Stanley Crouch's gloriously bold first novel provides an intimate and epic portrait of America that breaks all the rules in crossing the boundaries of race, sex, and class. Blonde Carla from South Dakota is a jazz singer who has been around the block. Almost suddenly, she finds herself fighting to hold on to Maxwell, a black tenor saxophonist from Texas. Their red-hot and sublimely tender five-year union is under siege. Those black people who oppose such relatonships in the interest of romantic entitlement or group solidarity are pressuring Maxwell, and he is wavering. As Carla battles to save the deepest love of her life, her past plays out against the present, vividly bringing forth a startlingly fresh range of characters in scenes that are as accurately drawn as they are unpredictable and innovatively conceived.
Stanley Crouch has been a contributing editor to The New Republic¿ is an editorial columnist for the New York Daily News, and is a frequent panelist on television and radio talk shows. He is the author of Always in Pursuit, The All-American Skin Game (which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award), and Notes of a Hanging Judge. For years a staff writer for the Village Voice, he is artistic consultant to jazz at Lincoln Center. A recipient of a MacArthur fellowship, Crouch lives in New York City.
Show moreStanley Crouch's gloriously bold first novel provides an intimate and epic portrait of America that breaks all the rules in crossing the boundaries of race, sex, and class. Blonde Carla from South Dakota is a jazz singer who has been around the block. Almost suddenly, she finds herself fighting to hold on to Maxwell, a black tenor saxophonist from Texas. Their red-hot and sublimely tender five-year union is under siege. Those black people who oppose such relatonships in the interest of romantic entitlement or group solidarity are pressuring Maxwell, and he is wavering. As Carla battles to save the deepest love of her life, her past plays out against the present, vividly bringing forth a startlingly fresh range of characters in scenes that are as accurately drawn as they are unpredictable and innovatively conceived.
Stanley Crouch has been a contributing editor to The New Republic¿ is an editorial columnist for the New York Daily News, and is a frequent panelist on television and radio talk shows. He is the author of Always in Pursuit, The All-American Skin Game (which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award), and Notes of a Hanging Judge. For years a staff writer for the Village Voice, he is artistic consultant to jazz at Lincoln Center. A recipient of a MacArthur fellowship, Crouch lives in New York City.
Show moreStanley Crouch has been a contributing editor to The New Republic¸ is an editorial columnist for the New York Daily News, and is a frequent panelist on television and radio talk shows. He is the author of Always in Pursuit, The All-American Skin Game (which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award), and Notes of a Hanging Judge. For years a staff writer for the Village Voice, he is artistic consultant to jazz at Lincoln Center. A recipient of a MacArthur fellowship, Crouch lives in New York City.
“Stanley Crouch’s first novel, audacious and outrageous, is worthy
of the bold iconoclast we know from his essays.” –Harold Bloom
“Fearless and exquisitely lyrical. . . . Some of the most heady,
passionate, soulful, high-flying, blues-tinged prose this side of
Leon Forrest. . . . It radiates the joy of doing battle for love
and music . . . [and] captures the gravity-defying lift of romance
more majestically than one previously believed the English language
allowed.” –Chicago Tribune
“Like the modernist masters with whom he is in dialogue—Charles
Baudelaire, Ralph Ellison, James Joyce, and Charlie Parker, to name
but a few—Stanley Crouch has given us an exquisite meditation on
Western aesthetics, the artist’s vocation and the sensual pulse of
urban life. . . . In Carla, one of the most original characters in
contemporary literature, this complex novel gives us the portrait
of an artist and a lady who quietly challenges us to rethink the
meaning of love.” –Farah J. Griffin, Columbia University
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