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2 Novelas & 3 Stories & a Little Play
by William Melvin Kelley
Dis//Integration, a previously unpublished work by William Melvin Kelley, author of A Different Drummer, is a notable and welcome addition to African American literature.
The linked "2 novelas, 3 stories, and a little play" that make up Dis//Integration follow the life journeys of Charles "Chig" Dunford from his Nanny Eva sermonizing from her front porch, when he is only seventeen, to his peripatetic studies in Reupeo (an anagram of Europe) as a college student, to his unsettled bachelorhood as an English professor at a small Vermont college, where he continues to struggle to finish his life-long study of the Reupeonese author Dupukshamin and find true love.
Along the way, as Chig's sentimental education unfolds, we meet an array of memorable characters: John Hoenir, the Hemingway-esque expatriate novelist who takes Chig under his wing; Wendy Whitman, an actress passing for white, who breaks Chig's heart; Merry, his troubled teen-age niece who Chig, in middle-age, agrees to look after; Raymond Winograd, the villainous department chair; Renka Bravo, the alluring dancer who might just make Chig an honest man; and one hundred Africans mysteriously chained together in the lower decks of Chig's homeward-bound transatlantic liner.
Dis//Integration is an an odyssey through time in which past and future combine and re-combine to give the arc of a full life.
"There's no use in trying to fashion any kind of logical narrative from these interludes. All you can do is marvel at Kelley's arresting collagelike portrait of the artist as an intellectual nomad, clinging to the core of what makes him human—and humane. There's cleverness and craft in abundance here. Also, wisdom and even warmth." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
This information about Dis//Integration was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
William Melvin Kelley was born in New York City in 1937 and attended the Fieldston School and Harvard. The author of four novels and a short story collection, he was a writer in residence at the State University of New York at Geneseo and taught at The New School and Sarah Lawrence College. He was awarded the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for lifetime achievement and the Dana Reed Prize for creative writing. He died in 2017.
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