Amiable with Big Teeth
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A monumental literary event: the newly discovered final novel by seminal Harlem Renaissance writer Claude McKay, a rich and multilayered portrayal of life in 1930s Harlem and a historical protest for black freedom
One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years
The unexpected discovery in 2009 of a completed manuscript of Claude McKay’s final novel was celebrated as one of the most significant literary events in recent years. Building on the already extraordinary legacy of McKay’s life and work, this colorful, dramatic novel centers on the efforts by Harlem intelligentsia to organize support for the liberation of fascist-controlled Ethiopia, a crucial but largely forgotten event in American history. At once a penetrating satire of political machinations in Depression-era Harlem and a far-reaching story of global intrigue and romance, Amiable with Big Teeth plunges into the concerns, anxieties, hopes, and dreams of African-Americans at a moment of crisis for the soul of Harlem—and America.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,800 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Unpublished in the author's lifetime, this recently unearthed work by Harlem Renaissance writer McKay (1889 1948) is both a brilliant social novel and a historical document shedding light on two oft-overlooked episodes from the history of America's African-American community: the campaign to aid Ethiopia after the invasion by Fascist Italy, and the debate among the black intelligentsia over Communism. It is the 1930s and Harlem is abuzz with festivity as the Hands to Ethiopia committee receives an envoy, Lij Tekla Alamaya. But controversy soon engulfs the neighborhood, as Soviet agent Maxim Tasan infiltrates the cause and plans to turn its various constituents against one another. These include the eccentric and flamboyant Professor Koazhy; the committee's leftist secretary, Newton Castle; and the committee's chairman, Pablo Peixota, who winds up between a rock and a hard place once his daughter, Seraphine, falls in love with Alamaya. But is Alamaya an impostor? And will the committee's good intentions fall victim to anti-Communist hysteria? As witch hunts mount, questions of black identity come to drive this fiercely political novel, which doesn't shy away from examining the hypocrisy of Harlem's moral leaders, nor from frank discussion of assimilation and the quandary of the socialist reformer in the era of Stalin. The novel suffers from some repetition probably reflecting that McKay was unable to revise it but remains a complex, extraordinarily even-handed portrait of American blackness in a time of war.
