Tales

The sixteen artful and nuanced stories in this reissue of Amiri Baraka's seminal 1967 collection fall into two parts: the first nine concern themselves with the sensibility of a hip, perceptive young black man in white America. The last seven stories endeavor to place that same man within the context of his awareness of and participation in a rapidly emerging and powerfully felt negritude. They deal; it might be said, with the black man in black America. Yet these tales are not social tracts, but absolutely masterful fiction-provocative, witty, and, at times, bitter and aggressive.