Albert Murray—SOUTH TO A VERY OLD PLACE—HC—"A wonderful writer"

Description: • For Your Consideration: • A 1995 MODERN LIBRARY Hardcover & First Edition Thus: • “SOUTH TO A VERY OLD PLACE” (Modern Library, 1995) (Hardcover, First Edition Thus) • BY ALBERT MURRAY • “ALBERT MURRAY is a man whose learning did not interfere with understanding. An authority on soul form the days of old, he is right on right back to back and commands respect. He doesn’t have to look it up. He already knows. If you want to know, look him up. He is the unsquarest person I know.” —DUKE ELLINGTON • ABOUT THIS TITLE: • “At once an intimate personal journal and an incisive social history, SOUTH TO A VERY OLD PLACE fuses the experience of novelist and critic ALBERT MURRAY on an odyssey through the South of the early seventies with his remembrances of growing up there in the twenties and thirties…. A book that blends folklore, history, and memory as it reflects on the South, past and present, and on the intermingled blackness and whiteness of American culture.”—THE PUBLISHER • “ALBERT MURRAY is one of the best-kept secrets in contemporary American literature. He is our premier writer about jazz and blues, an incisive literary critic, and a social commentator of wide-ranging vision.”—WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD • “A kind of anti-travel book, in which the observable facts are constantly eclipsed by the author’s memories and associations—even as he puts the torch to every bit of received wisdom about the region and its racial conundrums…. The book’s speed, intensity, tenderness, and pugilistic laughter remain as fresh as ever…. Blazing a fresh trail through the briar patch, turning every assertion about race and identity and the storied South on its head, he seems almost determined to leave the reader behind. Yet you keep turning the pages, eager as ever to accompany MURRAY around the next bend and to share with him the purest of all literary intoxicants: self-discovery.” —JAMES MARCUS, COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW • “New insights streak like horns through a solid pulsing of home truths.” —ANATOLE BROYARD, NEW YORK TIMES • “ALBERT MURRAY employs a style that allows for the fruitful marriage of instinct and intellect…. His perceptions are firmly based in the blues idiom, and it is black music no less than literary criticism and historical analysis that gives his work its authenticity, its emotional vigor and its tenacious hold on the intellect…. [It also] destroys some fashionable sociopolitical interpretations of growing up black.” —TONI MORRISON, NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW • “One of the most exquisite books of any year.”—BOSTON GLOBE • “The voice that is heard in these pages is that of a man who revels in his blackness, even as he celebrates his American identity. MURRAY’s is essentially a comic vision, based upon his sense of the absurd, and derived from that rough tradition of native existentialism that embraces both BRER RABBIT and the blues.” —ROBERT BONE • “MURRAY was a scholar, a philosopher, a novelist, an essayist, and an autobiographer (as in the superb book SOUTH TO A VERY OLD PLACE).”—RICHARD BRODY, THE NEW YORKER • “MURRAY’s SOUTH TO A VERY OLD PLACE (1971, a finalist for the National Book Award) includes a rollicking verbal jam session in which middle-aged and elderly black folks in Mobile riff on the Civil Rights movement. JOHNSON’s former aide JACK VALENTI wrote to MURRAY in 1972, and told him that LBJ read the section out loud to him, adding, ‘you should know that the President found what you wrote, poetically and structurally, as well as emotionally, to his taste.’”—PAUL DEVLIN, SLATE • “MURRAY’s prose style is incredibly inventive…. Rolling cadences of FAULKNER and JOYCE, but soaked in jazz rhythms and electrified by a terrifically keen ear for Southern black speech. Nobody, but nobody, has ever captured Southern black speech, in all its deep humanity and signifying boastfulness, like ALBERT MURRAY.” —CHARLES MONAGHAN • “MURRAY is always the playful theoretician, a man who can turn a potential identity crisis into a vital style. He can equate the improvisations of UNCLE REMUS, JELLY ROLL MORTON, and LOUIS ARMSTRONG with the existentialism of CAMUS and SARTRE.” —R. Z. SHEPHERD, TIME MAGAZINE • MURRAY possesses “the poet’s language, the novelist’s sensibility, the essayist’s clarity, the jazzman’s imagination, the gospel singer’s depth of feeling.”