Lover Man

Alston Anderson (1924–2008) was born in Panama to Jamaican parents who brought him to North Carolina as a child. After serving in the Army during World War II, Anderson attended North Carolina College and Columbia University on the G.I. Bill, as well as the Sorbonne, where he studied German philosophy. Moving in expatriate circles, he overlapped with James Baldwin at Yaddo, stayed with Robert Graves in Majorca, and co-interviewed Nelson Algren with Terry Southern for the Paris Review. After Lover Man, he published one novel, All God’s Children, a critical and commercial failure. Following a series of personal and professional ruptures, Anderson vanished from the public record in the early 1970s until the time of his death in New York’s Bellevue Hospital. Kinohi Nishikawa is the author of Street Players: Black Pulp Fiction and the Making of a Literary Underground. He teaches African American print culture at Princeton University.

“A gem of Americana . . . These stories span the early decades of the 20th century and address with nuance the Black characters’ negotiations with youthful turmoil, sexual desire, and race in the U.S. . . . Anderson’s feat is in finding the poetry of everyday moments among marginalized people. This deserves a place on the shelf of mid-century classics.”—Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)“Models of subtlety and sparsity . . . Anderson’s short story ‘Signifying’ is a masterpiece of the genre.” —Henry Louis Gates“One of the lost names of Black literature . . . His style is straightforward, but the simplicity is deceptive, the calm surface at odds with the depths sending up their clues . . . His ear, like Hurston’s, can be faultless . . . Lover Man has considerable interest as a portrait of black postwar migration from the lusty, incestuous-feeling, small-town South to the war-changed streets of Harlem . . . His storytelling gifts were undeniable.”—Darryl Pinckney, The New York Review of Books“[An] extraordinarily fine first collection . . . [A] writer with a perfect ear, a warm heart, and an amazing capacity to seize character and make it live . . . This reviewer was ensnared by the very first story, a combination of compassion, naturalness and humor. In only one (‘Suzie Q.’) do the dialect and malapropisms seem introduced deliberately for laughs—but you laugh. I had a feeling throughout, as I've had with some of the best West Indian and African writers, that if the novel is ever to come to life again it’s going to start at this level where folk wisdom has not been forgotten, true innocence still exists, characters act as well as feel.”—Selden Rodman, The New York Times“A born writer . . . What distinguishes Alston’s stories from the usual white American variety—derived from O. Henry at however far a remove—is that there’s no inevitable whip-crack ending. In fact, he makes his points by judicious ‘signifying’ . . . We see [his subject] clearly from the part of the retina that has not been fogged by too much direct staring.” —Robert Graves“Set mostly in North Carolina, moving to New York City and the German front, Anderson’s fifteen short stories are populated by African American outsiders, among them drifters, addicts and tricksters . . . Anderson’s writing is taut, the narrative voice beguiling . . . In an echo of his contemporary James Baldwin, Anderson picks apart the tired threads of racial politics . . . There’s an implicit ‘So What,’ to echo Miles Davis, in this fresh and unsettling collection.”—Douglas Field, Times Literary Supplement“The best books I’ve read in the past year are The Laws of Simplicity by John Maeda and Lover Man by Alston Anderson . . . Lover Man feels like an anthology, where it skips around but it all makes sense.”—Michael Bennett, Financial Times“The depth with which Lover Man explores Black life comes draped with a raunchy and sly critique as well, something rarely seen in major literature in the 1950s and ’60s . . . Anderson seemed to have little interest in either respectability or politics . . . The characters portrayed in Lover Man certainly exist outside of any culturally approved image. Anderson’s gritty portrayal of Black, Southern, country life stands as a testament to his talent.”—Carr Harkrader, The Assembly“These stories . . . display a genuine talent for fiction . . . All are rich with wonderful speech—racy, ribald, robust and startling . . . Some of these stories deal with death and violence and sorrow. One is about a rip-snorting fight with razors. Another is about the misery of a girl suffering from a bungled abortion and the baffled frustration of her lover. Several are about lust . . . they all are full of vigorous life, taut with emotion. They show that Alston Anderson possesses many of the qualities of a first-rate novelist—an ear for speech, a gift for storytelling, a sense of humor and a feeling for the humanness of human beings.”—Orville Prescott, The New York Times“With this series Anderson introduces himself not only as a first-class writer, but also as an observer who aims to talk only about life as it is lived by people who are not professionally sensitized to it . . . He is fascinated by the South, by what he has seen, and by what he has heard, and he manages to re-create that fascination for his reader.”—TIME Magazine

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