Tragic Magic: (Of the Diaspora North America)

(Hardback)

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Tragic Magic is the story of Melvin Ellington, a.k.a. Mouth, a black, twenty-something, ex-college radical who has just been released from a five-year prison stretch after being a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War. Brown structures this first-person tale around Ellington's first day on the outside. Although hungry for freedom and desperate for female companionship, Ellington is haunted by a past that drives him to make sense of those choices leading up to this day.

Through a filmic series of flashbacks the novel revisits Ellington's prison experiences, where he is forced to play the unwilling patsy to the predatorial Chilly and the callow pupil of the not-so-predatorial Hardknocks; then dips further back to Ellington's college days where again he takes second stage to the hypnotic militarism of the Black Pantheresque Theo, whose antiwar politics incite the impressionable narrator to oppose his parents and to choose imprisonment over conscription; and finally back to his earliest high school days where we meet in Otis the presumed archetype of Ellington's 'tragic magic' relationships with magnetic but dangerous avatars of black masculinity in crisis. But the effect of the novel cannot be conveyed through plot recapitulation alone, for its style is perhaps even more provoking than its subject.

Originally published in 1978, and edited by Toni Morrison during her time at Random House, this Of the Diaspora edition of Tragic Magic features a new introduction by author Wesley Brown.

'Tragic Magic is a tremendous affirmation...One hell of a writer.' James Baldwin

'...wonderfully wry.' Donald Barthelme

Reviews

"Tragic Magic is a tremendous affirmation. . One hell of a writer."
--James Baldwin

"(A) vibrant riff on Blackness, manhood, and jazz."
--The New Yorker

"(W)onderfully wry."
--Donald Barthelme

"Wesley Brown's Tragic Magic is an underrated classic in the vein of my favorite albums. This is a book worth holding close and hugging hard. There has been much talk about the literary foreparents to hip-hop culture and for my money Brown has to take his place alongside the likes of the Black Arts Movement, The Nuyoricans, Piri Thomas, and Julius Lester. Pick this one up and ride alongside a masterful storyteller."
--Nate Marshall, author of Finna: Poems

"A prescient ancestor to today's insurgent, boundary-breaching African American fiction... deserves rediscovery by a new generation of readers curious about where an earlier generation of Black protest came from and how they came through its challenges."
--Kirkus

"(A)s relevant today as when first brought to print...excels in its line-level risks, intellectual depth, and wide-ranging cultural and political subject matter."
--Southeast Review

"A captivating read...precisely structured and movingly written."
--Tobias Carroll

Author Bio

Wesley Brown is an acclaimed novelist, playwright, and teacher. He worked with the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in 1965 and became a member of the Black Panther Party in 1968. In 1972, he was sentenced to three years in prison for refusing induction into the armed services and spent 18 months in Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary. For 27 years, Brown was a much-revered Professor at Rutgers University, where he inspired hundreds of students, including novelist Junot Diaz. He currently teaches literature at Bard College at Simons Rock.