—ROBERT COLES, THE NEW YORKER • “The great delight of the book is its style, a jazz orchestra-like multimodality in which MURRAY’s self as “I,” as “you,” as “we” steers the wild ride…. MURRAY sets a very high bar for his writing: to sound and sway like a jazz band, its competitive contradictions and consonances a kind of symbol for the self and its profusion of roles. Thus, as a swing band creates striking colors and sounds, riffs and melodies, alternating written arrangements and improvised solos, in each tune, so, too, does MURRAY mimic this elegant synthesis on the page. His expert technique and soulful bounce in phrases, sentences, and sections brings out the best of Black orality and the journalistic inquisitiveness of an author. That author—the best literary ear I know—speech-writes his way through America’s sonic landscape, sounding its pulse by tapping its plurality.”—THOMAS LARSON (BLOG) • “MURRAY’s writing has been called ‘jazz-like,’ and while that adjective has been applied far too loosely, in MURRAY’s case it is actually appropriate…. In SOUTH TO A VERY OLD PLACE, we find the writer, one might say, exploring the chords that undergird that melody—operating, in other words, like a jazz soloist.”—CLIFFORD THOMPSON, LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS • MORE ABOUT THE AUTHOR: • “The last of the giants.” —JAMES ALAN MCPHERSON • “He is his own man and has done things in his own way, and what he says demands to be heard. and he gives the pleasure that a good writer—a real writer—always gives.” —ROBERT PENN WARREN • “A lithe and dapper man with an astonishing gift of verbal fluency, by turns grandiloquent and earthy.”—HENRY LOUIS GATES, THE NEW YORKER • “[A] wonderful writer.” —KURT VONNEGUT • “One of America’s great cultural thinkers and one of our original champions.” —WYNTON MARSALIS • “The man of letters—the cultural critic who ranges over genres to effect ‘the meeting of literature with social actions and attitudes and manners,’ in the words of LIONEL TRILLING—has been a vanishing breed in American literature. Indeed, the species may well have gone extinct in 2013 with the death of ALBERT MURRAY.”—MICHAEL ANDERSON, NEW CRITERION • “One of the most original stylists in American letters, a philosopher of the blues, who championed resilience and improvisation against the cold certainty of life’s uncertainties, and helped articulate and explain the dynamic synthesis that is American culture, as much black as it is white, if not more.”—PAUL DEVLIN, SLATE • MURRAY is possessed “of the poet’s language, the novelist’s sensibility, the essayist’s clarity, the jazzman’s imagination, the gospel singer’s depth of feeling.”—ROBERT COLES, THE NEW YORKER • • For other details about this book, please see below. • SERIES: “THE MODERN LIBRARY OF THE WORLD’S BEST BOOKS” TITLE: “SOUTH TO A VERY OLD PLACE” AUTHOR: ALBERT MURRAY TYPE: HARDCOVER PUBLISHER, LOCALE, & YEAR: MODERN LIBRARY (New York), 1995 EDITION: First Edition Thus* *RE: On the Copyright Page, the statement “1995 Modern Library Edition” & this Number Row: “2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1.”FIRST PUBLISHED: 1971 PAGES: 266ISBN: 0-679-60147-3 NOTE: THIS BOOK is not an ex-library copy nor a Book-of-the-Month-Club edition.CONDITION OF DUST JACKET: VERY GOOD PLUS.DJ is clean & bright. Price (13.50) is unclipped. Corners & spine tips are bumped. Light scratching & smudging (from normal handling) on sides.CONDITION OF BOOK ITSELF: VERY GOOD PLUS. Book is square. Boards are clean. Corners are sharp. Spine is tight & uncreased with bumped tips (especially so at the bottom). Text-block edges are faintly toned & scuffed. All the pages are clean & bright—with no writing, no underlining, no highlighting, no tears, no stains, no foxing, no foul odor, etc. LOOKS UNREAD.•• SHIPPING NEWS: This book will be wrapped with care before being shipped in a cushioned & sturdy mailer. THANK YOU! ********************** /\___/\=•ᆺ•= “We believe it’s good business to be good to our customers.” *********** FLAPPINCAT’s HOUSE RULES ***********1. GENERAL TREATMENT. We enjoy treating FLAPPINCAT customers with honesty & respect & warmth because that’s how we like to be treated when we buy things on eBay.2. GENERAL ATTITUDE. We are grateful you choose to trust us with your business. 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Price: 39.99 USD

Location: Chapel Hill, North Carolina

End Time: 2024-12-22T23:17:38.000Z

Shipping Cost: 5.99 USD