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A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines
Category: Classics | Series: Serpent's Tail Classics
An Oprah Book Club selection Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize In a small Cajun community in the late 1940s, a young black man named Jefferson witnesses a liquor store shootout in which three men are killed. The only survivor, he is convicted of ...Show more
As Serious As Your Life: Black Music and the Free Jazz Revolution, 1957-1977 by Valerie Wilmer
Category: Music | Series: Serpent's Tail Classics
In this classic account of the new black music of the 1960s and 70s, celebrated photographer and jazz historian Val Wilmer tells the story of how a generation of revolutionary musicians established black music as the true vanguard of American culture. Placing the achievements of African-American artists ...Show more
Astragal by Albertine Sarrazin
Category: Fiction | Series: Serpent's Tail Classics
'My Albertine, how I adored her! Her luminous eyes led me through the darkness of my youth. She was my guide through the nights of one hundred sleeps. And now she is yours.' At the age of twenty-one, a sad and hungry Patti Smith walked into a bookshop in Greenwich Village and decided to spend her last 9 ...Show more
Beer in the Snooker Club by Waguih Ghali
Category: Fiction | Series: Serpent's Tail Classics Ser.
Behind the bar at Jameel's in Cairo hang two mugs engraved with the names of Ram and Font. During their years together in London, they drank many a pint of Bass from these mugs. But there is no Bass in Nasser's Egypt, so Ram and Font have to make do with a heady mixture of beer, vodka and whisky.
Closer by Dennis Cooper
Category: Literature | Series: Serpent's Tail Classics Ser.
The brutally frank and daring gay classic from countercultural icon Dennis Cooper
Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley
Category: Crime and Thrillers | Series: Serpent's Tail Classics
This is an award winning first novel that immediately established Mosley as a great American writer. Los Angeles, 1948: Easy Rawlins is a war veteran just fired from his job. Drinking in a friend's bar, he wonders how to meet his mortgage when a white man in a linen suit walks in, offering good money if ...Show more
Fatale by Jean-Patrick Manchette
Category: Fiction | Series: Serpent's Tail Classics
Aimee Joubert is a drop-dead gorgeous femme fatale with a penchant for bloody murder. Ever on the lookout for opportunities for self-enrichment, she finds plenty to like as a newcomer to the detestable backwater town of Bleville: small-minded parochialism, self-interested parish politics, rampant corrup ...Show more
Haruko / Love Poems by June Jordan
Category: Poetry | Series: Serpent's Tail Classics Ser.
In trailblazing poet, essayist, teacher and activist June Jordan's poems, love is a vision of revolutionary solidarity, crossing borders both emotional and literal with an outstretched hand. Haruko traces the faltering arc of a passionate love affair with another woman while Love Poems encompasses relat ...Show more
If He Hollers Let Him Go by Chester Himes
Category: Fiction | Series: Serpent's Tail Classics
Robert Jones is a crew leader in a naval shipyard in Los Angeles in the 1940s. He should have a lot going for him, being educated, with a steady job and a steady relationship. But in the four days covered in this novel, the impossibility of life as a black man in a white world is made devastatingly clea ...Show more
Jernigan by David Gates
Category: Fiction | Series: Serpent's Tail Classics
Peter Jernigan's life is slipping out of control. His wife's gone, he's lost his job and he's a stranger to his teenage son. Worse, his only relief from all this reality - alcohol - is less effective by the day. And when the medicine doesn't work, you up the dose. And when that doesn't work, what then? ...Show more
Man Enough to Be a Woman by Jayne County with Rupert Smith
Category: Film | Series: Serpent's Tail Classics Ser.
Remember Wayne County and the Electric Chairs? Long before drag queens dominated the media, before gender-bending, before punk, even before Stonewall, there was W/Jayne County. From the '60s to the '90s she's been the craziest, the most extreme queen ever to hit a rock 'n' roll stage. She's known and wo ...Show more
Ocean of Sound - Aether Talk, Ambient Sound and Imaginary Worlds by David Toop
Category: Culture | Series: Serpent's Tail Classics Ser.
David Toop's extraordinary work of sonic history travels from the rainforests of Amazonas to the megalopolis of Tokyo via the work of artists as diverse as Brian Eno, Sun Ra, Erik Satie, Kate Bush, Kraftwerk and Brian Wilson. Beginning in 1889 at the Paris exposition when Debussy first heard Javanese m ...Show more