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    The System of Dante's Hell
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    The System of Dante's Hell
    Unavailable
    The System of Dante's Hell
    Ebook156 pages2 hours

    The System of Dante's Hell

    By Amiri Baraka

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

  • Simultaneous publication with another LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka reissue, the story collection Tales, originally published in 1967.
  • Amiri Baraka was a poet, playwright, and story writer, but he published very few novels; this is his strongest novel.
  • The highly political elements of the novel are both provocative and highly relevant for a contemporary audience.
  • In early 2015, Grove is publishing SOS, an Amiri Baraka poetry retrospective. Baraka died in 2014, and interest in his work has grown since that time.
  • Publishing during Black History Month for additional promotional tie-ins.
  • There is a very strong appeal to librarians and academics, so promotion will include this focus.
  • Giveaways on Goodreads, LibraryThing, and through Advance Access.
  • Galleys (and e-galleys via Edelweiss) available 4-6 months in advance of publication.
  • Targeted outreach to AfAm publications and stores.
    • LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAkashic Books
    Release dateFeb 16, 2016
    ISBN9781617754142
    Unavailable
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    Reviews for The System of Dante's Hell

    4/5

    21 ratings6 reviews

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    • 2/5
      Amiri Baraka is probably best know for his "inside job" conspiracies about 911. A vicious anti-semite, he blamed the Jews and George Bush for the attacks on 911 and also was pro-rape in his early days. Calling for the rape of white women as a political statement. I am capable of separating politics and art, but some people cannot. Once you get past his revolting worldview, his writing reminds one of Burroughs although with a little more jazz to it. I was over beat writing once I discovered other literary writers, so this kind of felt like revisiting old hat. This novel should appeal to college students and poetry lovers, both of which I am not. It is in fact a novel comprised of the hell in his head, yet reads like what would have been cutting edge poetry in his time.It annoys me when black intellectuals get a pass on anti-semitism and talk about harming whites. I carried this into the book, so perhaps someone more naive then myself would have been a better judge of the writing,
    • 5/5
      Amiri Baraka's The System of Dante's Hell is a brilliant little book I am grateful to have discovered. I had previously read Baraka's criticism (e.g. Blues People, published under the name LeRoi Jones) and was generally familiar with his reputation as a poet. To my knowledge, this is Baraka's only novel (originally published ca. 1965) and one of only two of this prolific writer's published works in the fiction category.The newly published small paperback volume of just 160 pages belies the depth of the novel's thematic content as well as the complexity of its form. Baraka riffs on the structure of hell originally set forth by Dante to outline his perspective on humanity's faults, which is set forth in an unorthodox, stream-of-consciousness style. In addition to a pretty fascinating formal presentation, Baraka's work features ideas that command the reader's attention due to their particular boldness and poignancy. I highly recommend this work to prior readers of Baraka, those interested in exploring his work's particular political and social themes (at this time in his career or generally), as well as to any lover of bold ideas in brilliant literary form. Baraka's prose always punches through to strike the audience with his meaning, as it were, and yet it also rewards close scrutiny of its textual nuances by readers so inclined.Thank you for reading my thoughts. I hope they can be useful as you evaluate this prospective read. Note: It was my great good fortune to win a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review through the LibraryThing Early Reviewer program.
    • 4/5
      Hot beautiful angry poetry flowing like lava out of the mouth of a sixties art volcano is a more accurate description than the narrative novel described on the cover copy. I was first introduced to LeRoi Jones when as a college student I was blasted and impressed by reading his plays Dutchman/and The Slave. My reference point was quite limited by age and experience but I was drawn to his powerful words nonetheless. Since then I only briefly read him as he became Amiri Baraka and followed him from afar through the years until his death. This work is a wondrous surprise and a take on Inferno as imagined by a black city-youth with more language than he knew what to do with. I am exhausted and a little scared.
    • 3/5
      Angry, experimental prose by an influential twentieth-century African American.Amiri Baraka (1934-2004) was a leading voice in defining African American literature. He was a poet, a novelist, a music critic, and university teacher who exhorted blacks to create their own artistic forms rather than imitate those of whites. He and his political writing has been widely praised and attacked. In the 1960s, he gave up his birth name, LeRoy Jones, and took a leading role in the more militant movements of the time rather than in the non-violent civil rights movement. His later work lays bare black hatred and violence. The System of Dante’s Hell, written at this time, is meant to convey the depths of pain and isolation in urban ghettos. Written largely in prose, the book is highly complex, impressionistic, and non-linear.While I recognize Baraka’s power and wanted to read his work, I lacked the skill to decipher his words. His anger and contempt were evident, but I needed more structure. I applaud Akashic Books for republishing this important book and recommend it to more cosmopolitan readers than myself.Thanks to Akashic Books for a review copy of this book.
    • 4/5
      The System of Dante's Hell is a brilliant prose poem structured on the themes of Dante's Inferno exposing the pain and violence of early 60's Newark slums, a southern youth and the beat precincts of New York's Greenwich Village. Baraka's language sings and his denouement pierces — there is very little middle ground. It is a work of it's time — free-form jazz, abstract art and beat cadence flow through this short but dense autobiographical novel.
    • 4/5
      I'd read Dante's "The Inferno" (in English) a couple of times and was very much looking forward to reading this book. Baraka wrote it in 1963 when he was still LeRoi Jones; Woodie King Jr., producer and director of the writer's plays points out in his introduction this was a time when "America had not yet witnessed the Watts Riots, Malcolm had not been assassinated, the the Black Arts Movement was not in ascendance..." Though I'd heard of Baraka's last play, "The Most Dangerous Man in America," about WEB DuBois, I haven't seen it, nor did I know the writer's name — unfortunately a big gap in my education.Knowing that this experimental work had for its writer an intense connection with Dante's gave me a place to start. The language and imagery of "The System of Dante's Hell" are powerful and vivid, and forcefully push forward even an uninformed reader. It is both poetry and novel, free-form, yet it corresponds with the structure of Hell in Dante's work.There is freedom, however, and there is freedom. Baraka’s form of writing can be called free in that it is not in accordance with any classically European poetic form like that with which Dante wrote. Even without such a rigorous set of rules to constrain his expression, however, his words and meaning are imbued with imprisonment, the imprisonment of his life.Dante used a constraining form of writing to express imprisonment in the tortures of Hell for eternity as the consequences of choices made in life. Baraka, whose time, place and conventions of writing are different, makes what choices he can. Terrifyingly, for a black person in America, those choices are made in a life that is already Hell.I have to confess that there is a lot that I don’t understand in this book. If I have misread it, please forgive me; know that I am moved and impressed by what I have read, and no disrespect is intended.