Rare Books

Jazz

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Description: In Harlem, 1926, Joe Trace, a door-to-door salesman in his fifties, kills his teenage lover. At the funeral, his wife Violet slashes the dead girl's face and then desperately searches to find why Joe was unfaithful. The profound love story is immersed in the sights and sounds of Black urban life during the Jazz Age.
Type: Rare Books(Opens in new tab)
Publication date: 1992.
Call number: 633856
Creator: Morrison, Toni (1931-2019)(Opens in new tab)
ISBN: 9780679411673; 0679411674
Provenance: Gift of Curt B. Smith and Douglas F. Smith, 2004.
Dimensions: 22 cm
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Inside outsider : the life and times of Colin MacInnes

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"During the 1950s and 1960s, Colin MacInnes established a unique and formidable reputation as a novelist, as an Orwellian chronicler and interpreter of the then unfamiliar worlds of the teenager, of pop music, and of Britain's black community, and as a homosexual who combined prickliness and a drunken belligerence with a sympathetic championing of the underdog. Tony Gould got to know MacInnes towards the end of his life; and he has now written an affectionate but unillusioned biography that is riveting as the account of an extraordinary life, and remarkably evocative of the life and culture of the Fifties and Sixties. MacInnes's adult life represented, perhaps, a reaction against a an astonishing family background: his father was a professional singer with a weakness for the bottle; his mother was the steely Angela Thirkell, whose novels were permeated with a resentful nostalgia for the world in which she had grown up. Burne-Jones was his grandfather, and family cousins included Kipling and Stanley Baldwin; yet when MacInnes was a small boy the family decamped from Kensington to Australia, and he grew up in Melbourne, only returning to England in his late teens. Tony Gould succeeds magnificently in evoking the very different worlds of the Edwardian intelligentsia, Australia in the 1920s, and London's post-war Bohemia - and a writer whose often repellent character and habits seemed oddly at variance with his perceptive and sometimes prophetic insights into the society in which he lived"--From dust jacket.

657419

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The doomsters

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"When Archer opened the door to the tall young man who was afraid of the light, he was letting the Doomsters in. Who were the Doomsters? Carl certainly knew them--that was why Archer found him on the doorstep in a bad state of exhaustion and desperately in need of help. Zinnie knew them, though you wouldn't expect her to be haunted by memories--or conscience; Zinnie was pseudo-Hollywood, expensive and not very new, but a nice machine for all that. Mildred certainly knew them and that was more understandable, with her grave innocence and the loneliness that made her seem vulnerable. And Dr. Grantland had his fill of them--he was a good doctor suffering from a bad case of lack of integrity. There was the red-headed woman, too, who drank time under the table; she knew them. But Archer didn't, until he got talked into helping Carl, and found himself a lap behind the next murder"--Dust jacket.

636034

Jazz

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