6 Books Published by Melville House on AALBC — Book Cover Collage

Click for more detail about Bell Hooks: The Last Interview: And Other Conversations by bell hooks Bell Hooks: The Last Interview: And Other Conversations

by bell hooks
Melville House (Jul 18, 2023)
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“I will not have my life narrowed down. I will not bow down to somebody else’s whim or to someone else’s ignorance.”
—bell hooks

bell hooks was a prolific, trailblazing author, feminist, social activist, cultural critic, and professor. Born Gloria Jean Watkins, bell used her pen name to center attention on her ideas and to honor her courageous great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks.

hooks’s unflinching dedication to her work carved deep grooves for the feminist and anti-racist movements. In this collection of 7 interviews, stretching from early in her career until her last interview, she discusses feminism, the complexity of rap music and masculinity, her relationship to Buddhism, the "politic of domination," sexuality, and love and the importance of communication across cultural borders. Whether she was sparking controversy on campuses or facing criticism from contemporaries, hooks relentlessly challenged herself and those around her, inserted herself into the tensions of the cultural moment, and anchored herself with love.


Click for more detail about The Talented Ribkins by Ladee Hubbard The Talented Ribkins

by Ladee Hubbard
Melville House (Aug 08, 2018)
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“For sheer reading pleasure Ladee Hubbard’s original and wildly inventive novel is in a class by itself.” —Toni Morrison

“The Talented Ribkins is a charming and delightful debut novel with a profound heart, and Ladee Hubbard’s voice is a welcome original.” —Mary Gaitskill

   • An INDIE NEXT 2017 pick
   • Winner of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award
   • Winner of the William Faulkner - William Wisdom Prize
 
At seventy-two, Johnny Ribkins shouldn’t have such problems: He’s got one week to come up with the money he stole from his mobster boss or it’s curtains. 

What may or may not be useful to Johnny as he flees is that he comes from an African-American family that has been gifted with super powers that are a bit, well, odd. Okay, very odd. For example, Johnny’s father could see colors no one else could see. His brother could scale perfectly flat walls. His cousin belches fire. And Johnny himself can make precise maps of any space you name, whether he’s been there or not.

In the old days, the Ribkins family tried to apply their gifts to the civil rights effort, calling themselves The Justice Committee. But when their, eh, superpowers proved insufficient, the group fell apart. Out of frustration Johnny and his brother used their talents to stage a series of burglaries, each more daring than the last.
 
Fast forward a couple decades and Johnny’s on a race against the clock to dig up loot he’s stashed all over Florida. His brother is gone, but he has an unexpected sidekick: his brother’s daughter, Eloise, who has a special superpower of her own.
 
Inspired by W. E. B. Du Bois’s famous essay “The Talented Tenth” and fuelled by Ladee Hubbard’s marvelously original imagination, The Talented Ribkins is a big-hearted debut novel about race, class, politics, and the unique gifts that, while they may cause some problems from time to time, bind a family together.

Book Review

Click for more detail about The Queue by Basma Abdel Aziz The Queue

by Basma Abdel Aziz
Melville House (Jun 02, 2016)
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Set against the backdrop of a failed political uprising, The Queue is a chilling debut that evokes Orwellian dystopia, Kafkaesque surrealism, and a very real vision of life after the Arab Spring.

In a surreal, but familiar, vision of modern day Egypt, a centralized authority known as ‘the Gate’ has risen to power in the aftermath of the ‘Disgraceful Events,’ a failed popular uprising. Citizens are required to obtain permission from the Gate in order to take care of even the most basic of their daily affairs, yet the Gate never opens, and the queue in front of it grows longer.

Citizens from all walks of life mix and wait in the sun: a revolutionary journalist, a sheikh, a poor woman concerned for her daughter’s health, and even the brother of a security officer killed in clashes with protestors. Among them is Yehia, a man who was shot during the Events and is waiting for permission from the Gate to remove a bullet that remains lodged in his pelvis. Yehia’s health steadily declines, yet at every turn, officials refuse to assist him, actively denying the very existence of the bullet.

