Jimi Hendrix, Francis Bacon, the boxer Jack Johnson, Miles Davis, and a space-age Muhammad Ali find themselves in the otherworldly hands of Jeffery Renard Allen, reimagined and transformed to bring us news of America in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Along with them are characters of Allen's invention: two teenagers in an unnamed big city who stumble through a down-low relationship; an African preachervisits a Christian religious retreat to speak on the evils of fornication in an Italian villa importedto America by Abraham Lincoln; and an albino revolutionary who struggles with leading his people into conflict.
Allen, whose writings seem to reach us from the darker side of the moon ...In Allen’s fashioning, Black experience is never subject to conventional parameters of time and space, and his magic realism, instead of being performatively exuberant or purposefully provocative, is plainly unsettling and disturbing ... These are difficult, inventive stories that, at their best, occupy a range of frequencies and otherworldly places.
An absorbing, genre-blending collection of stories ... There is an expansiveness to this gathering of short fiction as alongside these inventively fictionalized histories are quieter but no less impactful stories that examine grief, community, and the inextricable link between the past and the present. For fans of John Edgar Wideman.
A collection of wildly inventive and intensely realized stories ... Allen is both a poet and novelist whose prose reverberates with colorful imagery and crystalline lyricism ... The whole collection hums and throbs with such startling craft. A potentially transformative exhibition of visionary storytelling.
