{"title":"William Demby","description":"William Demby was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on December 25, 1922, and attended college in Clarksburg, West Virginia, before enlisting in World War II and serving in Italy. He graduated from Fisk University in 1947 then moved abroad to Rome, where he spent the next two decades working as a novelist, journalist, and script translator and screenwriter for the Italian cinema. In the late 1960s, Demby joined the faculty at The College of Staten Island, dividing his time between the United States and Italy. His works include Beetlecreek, The Catacombs, Love Story Black, and King Comus. In 2006, he was the recipient of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Lifetime Achievement. He died in Sag Harbor, New York, in 2013.","products":[{"product_id":"love-story-black-paperback","title":"Love Story Black - Paperback","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eThis \"thoroughly engaging\" novel by the author of \u003ci\u003eBeetlecreek \u003c\/i\u003e(\"[a] quiet masterpiece\" --\u003ci\u003eKirkus Reviews\u003c\/i\u003e) follows a Black journalist in the 1970s whose bourgeois life is turned upside down by the subject of his writing assignment. \u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\"One of the great novelists of the last 100 years.\" --Ishmael Reed, author of \u003ci\u003eMumbo Jumbo\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eIn the midst of the tumultuous 1970s, Edwards, a freelance writer and Black Studies professor at a small college in New York City, is assigned a story for New Black Woman magazine: a profile of Mona Pariss, an aging former singer whose popularity once rivaled Josephine Baker's. With his creditors at the door, Professor Edwards beats a path to the crumbling Harlem apartment house where Mona Pariss, once the toast of Europe for her singing, now lives in squalid obscurity. As his interviews progress, Edwards is gradually drawn into Mona's strange world. At the same time, he finds himself entering into an affair with Hortense, a beautiful young assistant at New Black Woman. From revolutionary downtown poetry readings to a hospital bed on the Continent and back, becoming entangled in the lives of both women might turn Edwards's bourgeois life upside down for good. A smart satire with a biting wit, \u003ci\u003eLove Story Black\u003c\/i\u003e is an unmissable novel by one of the masters of midcentury American fiction.","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50101938913503,"sku":"9798217007356","price":17.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0813\/8958\/4607\/files\/VhgvXU3rUq9798217007356.webp?v=1781075922"},{"product_id":"king-comus-paperback","title":"King Comus - Paperback","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003ePast and present collide in this posthumous, semiautobiographical masterpiece by the author of \u003ci\u003eBeetlecreek. \u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\"One of the great novelists of the last 100 years.\" --Ishmael Reed, author of \u003ci\u003eMumbo Jumbo\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eIn the present day, a Black American expat to Rome named D. reconnects with his former Army friend, Tillman, and their former commanding officer, Joe Stabat, to organize a gospel summit for the singer Little Antioch. In the 1940s, as D. becomes enmeshed in Tillman's large and boisterous family for the first time, Tillman recounts the story of his fabled ancestor King Comus. And in the early nineteenth century, master musician King Comus embarks on a grand journey to freedom from enslavement. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eIn this time-bending tale of survival and kinship, the product of more than twenty years of literary labor, William Demby weaves elements of the neo-slave narrative and Afrofuturism into a panoramic vision encompassing the forces of empire, race, gender, and religion.","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50101942255839,"sku":"9798217007370","price":17.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0813\/8958\/4607\/files\/yQ5xB6nVc-9798217007370.webp?v=1781075928"},{"product_id":"beetlecreek-paperback","title":"Beetlecreek - Paperback","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eA rediscovered \"masterpiece\" (\u003ci\u003eKirkus\u003c\/i\u003e) of Black American literature first published in 1950, about an unlikely friendship in a West Virginia town\u003c\/b\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eAfter several years of seclusion in the Black quarter of Beetlecreek, West Virginia, in the precarious 1930s, a retired carnival worker named Bill Trapp strikes up a chance friendship with Johnny Johnson, a Pittsburgh teenager transplanted into his uncle's home. Bill is white. Johnny is Black. Both are searching for something that will give meaning to their lives. While Bill tries to court favor in the community, Johnny joins a local gang; meanwhile, their new friendship kindles hope that there is something for each of them beyond the bounds of Beetlecreek. But as the church society's Fall Festival approaches, the battle between the repressive town and the aspirations of its trapped inhabitants comes to a nail-biting head. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eFirst published in 1950, \u003ci\u003eBeetlecreek\u003c\/i\u003e stands as a moving condemnation of provincialism and fundamentalism, and a classic of Black American literature. Both a critique of racial hypocrisy and a new direction for the African American novel, it occupied fresh territory for its time: neither the gritty realism of Richard Wright nor the ironic modernism of Ralph Ellison.","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50102216753375,"sku":"9798217007318","price":17.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0813\/8958\/4607\/files\/paAsQlSiAW9798217007318.webp?v=1781079159"},{"product_id":"the-catacombs-paperback","title":"The Catacombs - Paperback","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eAn expat in Rome makes his way as a writer in this gripping and genre-defying novel, first published in 1965 by a rediscovered great of Black American literature.\u003c\/b\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eIn this masterpiece of metafiction set in the Rome of the tumultuous 1960s, Black American expatriate Bill Demby narrates his attempts to write a novel about his friend Doris, another Black American working as one of Elizabeth Taylor's handmaidens in the filming of \u003ci\u003eCleopatra\u003c\/i\u003e. Utterly dependent upon Doris for the development of his novel, Demby is both a participant in and observer of her life as she begins an affair with an Italian count. Demby's growing emotional and artistic involvement in the tumultuous affair of his character-friend leads him on an existential quest for the meaning of truth and fiction, both lived and created, in a world torn by the social upheaval of the early sixties.","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50102217900255,"sku":"9798217007332","price":17.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0813\/8958\/4607\/files\/IpgfJnJ_cx9798217007332.webp?v=1781079162"}],"url":"https:\/\/blackandbarhe.com\/collections\/william-demby.oembed","provider":"Black \u0026 Barhe Bookstore","version":"1.0","type":"link"}