Always a step ahead, Baraka in 1964 recorded a reading of his
provocative poem, 'Black Dada Nihilimus, ' to the avant-garde jazz of
the New York Art Quartet. Tales, a collection of impressionistic short
stories, reads like an angry James Joyce. I spent an amazing hour with
Baraka in the 1990s and first read Tales in an African American
literature class I took in college. I was hooked from the first
paragraph.
--Palestine Herald-Press
We owe profound thanks to Akashic Books for reissuing this important
collection of Amiri Baraka's short stories. Baraka was, without
question, the central figure of the Black Arts Movement, and was the
most important theorist of that movement's expression of the 'Black
Aesthetic, ' which took hold of the African American cultural
imagination in earnest in the late sixties. While known primarily for
his plays, poems, and criticism of black music, Baraka was also a master
of the short story form, as this collection attests. Tales first
appeared in 1967 and is an impressionistic and sometimes surrealistic
collection of short fiction, showcasing Amiri Baraka's great impact on
African American literature of the 1950s and 1960s. Tales is a
critical volume in Amiri Baraka's oeuvre, and an important testament to
his remarkable literary legacy.
--Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
A clutch of early stories from the poet, playwright, and provocateur,
infused with jazz and informed by racial alienation...Worth reading to
see the way [Baraka] feverishly tinkered with ways to explore a
multiplicity of black experiences. An intense and button-pushing
collection.
--Kirkus Reviews
Praise for Amiri Baraka:
Baraka's stories evoke a mood of revolutionary disorder, conjuring an
alternative universe in which a dangerous African-American underground,
or a dangerous literary underground still exists...Baraka is at his best
as 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) on Tales of the
Out & the Gone
The sixteen artful and nuanced stories in this reissue of Amiri Baraka's
seminal 1967 collection fall into two parts: the first nine concern
themselves with the sensibility of a hip, perceptive young black man in
white America. The last seven stories endeavor to place that same man
within the context of his awareness of and participation in a rapidly
emerging and powerfully felt negritude. They deal, it might be said,
with the black man in black America. Yet these tales are not social
tracts, but absolutely masterful fiction--provocative, witty, and, at
times, bitter and aggressi
