Leon Forrest, acclaimed author of Divine Days, uses a remarkable verbal intensity to evoke human tragedy, injustice, and spirituality in his writing. As Toni Morrison has said, "All of Forrest's novels explore the complex legacy of Afro-Americans. Like an insistent tide this history . . . swells and recalls America's past. . . . Brooding, hilarious, acerbic and profoundly valued life has no more astute observer than Leon Forrest." All of that is on display here in two novels that give readers a breathtaking view of the human experience, filled with humor and pathos.

There Is a Tree More Ancient Than Eden (Phoenix Fiction)

Literature & Fiction

FORREST, LEON

United States

University of Chicago Press

Leon Forrest, acclaimed author of Divine Days, uses a remarkable verbal intensity to evoke human tragedy, injustice, and spirituality in his writing. As Toni Morrison has said, "All of Forrest's novels explore the complex legacy of Afro-Americans. Like an insistent tide this history . . . swells and recalls America's past. . . . Brooding, hilarious, acerbic and profoundly valued life has no more astute observer than Leon Forrest." All of that is on display here in a novel that give readers a breathtaking view of the human experience, filled with humor and pathos.

The Bloodworth Orphans (Phoenix Fiction)

Divine Days: A Novel

Fabulous, wildly comic, and Ulysses-like, Divine Days explores the mythical world of Leon Forrest's literary kingdom, Forest County. It is a huge oratorio of the sacred and the profane, set in bars, churches, and barbershops over a crucial seven-day period in the life of would-be playwright Joubert Jones during February 1966. Divine Days creates a profound microcosm of African-American life. It is the most prodigious literary creation since Ellison's Invisible Man forty years ago. Joubert Jones - playwright, journalist, bartender, lover - confronts and transcends the power of a fantastic group of bar denizens whose personalities run the gamut of classical myths, Shakespearean heros, Shakespearean villains, religious true-believers, and ghetto dwellers. Joubert is evolving a memory from the yeasty material of his friend and mentor Sugar-Groove into a play. Sugar-Groove is a world traveler, a mythical lover, who has twenty nicknames connected with his prowess. He is trickster-as-angel. Joubert's volatile and fragile girlfriend, Imani, is desperately searching for her abandoned siblings, a meaningful self-definition of her Blackness, and a place to settle her warring spirit. Joubert also encounters the powerful presence of his Aunt Eloise and the ever-haunting phantasmagoric W. A. D. Ford, the demonic trickster and manipulator of bodies and souls. Ford is the Mephistopheles of Forest County, and he comes to represent the forces of cosmic evil in the world. The neighborhood of Joubert's imagination becomes a theater enraptured with the voices of the living and the dead, acted out in Aunt Eloise's Night Light Lounge. The critic John Cawelti has called this novel: "the Ulysses of the South Side." In the tradition of Joyce's Dedalus, Ellison's invisible narrator, Bellow's Augie March, and Heller's Yossarian, Joubert's voice emerges clearly upon Divine Days's ebullient stage.

W.W. Norton & Co., Inc.

A unanimous chorus of critical acclaim greeted this powerful novel last year―one of the most significant works of African-American fiction since Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. This huge oratorio of a novel unfolds over seven days in the life of Joubert Jones, an aspiring playwright making ends meet tending bar at his Aunt Eloise's Night Lounge. A Rabelaisian cast of characters and a Shakespearean range of voices crowd the pages of this book, an infinitely rich and suggestive tapestry of Black-American life and identity.

Divine Days

W.W.Norton&Company

The Bloodworth Orphans

Random House]

A ninety-one-year-old Black woman tells her story of passage from slavery to freedom to her twenty-one-year-old grandson

Two Wings to Veil My Face

Meteor in the Madhouse

Review "This rich and wonderful work is Forrest's Dubliners. . . . Bringing this novel together is one of the great comic gifts in twentieth-century literature . . . but taken to many places even great Joyce could not go. Like Joyce, Forrest was well aware that the belly laugh and the most bitter moment of tragedy are forever twinned." --Stanley Crouch, New York Times Book Review"I was, to put it mildly, deeply moved that in his last days, terribly weakened, his words rang true and so strong." --Studs Terkel"He spoke and wrote out of the conflicted heart of Chicago but found a transcendent emotional jurisprudence in the heart and soul of the blues/jazz idiom that was his birthright from the bars and juke joints that shaped his perspective on the human condition." --James Alan McPherson Product Description Forrest's long-awaited last work follows the last days of journalist Joubert Jones and his long relationship with his friend and mentor, the idealistic and doomed poet Leonard Foster.

TriQuarterly

<div> <div>A virtuosic epic applauded by Stanley Crouch as "an adventurous masterwork that provides our literature with a signal moment," back in print in a definitive new edition "I have an awful memory for faces, but an excellent one for voices," muses Joubert Jones, the aspiring playwright at the center of Divine Days. A kaleidoscopic whorl of characters, language, music, and Black experience, this saga follows Jones for one week in 1966 as he pursues the lore and legends of fictional Forest County, a place resembling Chicago's South Side. Joubert is a veteran, recently returned to the city, who works for his aunt Eloise's newspaper and pours drinks at her Night Light Lounge. He wants to write a play about Sugar-Groove, a drifter, "eternal wunderkind," and local folk hero who seems to have passed away. Sugar-Groove's disappearance recalls the subject of one of Joubert's earlier writing attempts--W. A. D. Ford, a protean, diabolical preacher who led a religious sect known as "Divine Days." Joubert takes notes as he learns about both tricksters, trying to understand their significance. Divine Days introduces readers to a score of indelible characters: Imani, Joubert's girlfriend, an artist and social worker searching for her lost siblings and struggling to reconcile middle-class life with her values and Black identity; Eloise, who raised Joubert and whose influence is at odds with his writerly ambitions; (Oscar) Williemain, a local barber, storyteller, and founder of the Royal Rites and Righteous Ramblings Club; and the Night Light's many patrons. With a structure inspired by James Joyce and jazz, Leon Forrest folds references to African American literature and cinema, Shakespeare, the Bible, and classical mythology into a heady quest that embraces life in all its tumult and adventure. This edition brings Forrest's masterpiece back into print, incorporating hundreds of editorial changes that the author had requested (but were never made) when the book was picked up by W. W. Norton after a disastrous warehouse fire destroyed most of the inventory from the original printing of the book by Another Chicago Press.</div> </div>

Seminary Co-op Offsets

Book by Forrest, Leon, Drown, Merle

Drown, Merle

A unanimous chorus of critical acclaim greeted this powerful novel last yearâ€”one of the most significant works of African-American fiction since Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man.This huge oratorio of a novel unfolds over seven days in the life of Joubert Jones, an aspiring playwright making ends meet tending bar at his Aunt Eloise's Night Lounge. A Rabelaisian cast of characters and a Shakespearean range of voices crowd the pages of this book, an infinitely rich and suggestive tapestry of Black-American life and identity.

Another Chicago Press

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

Books by FORREST, LEON

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

There Is a Tree More Ancient Than Eden (Phoenix Fiction)

The Bloodworth Orphans (Phoenix Fiction)

Divine Days: A Novel

Divine Days

The Bloodworth Orphans

Two Wings to Veil My Face

Meteor in the Madhouse

Divine Days: A Novel

Meteor in the Madhouse

Divine Days