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Ex Wife by Ursula Parrott

First published 100 years ago in the 1920’s, and now it is no. 17 in the McNally Editions publications … I just … ❤️… recommend it for any NYC girly. It was just so fricken good and juicy, the fashion was on point, and the cocktails in the speakeasies, all of it, just set a sexy tone that had me addicted.

From Alston Anderson's rediscovered 1959 collection, Lover Man:

"a day when there won't be any war no more because there won't be any need for it: Me and You will be One, just like the Good Book means. Then it will be alright to greet a stranger as you would a friend; and tend to his business, too, instead of just your own. I like to believe that one day men won't talk of anything except what's True. That is, of what we're doing here and what this thing called Life is all about. Sometimes I dream of taking a child by the hand and telling him what it feels like to be a man. Sometimes I dream of talking to a woman or a man and telling them exactly what I feel and what I think."

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I've been trying to find words to convey how blown away I am with Anderson's Lover Man, a read as close to perfect as you'll find. It's that good, one of the few works I've subsequently recommended to both colleagues and my parents (rare literary company).

I've joked the collection is so mysterious to me, reads almost too perfect, as if created by AI or ChatGPT, as exploration into narrative cohesion and cultural clarity. But of course that's wrong, AI would create the opposite of this, triteness, dredge, common prose, as one often reads in works of "the Black experience". LM is so very dialed into the minutiae of African American experience, even 75 years on, as to induce many, many tiny shards of enlightenment, deep pangs within spot on moments of insightfulness.

Maybe a cultural comparison is the Detroit punk band rediscovered from obscurity fairly recently, Death. Many of us thought that their "unearthed" 1975 record, ...For the Whole World to See, HAD to be a hoax, it was just too perfect of an encapsulation of what Black punk rock should sound like, but there's no way that an unknown band could have crafted such a record in the early 1970s. In Detroit. It reeked of post-punk, not pre-punk (which is when it was crafted), just made no sense, too perfect. That is what I felt reading this Alston Anderson, who I am ashamed to have known nothing of previously.

I guess what I'm trying to say is thank you to McNally Editions for republishing it.

#black literature #alston anderson #mcnally editions