It is winter, barely three days into 1926, seven years after Armistice; we are in the scintillating City, around Lenox Avenue, "when all the wars are over and there will never be another one... At last, at last, everything's ahead... Here comes the new. Look out. There goes the sad …
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It is winter, barely three days into 1926, seven years after Armistice; we are in the scintillating City, around Lenox Avenue, "when all the wars are over and there will never be another one... At last, at last, everything's ahead... Here comes the new. Look out. There goes the sad stuff. The bad stuff. The things-nobody-could-help stuff." But amid the euphoric decisiveness, a tragedy ensues among people who had train-danced into the City, from points south and west, in search of promise.
Joe Trace--in his fifties, door-to-door salesman of Cleopatra beauty products, erstwhile devoted husband--shoots to death his lover of three months, impetuous, eighteen-year-old Dorcas ("Everything was like a picture show to her"). At the funeral, his determined, hard-working wife, Violet, herself a hairdresser--who is given to stumbling into dark mental cracks, and who talks mostly to birds--tries with a knife to disfigure the corpse.
In a dazzling act of jazz-like improvisation, moving seamlessly in and out of past, present, and future, a mysterious voice--whose identity is a matter of each reader's imagination--weaves this brilliant fiction, at the same time showing how its blues are informed by the brutal exigencies of slavery. Richly combining history, legend, reminiscence, this voice captures as never before the ineffable mood, the complex humanity, of black urban life at a moment in our century we assumed we understood.
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Jazz
Paperback, 229 pages
English language
Published Nov. 10, 1993 by Picador.
- ISBN:
- 978-0-330-32996-5Copied ISBN!
- OCLC Number:
- 28799164
Jazz.
Paperback, 249 pages
German language
Published Jan. 1, 1994 by Rowohlt Tb..
- ISBN:
- 978-3-499-22853-7Copied ISBN!
- OCLC Number:
- 76086758
Jazz
library binding
English language
Published Oct. 10, 1999 by Tandem Library.
- ISBN:
- 978-0-7857-1985-4Copied ISBN!
Jazz
Paperback, 357 pages
Published Nov. 10, 1995 by Ediciones B.
- ISBN:
- 978-84-406-5696-4Copied ISBN!
Jazz
229 pages
English language
Published Nov. 10, 1992 by Alfred A. Knopf.
- ISBN:
- 978-0-679-41167-3Copied ISBN!
- OCLC Number:
- 25048293
Jazz
Hardcover, 240 pages
Spanish language
Published July 10, 1998 by MacMillan.
- ISBN:
- 978-0-330-32294-2Copied ISBN!
Jazz
mass market paperback, 248 pages
French language
Published March 30, 1995 by Editions Flammarion.
- ISBN:
- 978-2-264-02074-1Copied ISBN!
Jazz
275 pages
English language
Published Nov. 10, 1993 by Ediciones B.
- ISBN:
- 978-84-406-3164-0Copied ISBN!
Jazz
229 pages
English language
Published April 10, 1993 by Plume.
- ISBN:
- 978-0-452-26965-1Copied ISBN!
Jazz: a novel
229 pages
English language
Published Nov. 10, 2004 by Vintage International.
- ISBN:
- 978-1-4000-7621-5Copied ISBN!
Jazz
Hardcover
English language
Published Jan. 22, 1995 by Random House Value Publishing.
- ISBN:
- 978-0-517-13764-2Copied ISBN!
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