Ultimately it is Tarek, the principled doctor tending to Yehia’s case, who must decide whether to follow protocol as he has always done, or to disobey the law and risk his career to operate on Yehia and save his life.

Written with dark, subtle humor, The Queue describes the sinister nature of authoritarianism, and illuminates the way that absolute authority manipulates information, mobilizes others in service to it, and fails to uphold the rights of even those faithful to it.


Click for more detail about The Happy Marriage by Tahar Ben Jelloun The Happy Marriage

by Tahar Ben Jelloun
Melville House (Jan 12, 2016)
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“Ben Jelloun is arguably Morocco’s greatest living author, whose impressive body of work combines intellect and imagination in magical fusion.” —The Guardian
 
In The Happy Marriage, the internationally acclaimed Moroccan author Tahar Ben Jelloun tells the story of one couple—first from the husband’s point of view, then from the wife’s—just as legal reforms are about to change women’s rights forever.
 
The husband, a painter in Casablanca, has been paralyzed by a stroke at the very height of his career and becomes convinced that his marriage is the sole reason for his decline.
 
Walled up within his illness and desperate to break free of a deeply destructive relationship, he finds escape in writing a secret book about his hellish marriage. When his wife finds it, she responds point by point with her own version of the facts, offering her own striking and incisive reinterpretation of their story.
 
Who is right and who is wrong? A thorny issue in a society where marriage remains a sacrosanct institution, but where there’s also a growing awareness of women’s rights. And in their absorbing struggle, both sides of this modern marriage find out they may not be so enlightened after all.


Click for more detail about Gabriel Garcia Marquez: The Last Interview: and Other Conversation by Gabriel Garcia Marquez Gabriel Garcia Marquez: The Last Interview: and Other Conversation

by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Melville House (Jan 27, 2015)
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An intimate and lively collection of interviews with a giant of twentieth century literature—the only collection of interviews with Marquez available
 
Hailed by the New York Times as a "conjurer of literary magic," Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez is known to millions of readers worldwide as the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude. Beloved by readers of nearly all ages, he is surely the most popular literary novelist in translation—and he remains so today, a decade after the publication of his final novel.

In addition to the first-ever English translation of Marquez’s last interview, this unprecedented volume includes his first interview, conducted while he was in the throes of writing One Hundred Years of Solitude, which reveals the young writer years before the extraordinary onslaught of success that would make him a household name around the world. Also featured is a series of unusually wide-ranging conversations with Marquez’s friend Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza—surely the only interview with Marquez that includes the writer’s insights into both the meaning of true love and the validity of superstitions. Gabriel Garcia Marquez: The Last Interview also contains two interviews with Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter David Streitfeld.

A wide-ranging and revealing book, Gabriel Garcia Marquez: The Last Interview is an essential book for lifelong fans of Marquez—and readers who are just getting encountering the master’s work for the first time.


Click for more detail about James Baldwin The Last Interview: and Other Conversations by James Baldwin James Baldwin The Last Interview: and Other Conversations

by James Baldwin
Melville House (Dec 02, 2014)
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Never before available, the unexpurgated last interview with James Baldwin

“I was not born to be what someone said I was. I was not born to be defined by someone else, but by myself, and myself only.” When, in the fall of 1987, the poet Quincy Troupe traveled to the south of France to interview James Baldwin, Baldwin’s brother David told him to ask Baldwin about everything—Baldwin was critically ill and David knew that this might be the writer’s last chance to speak at length about his life and work.

The result is one of the most eloquent and revelatory interviews of Baldwin’s career, a conversation that ranges widely over such topics as his childhood in Harlem, his close friendship with Miles Davis, his relationship with writers like Toni Morrison and Richard Wright, his years in France, and his ever-incisive thoughts on the history of race relations and the African-American experience.

Also collected here are significant interviews from other moments in Baldwin’s life, including an in-depth interview conducted by Studs Terkel shortly after the publication of Nobody Knows My Name. These interviews showcase, above all, Baldwin’s fearlessness and integrity as a writer, thinker, and individual, as well as the profound struggles he faced along the way.