As a cultural critic, biographer, essayist, and novelist, Albert Murray has had a wide-ranging and profound influence on American art in the decades since the Second World War. Artists as diverse as Walker Percy, Romare Bearden, and Wynton Marsalis have drawn from Murray and his ideas on jazz and the blues, modern consciousness, and the role of race in the American identity. His own works include The Hero and the Blues, Train Whistle Guitar, Good Morning Blues: The Autobiography of Count Basie as Told to Albert Murray, The Spyglass Tree, The Blue Devils of Nada, and The Seven League Boots. Yet this is the first book devoted to Murray himself, and fittingly it is based on the kind of conversations that have proven indispensable to his friends in the arts. It brings together twenty interviews with Murray conducted over the last twenty-four years, beginning with an interview that took place shortly after his second book, South to a Very Old Place, was published, and ending with a previously unpublished interview with the editor. In these conversations Murray discusses those who influenced him - Thomas Mann, Ernest Hemingway, Louis Armstrong, and Duke Ellington - and tells how they helped him develop a philosophy of art based on the blues as well as a new archetype of the American hero, the blues hero. The collection reveals a man who enjoys a good time and a good conversation and whose intellectual improvisations move over such subjects as his reminiscences about the South he grew up in, his insights about regional culture, and commentaries about the contemporary American scene. He is quick to laugh, to conspire, to correct misperceptions, to mimic the sounds a great jazz musician makes, or to recite lines from favorite poems or novels. Taken together, these interviews reveal Murray to be the composite American he describes in his first book, The Omni-Americans, which, when published in 1970, announced a new and important literary voice. Roberta S. Maguire is an assistant professor of English at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh.

Octavia Butler (1947-2006) spent the majority of her prolific career as the only major black female author of science fiction. Winner of both the Nebula and Hugo Awards as well as a MacArthur "genius" grant, the first for a science fiction writer, Butler created worlds that challenged notions of race, sex, gender, and humanity. Whether in the postapocalyptic future of the Parable stories, in the human inability to assimilate change and difference in the Xenogenesis books, or in the destructive sense of superiority in the Patternist series, Butler held up a mirror, reflecting what is beautiful, corrupt, worthwhile, and damning about the world we inhabit. In interviews ranging from 1980 until just before her sudden death in 2006, Conversations with Octavia Butler reveals a writer very much aware of herself as the "rare bird" of science fiction even as she shows frustration with the constant question,"How does it feel to be the only one?" Whether discussing humanity's biological imperatives or the difference between science fiction and fantasy or the plight of the working poor in America, Butler emerges in these interviews as funny, intelligent, complicated, and intensely original.

A key figure in modern science fiction and fantasy, Samuel R. Delany (b. 1942) is also one of the most acclaimed figures in contemporary literary theory and gay/lesbian literature. As a gay African American writer, Delany's cerebral, experimental prose crosses lines of genre, gender, sexuality, and class. Several of his works--Dhalgren, The Einstein Intersection, Babel-17, Stars in My Pocket like Grains of Sand, and the Nevéryon quartet are considered landmarks of "new wave" science fiction. His essays and critical works approach a wide variety of subjects from a perspective that is both resolutely philosophical and deeply provocative. Conversations with Samuel R. Delany collects interviews with the writer from 1980 to 2007. Delany considers the interview an especially fruitful form for the generation of ideas, and he has made it an integral part of his own work. In fact, two of his critical works are collections of interviews and correspondence. He insists that all interviews with him be written correspondence so that he is allowed the time and space to deliberate on each response. As a result, the conversations presented here are as rigorously constructed, elusive, and intellectually stimulating as his essays.

Product Description: Leon Forrest (1937-1997) was among the most innovative and ambitious African American fiction writers of the twentieth century. His books-which include novels There Is a Tree More Ancient than Eden, Divine Days, The Bloodworth Orphans, and Two Wings to Veil My Face, and the posthumously published novella Meteor in the Madhouse-fused classical mythology, realism, and African American history and culture...read more

Product Description: Known for his blending of philosophy, spirituality, humor, and a rollicking good story, Charles Johnson is one of the most important novelists writing today. From his magical first novel, Faith and the Good Thing, to his decidedly philosophical Oxherding Tale; from his swashbuckling indictment of the slave trade in the National Book Award-winning Middle Passage, to his more recent imaginative treatment of Martin Luther King Jr...read more

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A traveler's guide to New Orleans provides information on accommodations, dining, sights, entertainment, Mardi Gras and other local festivals, and explore the city's unique areas and colorful attractions. Original. (view table of contents)

Provides travel tips and cultural information about Bermuda, and recommendations for dining and lodging

Product Description: Charles Johnson is one of the most talented artists currently working in America. All of his novels have been widely praised and read. Middle Passage won the National Book Award and established Johnson in the tradition of Ralph Ellison, one of his idols...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Covers the political, scientific, cultural, and environmental events from the beginning of recorded history

A traveler's guide to New Orleans provides information on accommodations, dining, sights, entertainment, Mardi Gras and other local festivals, and explore the city's unique areas and colorful attractions. Original. (view table of contents)

Provides travel tips and cultural information about Bermuda, and recommendations for dining and lodging

Product Description: Conversations about issues from how to raise a child to the Vietnam War to how to save the African-American race that white America is trying to destroy.

Seventeen contemporary black writers candidly discuss their own styles, works, and personal concerns and voice their opinions of other literary figures