty-three. Less well known are the depth of his classical and gospel training, his wide-ranging intellectual interests, and the respect his musical knowledge, talent, and versatility commanded from collaborators like Curtis Mayfield and Aretha Franklin. Meanwhile, among listeners with special affinity for soul music of the 1970s, even almost thirty years after his death, no voice burns with the intensity of Hathaway's own in the great solo ballads and freedom songs such as "A Song for You," "Giving Up," "Someday We'll All Be Free," and "To Be Young, Gifted, and Black."

Winners Have Yet to Be Announced pushes poetry toward the rich characterization and depth of a novel. Yet it is the capacity of poetic language that allows the book to examine Donny Hathaway's vivid and remarkable life without attempting to resolve the mysteries within which he lived and created and sang.

Another Kind of Madness: A Novel

by Ed Pavlic

“A full-bodied literary achievement bustling with sweat, regret, and sound.” —KIESE LAYMON
Ndiya Grayson returns to her childhood home of Chicago as a young professional, but even her high-end job in a law office can’t protect her from half-repressed memories of childhood trauma. One evening, vulnerable and emotionally disarrayed, she goes out and meets her equal and opposite:
Shame Luther, a no-nonsense construction worker by day and a self-taught piano player by night. The love story that ensues propels them on an unforgettable journey from Chicago’s South Side to the coast of Kenya as they navigate the turbulence of long-buried pasts and an uncertain future.
A stirring novel tuned to the clash between soul music’s vision of our essential responsibility to each other and a world that breaks us down and tears us apart, Another Kind of Madness is an indelible tale of human connection.

This Is Not a Border: Reportage & Reflection from the Palestine Festival of Literature

by Alice Walker, China Miéville, Geoff Dyer, Claire Messud, Michael Palin, Pankaj Mishra, J.M. Coetzee, Chinua Achebe, Michael Ondaatje, Henning Mankell, Molly Crabapple, Teju Cole, Kamila Shamsie, Adam Foulds, Najwan Darwish, Linda Spalding, Mohammed Hanif, Suheir Hammad, Rachel Holmes, Deborah Moggach, Gillian Slovo, Mahmoud Darwish, William Sutcliffe, Atef Abu Saif, Ed Pavlic, Raja Shehadeh, Ru Freeman, Victoria Brittain, Susan Abulhawa, Jeremy Harding, Yasmin El-Rifae, Mercedes Kemp, Suad Amiry, Sabrina Mahfouz, John Horner, Bridget Keenan, Selma Dabbagh, Jehan Bseiso, Omar El-Khairy, Remi Kanazi, Maath Musleh, Ghada Karmi, Muiz, Nancy Kricorian, Nathalie Handal, Jamal Mahjoub

Writers from Alice Walker to Michael Ondaatje to Claire Messud share their thoughts on one of the most vital gatherings of writers and readers in the world.

The Palestine Festival of Literature was established in 2008 by authors Ahdaf Soueif, Brigid Keenan, Victoria Brittain and Omar Robert Hamilton. Bringing writers to Palestine from all corners of the globe, it aimed to break the cultural siege imposed by the Israeli military occupation, to strengthen artistic links with the rest of the world, and to reaffirm, in the words of Edward Said, "the power of culture over the culture of power."

Celebrating the tenth anniversary of PalFest, This Is Not a Border is a collection of essays, poems, and sketches from some of the world's most distinguished artists, responding to their experiences at this unique festival. Both heartbreaking and hopeful, their gathered work is a testament to the power of literature to promote solidarity and hope in the most desperate of situations.

Contributing authors include J. M. Coetzee, China Miéville, Alice Walker, Geoff Dyer, Claire Messud, Henning Mankell, Michael Ondaatje, Kamila Shamsie, Michael Palin, Deborah Moggach, Mohammed Hanif, Gillian Slovo, Adam Foulds, Susan Abulhawa, Ahdaf Soueif, Jeremy Harding, Brigid Keenan, Rachel Holmes, Suad Amiry, Gary Younge, Jamal Mahjoub, Molly Crabapple, Najwan Darwish, Nathalie Handal, Omar Robert Hamilton, Pankaj Mishra, Raja Shehadeh, Selma Dabbagh, William Sutcliffe, Atef Abu Saif, Yasmin El-Rifae, Sabrina Mahfouz, Alaa Abd El Fattah, Mercedes Kemp, Ru Freeman.

Who Can Afford to Improvise?: James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listeners

by Ed Pavlic

More than a quarter-century after his death, James Baldwin remains an unparalleled figure in American literature and African American cultural politics. In Who Can Afford to Improvise? Ed Pavlić offers an unconventional, lyrical, and accessible meditation on the life, writings, and legacy of James Baldwin and their relationship to the lyric tradition in black music, from gospel and blues to jazz and R&B. Based on unprecedented access to private correspondence, unpublished manuscripts and attuned to a musically inclined poet’s skill in close listening, Who Can Afford to Improvise? frames a new narrative of James Baldwin’s work and life. The route retraces the full arc of Baldwin’s passage across the pages and stages of his career according to his constant interactions with black musical styles, recordings, and musicians.

