Description
Book SynopsisThe pioneering novel of physical disability, transatlantic travel, and black international politics. A vital document of black modernism and one of the earliest overtly queer fictions in the African American tradition. Published for the first time.
A Penguin Classic
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice/Staff Pick
Vulture's Ten Best Books of 2020 pickBuried in the archive for almost ninety years, Claude McKay's
Romance in Marseille traces the adventures of a rowdy troupe of dockworkers, prostitutes, and political organizers--collectively straight and queer, disabled and able-bodied, African, European, Caribbean, and American. Set largely in the culture-blending Vieux Port of Marseille at the height of the Jazz Age, the novel takes flight along with Lafala, an acutely disabled but abruptly wealthy West African sailor. While stowing away on a transatlantic freighter, Lafala is discovered and locked in a frigid closet. Badly fro
Trade ReviewClaude McKay's poetry was one of the great forces in bringing about what is often called the 'Negro Literary Renaissance' -- James Weldon Johnson
I loved Claude McKay's
Romance in Marseille, so witty and so precise, a little instrument for imagining another kind of modernist history -- Adam Thirlwell * The White Review *
