ISBN: 0062913182 9780062913180

Category: Fiction / African American & Black / Urban & Street Lit

Page count: 217

<b>“The most important work of fiction by an Afro-American since Native Son.” —Addison Gayle, Jr., <i>The New York Times Book Review</i></b><br><br>A searing chronicle of the life of a young ex-convict and heroin addict in 1960’s Harlem, an unsparing portrait of a man who couldn’t free himself from the horrors of addiction <br><br><i>Blueschild Baby</i> takes place during the summer of 1967—the summer of race riots all across the nation; the Summer of Love in the Haight Ashbury; the summer of Marines dying near Con Thien, across the world in Vietnam—but the novel illuminates the contours of a more private hell: the angry desperation of a heroin addict who returns to his home in Harlem after being in prison.<br><br>First published in 1970, this frankly autobiographical novel was a revelation, a stunning depiction of a marginal figure, marked literally and figuratively by his drug addiction and navigating a predatory underground of junkies and hustlers—and named George Cain, like his author.<br><br>Now with a new preface by acclaimed writer Leslie Jamison, this is an unvarnished conjuring of the tyranny of dependence: its desperation, its degradation, its rage and rebellion; the fragile, unsettled, occasional shards of hope it permits; the strange joys of being alive and young and lost and hooked and full of feverish determination anyway.<br><br>“[A] powerful literary account of addiction.” —<i>The New Yorker</i>