Ride Out the Wilderness: Geography and Identity in Afro-American Literature

Literature & Fiction

Dixon, Melvin

History & Criticism

University of Illinois Press

Prior to Melvin Dixon’s death from AIDS in 1992 when he was on the verge of breaking out as an acclaimed novelist, his talent was compared to that of Toni Morrison and James Baldwin. In Vanishing Rooms, the author amply demonstrates his literary promise with a compelling love story of interracial sex and urban violence set in Manhattan’s West Village in the 1970s.

Vanishing Rooms

LGBTQ+ Books

Plume

Jesse Durand, a gay black dancer, suffers depression and emotional isolation when Metro, his white boyfriend, dies as a result of "gay bashing"

United States

Dutton Adult

Change of Territory is a first book of poems that covers much ground in historical and personal experiences through the language of exile and return and a search for love and selfhood. The poems move from the sharecropping South to sights in the North that "catch your eyes / and never give them back," from the hilly streets of Montmartre in Paris to the disturbing interior of a slave house on the island of Gorée in Senegal, from family separation to the uncertainty of reconciliation in the return home.

Change of Territory

Poetry

Callaloo Journal

Trouble the Water moves among finely woven layers of time and place as it takes on a new and controversial theme in contemporary black writing, the search for family reconciliation. Twenty years after running away from home in Pee Dee, North Carolina, Jordan Henry believed he had found success, as a young college professor of history, a married man, and a resident of New England, whose colonial past he knew so well. When Jordan finds his career stymied by local prejudices, his world crumbles. Word of his grandmother's death reaches him, and he returns home to claim the ambiguous legacy of her farmland and face the consequences of his long absence. Jordan's estranged father also returns to Pee Dee on a quest of his own restoring his good name in a community which blames him for Chloe Henry's death in childbirth. Chloe was Jordan's mother and his grandmother's only child. Unresolved hostility in the family and in the community breaks out, making Jordan the unsuspecting pawn in a plot of revenge against his father. Jordan may be the only one who can free his family from the past and the equally troubled present. 
Trouble the Water gains resonance from its unflinching confrontation with dualities common in the Afro-American experience: reality and myth, folklore and sophistication, North and South, rural and cosmopolitan. While sacrificing none of its complexities for the sake of simplicity, it has the relentless movement of a fairy tale that reaches deep into the unconscious roots of behavior. It is intensely lyrical and dense in realism. Trouble the Water is magical in the way it reveals the Afro-American psyche and symbolizes fundamental truths about American life.

Trouble the Water

Fiction Collective 2

Trouble the Water moves among finely woven layers of time and place as it takes on a new and controversial theme in contemporary black writing, the search for family reconciliation. Twenty years after running away from home in Pee Dee, North Carolina, Jordan Henry believed he had found success, as a young college professor of history, a married man, and a resident of New England, whose colonial past he knew so well. When Jordan finds his career stymied by local prejudices, his world crumbles. Word of his grandmother's death reaches him, and he returns home to claim the ambiguous legacy of her farmland and face the consequences of his long absence. Jordan's estranged father also returns to Pee Dee on a quest of his own restoring his good name in a community which blames him for Chloe Henry's death in childbirth. Chloe was Jordan's mother and his grandmother's only child. Unresolved hostility in the family and in the community breaks out, making Jordan the unsuspecting pawn in a plot of revenge against his father. Jordan may be the only one who can free his family from the past and the equally troubled present.
Trouble the Water gains resonance from its unflinching confrontation with dualities common in the Afro-American experience: reality and myth, folklore and sophistication, North and South, rural and cosmopolitan. While sacrificing none of its complexities for the sake of simplicity, it has the relentless movement of a fairy tale that reaches deep into the unconscious roots of behavior. It is intensely lyrical and dense in realism. Trouble the Water is magical in the way it reveals the Afro-American psyche and symbolizes fundamental truths about American life.

Vanishing Rooms: A Novel

Cleis Press

final collection of poems by late novelist/poet

Love's Instruments

Tia Chucha Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Dixon, Melvin. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Dixon, Melvin

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Dixon, Melvin. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Ride Out the Wilderness: Geography and Identity in Afro-American Literature

Vanishing Rooms

Vanishing Rooms

Change of Territory

Trouble the Water

Trouble the Water

Vanishing Rooms: A Novel

Love's Instruments