Home: Social Essays (AkashiClassics: Renegade Reprint Series)

LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka)

$18.95

Publication Date: January 1st, 2009

Publisher:

Akashic Books, Ltd.

ISBN:

9781933354675

Pages:

250

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Description

A seminal Jones/Baraka literary land mine that launches AkashiClassics: Renegade Reprint Series.

“Jones/Baraka usually speaks as a Negro—and always as an American. He is eloquent, he is bold. He demands rights—not conditional favors.” —New York Times Book Review

In 2007, Akashic Books ushered Amiri Baraka back into the forefront of America’s literary consciousness with the short story collection Tales of the Out & the Gone. Now, this reissue of Home—long out of print—features a highly provocative and profoundly insightful collection of 1960s social and political essays.

Home is, in effect, the ideological autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka. The two dozen essays that constitute this book were written during a five-year span—a turbulent and critical period for African Americans and whites. The Cuban Revolution, the Birmingham bombings, Robert Williams’s Monroe Defense movement, the Harlem riots, the assassination of Malcolm X . . . each changed the way Jones/Baraka looked at America. This progressive change is recorded with honesty, anger, and passion in his writings.

About the Author

AMIRI BARAKA/LEROI JONES (1934–2014) was the author of numerous books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. He was named poet laureate of New Jersey by the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, from 2002–2004. His short story collection Tales of the Out & the Gone (Akashic Books) was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and won a 2008 PEN/Beyond Margins Award. He is also the author of Home: Social Essays, Black Music, The System of Dante’s Hell, and Tales, among other works.

Praise for Home: Social Essays (AkashiClassics: Renegade Reprint Series)

In Home, Amiri Baraka, the master hunter, aims for the hearts and minds of his readers, and hits both targets dead-center. The result, here in the twenty-first century, is no different than when the book was originally published more than forty years ago.

— Kenji Jasper, author of Dark

Baraka remains a prodigiously skilled writer . . . Ultimately, those most familiar with Baraka as a rabble-rousing poet may be surprised that his prose can so readily make one squirm as well as smile.
— Time Out New York

Baraka unabashedly steps on toes, but does it in such a way that you close the book thanking him for it . . . [R]efreshing from both ideological and technical perspectives. His books cannot be read casually.
— Idaho Statesman