The BURIED Book Club discussion

I seem to see zero reviews for Demby here on goodreads.

Thanks for this find, Ali. There is a dearth of black experimental writers. Ishmael Reed is seemingly the only really influential one around.

Samuel Delaney!
Machado de Assis!

But I think the relative lack is pretty easily explainable. It's already harder to get published as a minority, being experimental AND a minority just makes it that much harder.

At the risk of once again being controversial, the factors cited above may well be significant, but there's yet another. Individuals of any walk of life can produce any kind of work, but if you're going to start looking from the perspective of who's black, who's a woman, who's middle-class, who's gay, who's European etc., then we may need to recognize the cultural component in the production of literature. What is being termed the "experimental" novel here may well be a largely white-culture phenomenon, or may not be a big factor in black culture. And I'm sure Ellison would quickly agree that a black man (or woman (but I'm not going to type two pronouns every time)) who enters the halls of white culture faces the risk of being scorned by the whites who don't accept him and the black folks who see him as no longer relevant to black culture. Of course there will be exceptional and daring pioneers, and whenever someone scores a big success, that changes the game, but we can't expect cultural considerations to vanish or cease in their influence upon the majority of would-be-novelists.

Here is the link to my review of The Catacombs - which I found excellent. It's amazing that this doesn't get more attention.

Ali wrote: "I wasn't expecting that. Thanks, Ronald!"

No, thank you for bringing him to my attention! I have Beetlecreek at home as well - I'll get to it soon - and now need to go ahead and pick up Love Story Black based on the strength of The Catacombs.

Of course I now clamor for the (hopefully) eventual publication of King Comus, as it sounds incredible.

Hey y'all. Thanks to Ali for pointing this writer out. Below is a link to my review of his novel Beetlecreek. Unfortunately it is not as groovy as The Catacombs sounds.

I pimped for Beetlecreek harder for the great unwashed than I would for the even dirtier digging bunch cloistered here. It's not in the least bit experimental but still a good book with a very unusual angle regarding race relations.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Ali wrote: "William Demby Has Not Left the Building, a profile (in PDF, cached on Google's server), containing the only significant coverage of his as yet unpublished last novel, King Comus, that I've been able to find. Everywhere else the novel is mentioned simply states that it deals with the historic relationship between blacks and Jews, but Jeff Biggers appears to have read some of it and is able to provide far more details. Of course, there is no news of a possible future publication. "

Someone randomly popped up and commented on my review of The Catacombs to let me know that King Comus has now been published! Amazon is showing temporarily out of stock (I went ahead and ordered regardless) but I've yet to find time to poke around to see if it can be acquired elsewhere. (make sure you note the cost to page count ratio - it's only 159 pages long)

And an article about King Comus on LARB today!

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/k...