Tragic Magic: (Of the Diaspora - North America)

by Wesley Brown

Book Overview

Foreword by Ismail Muhammad

Tragic Magic is the story of Melvin Ellington, a.k.a. Mouth, a Black, twenty-something, ex-college radical who has just been released from a five-year prison stretch after being a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War. Brown structures this first-person tale around Ellington's first day on the outside. Although hungry for freedom and desperate for female companionship, Ellington is haunted by a...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1944211985
• ISBN13: 9781944211981
• Release Date: April 2021
• Publisher: Of the Diaspora
• Length: 176 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.8" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Verbal jazz

Somewhat reminiscent of Ralph Ellison's narrator in "Invisible Man," Melvin Ellington's discourse takes place under the sway of the jazz he loves. Just as his nameless predecessor, he labors to make sense of a destiny that others are only too willing to define for him. The musicality of Brown's prose is both wondrous and, to these ears, unprecedented.