Amiable with Big Teeth

Description

A monumental literary event: the newly discovered final novel by seminal Harlem Renaissance writer Claude McKay, a rich and multilayered portrayal of life in 1930s Harlem and a historical protest for black freedom
 
One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years

The unexpected discovery in 2009 of a completed manuscript of Claude McKay’s final novel was celebrated as one of the most significant literary events in recent years. Building on the already extraordinary legacy of McKay’s life and work, this colorful, dramatic novel centers on the efforts by Harlem intelligentsia to organize support for the liberation of fascist-controlled Ethiopia, a crucial but largely forgotten event in American history. At once a penetrating satire of political machinations in Depression-era Harlem and a far-reaching story of global intrigue and romance, Amiable with Big Teeth plunges into the concerns, anxieties, hopes, and dreams of African-Americans at a moment of crisis for the soul of Harlem—and America.
 
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,800 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.“This is a major discovery. It dramatically expands the canon of novels written by Harlem Renaissance writers. More important, because it was written in the second half of the period, it shows that the renaissance continued to be vibrant and creative and turned its focus to international issues — in this case the tensions between Communists, on the one hand, and black nationalists, on the other, for the hearts and minds of black Americans.”
—Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

“Claude McKay is such a romantic, questing figure in American literature that he belongs as much to the Lost Generation as he does to the Harlem Renaissance. The dramatic work of his expatriate youth is celebrated, but much less attention has been paid to what he wrote after he returned to New York in the mid 1930s. Indeed, his autobiography, a monumental survey of Harlem, and his occasional pieces were all we knew of his late work. Now two brilliant scholars have discovered McKay’s last novel and thereby changed our picture of his closing years. Amiable with Big Teeth also tells us a lot about how black people around the globe responded to the invasion of Ethiopia and the spectre of fascism. McKay is always interesting and always heartbreaking, he is so original and desperate and brave.”
—Darryl Pinckney        

“As a creative work and a historical document, Amiable With Big Teeth is nothing short of a master key into a world where the intersection of race and global revolutionary politics plays out in the lives of characters who are as dynamic and fully realized as the novel itself (…) For today’s audience, McKay’s last novel should make for fascinating and timely reading as Americans enter an era in which solidarity-building across racial identities and national borders feels more necessary, and perhaps more difficult to achieve, than ever.”
—The Atlantic

“McKay (1889–1948) has long been considered one of the great authors of the Harlem Renaissance. (…) Scholars and admirers now have a new piece of the oeuvre to admire (…)Amiable With Big Teeth lives up to McKay’s reputation.”
—TIME 

“A satire of the political activists and intelligentsia of 1930s Harlem, it is a capstone to the literary career of McKay (1889-1948), considered one of the pillars of the Harlem Renaissance.” 
—Newsday 

“As a roman à clef written just a few years after the period it covers, Amiable with Big Teeth reflects that era with an intimacy impossible to capture in a later time—a miraculous feat for a book discovered seven decades later… it inevitably recasts the narrative of Claude McKay’s later years—altering our understanding of a novelist who seemingly wrote his last novel 15 years before his death—and it’s a satisfying rewrite.”
—Paste Magazine

“To read Amiable today is to discover a lost world that, with its internecine struggles over race and class in New York and elsewhere, may seem equally alien and visceral (…) the novel is an essential window into an overlooked era, when turmoil in Europe and the Depression at home didn’t stop Harlem’s brightest lights from carrying on with their work.”
—The Village Voice

“Engaging and well-paced.” 
—Kirkus ReviewsClaude McKay (1889–1948), born Festus Claudius McKay, is widely regarded as one of the most important literary and political writers of the interwar period and the Harlem Renaissance. Born in Jamaica, he moved to the U.S. in 1912 to study at the Tuskegee Institute. In 1928, he published his most famous novel, Home to Harlem, which won the Harmon Gold Award for Literature. He also published two other novels, Banjo and Banana Bottom, as well as a collection of short stories, Gingertown, two autobiographical books, A Long Way from Home and My Green Hills of Jamaica, and a work of nonfiction, Harlem: Negro Metropolis. His Selected Poems was published posthumously, and in 1977 he was named the national poet of Jamaica.
 
Brent Hayes Edwards is a professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. His books include The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism and Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination.
 
Jean-Christophe Cloutier is an assistant professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the editor of Jack Kerouac’s original French writings, La vie est d’hommage (2016), and translator of Kerouac’s two French novellas in The Unknown Kerouac: Rare, Unpublished & Newly Translated Writings (2016), and his essay on the first collaboration between Ralph Ellison and Gordon Parks appears in Invisible Man: Gordon Parks and Ralph Ellison in Harlem (2016).US

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