Love Story Black

New York: Reed, Cannon & Johnson Co., 1978. First edition. 7 x 5 inches.

,141,

pp. Red, black, and white illustrated wrappers. Rubbing and light wear to edges; spine creased and slightly sunned; stain to bottom edge of rear wrapper, slightly bleeding onto last few leaves. Good. First edition in wrappers (the hardcover appears to have been published the same year) of Demby's third novel, which the New York Times calls "at once a satire of the Black Arts Movement and a departure from the narrow dictates of social realist Black protest fiction in favor of a vision that allows for the uncanny, the humorous and the absurd." The novel follows a writer and professor of Black literature on assignment for the fictitious New Black Woman Magazine, an Essence-like glossy lifestyle magazine whose editor wants him to get some "nitty-gritty shit about the black experience". Thus, Professor Edwards finds himself in an ancient apartment building in Harlem interviewing Mona Pariss, an elderly Black woman once renowned in Europe for her singing. During a series of bizarre interviews, Edwards is told a fantastical history of her life; afterwards Edwards' own life begins to fall apart. Demby is less well-known than many of his counterparts. He wrote experimental fiction, lived in Italy for a long time, and defied literary expectations of what Black writers should write about. Edwards, the main character in this book is in many ways a send-up of Demby: a writer whose time in Europe has given him a different perspective on being Black, Edwards is called a "Negro Bourgeois Lackey" by his students and slammed by his editor at the magazine for wanting to write what she (a Vassar grad) calls "washed out white literary chi-chi bullshit". Ishmael Reed put his assessment of Demby simply: “One of the great novelists of the last 100 years.” Uncommon in commerce.