Presented in three books ― or movements ― the first listens to Baldwin, in the initial months of his most intense visibility in May 1963 and the publication of The Fire Next Time. It introduces the key terms of his lyrical aesthetic and identifies the shifting contours of Baldwin’s career from his early work as a reviewer for left-leaning journals in the 1940s to his last published and unpublished works from the mid-1980s. Book II listens with Baldwin and ruminates on the recorded performances of Billie Holiday and Dinah Washington, singers whose message and methods were closely related to his developing world view. It concludes with the first detailed account of “The Hallelujah Chorus,” a performance from July 1, 1973, in which Baldwin shared the stage at Carnegie Hall with Ray Charles. Finally, in Book III, Pavlić reverses our musically inflected reconsideration of Baldwin’s voice, projecting it into the contemporary moment and reading its impact on everything from the music of Amy Winehouse, to the street performances of Turf Feinz, and the fire of racial oppression and militarization against black Americans in the 21st century.

Always with an ear close to the music, and avoiding the safe box of celebration, Who Can Afford to Improvise? enables a new kind of “lyrical travel” with the instructive clarity and the open-ended mystery Baldwin’s work invokes into the world.

Live at the Bitter End

by Ed Pavlic

Recasting the “trial of the century,” Ed Pavli ’s vertiginous new collection puts a century of segregation on trial for its soul Set in the vernacular origins of modernity, Live at the Bitter End puts the racialized logic of 20th century aesthetics on trial. Mixing anonymous voices with the testimonies of figures such as Paul Cézanne, Charles Mingus, Emma Bardac, Erik Satie, Alberto Giacometti, Billie Holiday, Pierre Bonnard, Samuel Beckett, Miles Davis, and others, Ed Pavli weaves a playfully raucous and intimately violent work of satirical force. Adhering to the structure of a murder trial, Live at the Bitter End bears lyrical witness to racial separation, masquerade, mongrelization, and communion to show how those connections (in love, lust, trust and betrayal) sound deep in the textures of who we are.

Visiting Hours at the Color Line: Poems (National Poetry Series)

by Ed Pavlic

“I am incapable of succinctly praising this poet’s immense talent.” —TERRANCE HAYES
Often the most recognized, even brutal, events in American history are segregated by a politicized, racially divided “Color Line.” But how do we privately experience the most troubling features of American civilization? Where is the Color Line in the mind, in the body, between bodies, between human beings?
Selected for the National Poetry Series by Dan Beachy-Quick, Ed Pavlić’s Visiting Hours at the Color Line attempts to complicate this black and white, straight-line feature of our collective imagination, and to map its nonlinear, deeply colored timbres and hues. From daring prose poems to powerful free verse, Pavlić’s lines are musically infused, bearing tones of soul, R & B, and jazz. They link the influence of James Baldwin with a postmodern consciousness descended from Samuel Beckett, tracking the experiences of American characters through situations both mundane and momentous. The resulting poems are intense, ambitious, and psychological, making Visiting Hours at the Color Line a poetic tour de force.

Labors Lost Left Unfinished: Poems

by Ed Pavlic

Book by Pavlic, Ed

Allies

by Evie Shockley, Ed Pavlic, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, Ladan Osman

Original poetry, fiction, and cultural criticism explore issues of trust, bridge-building, difference, and betrayal, both political and private.

How do we know who is on our side? Is it possible for someone who is not like us to share our hopes? Can links forged by empathy or mutual interest match those created by shared experience? What can we gain from alliances that we cannot achieve on our own?

These are difficult question to answer even in intimate settings, and more so in arenas of cultural and political struggle. Through original poetry, fiction, and cultural criticism from both established writers and newcomers, Allies offers unique insights into issues of trust, bridge-building, difference, and betrayal. Drawing on the prophetic power of the imagination to conjure both the possible dangers and life-giving possibilities of alliances—be they political, private (such as marriage), therapeutic, or even aesthetic (between readers and writers, for example)—Allies will be essential reading for our times.

Allies is the first publication of Boston Review's newly inaugurated Arts in Society department. A radical revisioning of the magazine's poetry and fiction, the department unites them—along with cultural criticism and belles lettres—into a project that explores how the arts can speak directly to the most pressing political and civic concerns of our age, from growing inequality to racial and gender regimes, a disempowered electorate, and a collapsing natural world.

Fiction

Samuel Delay, Tananarive Due, Catherine Taylor

Poetry 

Jane Miller, Ru Puro, Emilia Nielsen, Sarah Vap, Rachel Levitsky, Tess Liem

Interviews

Walter Johnson and Tef Poe, Robin D. G. Kelley and Vijay Iyer 

Essays

Roderick Ferguson, Micki McEyla, Mark Nowak, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Abdullah Taïa