The System of Dante's Hell (AkashiClassics: Renegade Reprint Series)

ISBN: 1617753963

Author: Baraka, Amiri

Condition: New

A reissue of a 1965 novel, a remarkable narrative of childhood and youth, spiraling out of Dante's Inferno.Much of the novel is an expression of the intellectual and moral lost motion of the age . . . the special agony of the American Negro. -New York Times Book ReviewA fevered and impressionistic riff on the struggles of blacks in the urban North and rural South, as told through the prism of The Inferno. . . . Other writers addressed race more directly, but for all its linguistic slipperiness, Barakas language conveys the feelings of fear, violation, and fury with a surprising potency. A pungent and lyrical portrait of mid-60s black protest. -Kirkus ReviewsWith a new introduction by Woodie King Jr.This 1965 novel is a remarkable narrative of childhood and youth, structured on the themes of Dantes Inferno: violence, incontinence, fraud, treachery. With a poets skill, Baraka creates the atmosphere of hell, and with dramatic power he reconstructs the brutality of the black slums of Newark, a small Southern town, and New York City. The episodes contained within the novel represent both states of mind and states of the soul-lyrical, fragmentary, and allusive.