Francisco
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A lost masterpiece of American literature about the creative evolution of a young Black woman in California and her intense relationship with an indie filmmaker
Alison Mills Newman’s innovative, genre-bending novel has long been out of print and impossible to find. A “fluently funky mix of standard and nonstandard English,” as the poet and scholar Harryette Mullen once put it, Francisco is the first-person account of a young actress and musician and her growing disillusionment with her success in Hollywood. Her wildly original and vivid voice chronicles a free-spirited life with her filmmaker lover, visiting friends and family up and down California, as well as her involvement in the 1970s Black Arts Movement. Love and friendship, long, meaningful conversations, parties and dancing—Francisco celebrates, as she improvises in the book, “the workings of a positive alive life that is good value, quality, carin, truth … the gift of art for the survival of the human heart.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
First published in 1974, actor-turned-minister Newman's only novel is a lush narrative of a young Black woman's love affair with a filmmaker. The two drift through the shifting currents of art and liberation in early 1970s California, a richly defined landscape that Saidiya Hartman calls in her foreword an "atlas of black culture." The unnamed narrator achieved fame and commercial success as a teen actor but has grown disillusioned with Hollywood. She meets Francisco, an independent filmmaker, and becomes enraptured, increasingly sublimating her own creativity in favor of nurturing his. They crash in guest rooms and living rooms up and down California, living a bohemian life, making love, listening to James Brown, and arguing about who has sold out. The prose, unfettered by punctuation or capitalization, envelops readers in the narrator's funkified quest for meaning, love, and freedom, and whether they can all coexist ("its not so much behind every great man is a great woman, as much as a great man is a great man and a girl is a girl"). In an afterword, Newman admits she struggled with the rerelease, luxuriating as it does in a lifestyle she no longer endorses. Readers will be grateful for the raw fervor and passion found in these pages.
