eBook

English

9780062966421

"First Harper Perennial edition published 1993; reissued in 2019."--Title page verso.

Includes bibliographical references.

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The complete trilogy following the double life of a young black man in mid-twentieth-century New York: “Reading Wright is a steep, stinging pleasure.” --Dwight Garner, The New York Times In this incisive, satirical collection of three classic American novels by Charles Wright--hailed by the New York Times as “malevolent, bitter, glittering”--a young black intellectual from the South struggles to make it in New York City. This special compilation includes a foreword by acclaimed poet and novelist Ishmael Reed, who calls Wright “Richard Pryor on paper.” As fresh and poignant as when originally published in the sixties and seventies, The Messenger , The Wig , and Absolutely Nothing to Get Alarmed About form Charles Wright’s remarkable New York City trilogy. By turns brutally funny and starkly real, these three autobiographical novels create a memorable portrait of a young working-class black man caught between the bohemian elite of Greenwich Village and the seedy underworld of male prostitution and drug abuse. Wright’s fiction is searingly original in bringing to life a special time, a special place, and the remarkable story of a man living in two worlds. This updated edition shines a spotlight once again on this important writer--a writer whose work is so crucial to our times.