Amiri Baraka

Fusing the personal and the political in high-voltage verse, Amiri Baraka--"whose long illumination of the black experience in America was called incandescent in some quarters and incendiary in others" (New York Times)--was one of the preeminent literary innovators of the past century. Selected by Paul Vangelisti, this volume comprises the fullest spectrum of Baraka's rousing, revolutionary poems, from his first collection to previously unpublished...

The sixteen artful and nuanced stories in this reissue of Amiri Baraka's seminal 1967 collection fall into two parts: the first nine concern themselves with the sensibility of a hip, perceptive young black man in white America. The last seven stories endeavor to place that same man within the context of his awareness of and participation in a rapidly emerging and powerfully felt negritude. They deal; it might be said, with the black man in black America....

In 1951, Barney Rosset acquires Grove Press and soon becomes the most controversial publisher in America. Scandal attends almost every book he puts out, from an uncensored version of D.H. Lawrence's "Lady Chatterley's Lover" to Henry Miller's "Tropic of Cancer," the latter provoking an obscenity trial that goes all the way to the Supreme Court. Filmmaker Neil Ortenberg traces Rosset's life and career, and along the way interviews many of the authors...

Discusses modern jazz movements and musicians, including Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Cecil Taylor, Eric Dolphy, Archie Shepp, and Sun-Ra.