“If you're black you don't need to get at anything. You're already there. You can live right out of your insides.” So says the antihero of this legendary novel that reimagines the Bible’s prodigal son as a young black man in post-Civil Rights-era America. George Washington—one of his many aliases—is a classic trickster figure, a blend of con artist, deep thinker, and willing object of white women’s sexual fantasies. Fed up with life in racist America, he leaves his rural South for Denmark on a curious quest, determined to discover if there is “any mother fucker in this despiteful world who ever told himself the truth.” In Denmark he spends his days bantering with fellow black expatriates and his nights bedding a series of white women who project their desires on him. Inevitably, these worlds collide, with Washington, aka Anthony Miller, aka Paul Winthrop, aka Mr. Jiveass Nigger, increasingly alienated in a world of opportunists. A return to America after his self-imposed exile promises transformation, but is Washington too far gone? Cecil Brown brings blistering prose, unabashed eroticism, and biting satire to this controversial masterpiece that’s as timely today as when it was first published.
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“This is a book that turns you on; it tells you how it feels to be a young, black male American in a permissive society of white women.”
—Chester Himes, author of If He Hollers, Let Him Go
“Flimflamboyantly erotic ... audacious ... dramatic ... Mr. Brown is a born pornographer gone straight.”
—The New York Times
“Brown's best-selling The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger, published in 1969, [is] a picaresque novel ˆ la Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, infused with a Black Power sensibility.”
—Scott McLemee
—Chester Himes, author of If He Hollers, Let Him Go
“Flimflamboyantly erotic ... audacious ... dramatic ... Mr. Brown is a born pornographer gone straight.”
—The New York Times
“Brown's best-selling The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger, published in 1969, [is] a picaresque novel ˆ la Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, infused with a Black Power sensibility.”
—Scott McLemee
About the Author
Cecil Brown holds a PhD in African American Literature from the University of California, Berkeley. His other books include Days Without Weather, Stagolee Shot Billy, and his autobiography, Coming Up Down Home. He lives in Berkeley.
Foreword contributor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is the Director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research and holder of the distinguished title of the Alphonse Fletcher, Jr. University Professor at Harvard University.
Foreword contributor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is the Director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research and holder of the distinguished title of the Alphonse Fletcher, Jr. University Professor at Harvard University.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Brilliant. Not to be missed.,
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This review is from: The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger: A Novel (The Dark Tower Series) (Paperback)
This one is a cult classic, a story with messages that resonate long after we've put it down. One of my three or four all-time favorites. Brown has the gift of the storyteller's ear and voice, and an instinctive feel for the trope and rhythm of language. If it were put to music, it would be a combination of Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane. A cover-to-cover "bright moment"
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Brilliant. Just as timely as it was nearly 30 years ago.,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger: A Novel (The Dark Tower Series) (Paperback)
The re-release of Cecil Brown's 1969 classic is long overdue. The man's insights and vision are haunting in their lyricism, and his messages pack a punch. Cecil Brown is a natural, and I've missed his fiction all these years. Not to be missed
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Cliche-busting brilliance,
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This review is from: The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger (Paperback)
This book is beautifully written, full of anger and sex, blatant truths and subtle descriptions of interpersonal relations. It captures the experience of a person trying to escape his past by making a philosophy and lifestyle out of jive, prevarication, self-imposed exile, promiscuity and drugs. Even more important, Jiveass shows how the protagonist gets out of the escapist thinking and behaviors and becomes ready to return to his home country--the site of all of the formative traumas of his life. The sex scenes are potentially distracting--but each contains luminous descriptions of the mental state that carries the participants through these rather fraught encounters, and reads dangerously true about how people with different amounts of power in the world (and different senses of their relationship to racial difference) behave sexually to each other. As George Washington (the protagonist) progresses through the novel, these scenes embody his changing awareness of the women he is involved with--and thus his changing relationship with the world that leads to his decision to return to the United States.
Overall, this is one of the best works of fiction I have read--a truly valuable work.
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