This "thoroughly engaging" novel by the author of Beetlecreek ("[a] quiet masterpiece" — Kirkus Reviews ) follows a Black journalist in the 1970s whose bourgeois life is turned upside down by the subject of his writing assignment. “One of the great novelists of the last 100 years.” —Ishmael Reed, author of Mumbo Jumbo In the midst of the tumultuous 1970s, Edwards, a freelance writer and Black Studies professor at a small college in New York City, is assigned a story for New Black Woman magazine: a profile of Mona Pariss, an aging former singer whose popularity once rivaled Josephine Baker’s. With his creditors at the door, Professor Edwards beats a path to the crumbling Harlem apartment house where Mona Pariss, once the toast of Europe for her singing, now lives in squalid obscurity. As his interviews progress, Edwards is gradually drawn into Mona’s strange world. At the same time, he finds himself entering into an affair with Hortense, a beautiful young assistant at New Black Woman. From revolutionary downtown poetry readings to a hospital bed on the Continent and back, becoming entangled in the lives of both women might turn Edwards’s bourgeois life upside down for good. A smart satire with a biting wit, Love Story Black is an unmissable novel by one of the masters of midcentury American fiction. “Thoroughly engaging. . . . Witty and sensible.” — Kirkus Reviews “[Demby is] a true artist.” —Arna Bontemps, author of Black Thunder “One of the great novelists of the last 100 years.”—Ishmael Reed, author of Mumbo Jumbo William Demby was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on December 25, 1922, and attended college in Clarksburg, West Virginia, before enlisting in World War II and serving in Italy. He graduated from Fisk University in 1947 then moved abroad to Rome, where he spent the next two decades working as a novelist, journalist, and script translator and screenwriter for the Italian cinema. In the late 1960s, Demby joined the faculty at The College of Staten Island, dividing his time between the United States and Italy. His works include Beetlecreek , The Catacombs , Love Story Black , and King Comus . In 2006, he was the recipient of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Lifetime Achievement. He died in Sag Harbor, New York, in 2013. Ishmael Reed is the author of over twenty-five books and plays, including Mumbo Jumbo and Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down . He is also a publisher, television producer, songwriter, radio and television commentator, lecturer, and has long been devoted to exploring an alternative black aesthetic: the trickster tradition, or Neo-Hoodooism. He has received the MacArthur Fellowship, the Los Angeles Times Robert Kirsch Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Award. Reed has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and is the only person to be nominated for the National Book Award in two categories in the same year. 1 “Miss Pariss? Miss Mona Pariss?” “Who are you? You my new welfare worker?” “No, mam—I’m—well, I’m a writer . . .” Hastily I backed away from the triple-chained crack in the door through which her darting suspicious eyes were studying me, and I assumed the smiling expression of a kindly undertaker to convince her, and myself as well, that I was neither a criminal nor a policeman—though my nose was vibrating convulsively from the exotic stench of collard greens, pork fat cooking, and powerful incense leaking out onto the darkly sinister landing of the fourth floor walk-up apartment where the great lady lived. “How come those people down at welfare always changing my worker?” she whined, she too shuffling back cautiously from her side of the door, so that I caught a fluttering glimpse of what looked like a tattered oriental robe of embroidered dragons and poisonous flowers draped over a slender body like an over-sized flag around a corpse. “I’m not a welfare worker, Miss Pariss,” I repeated loudly, thinking perhaps she was deaf. “I’m a writer—” “Oh, you one of them welfare auditors. Well, I ain’t got nothing to hide from the government. But where’s my Miss Hollygreen—that nice red-headed white girl got me my telephone put in. I ain’t seen hide nor hair of her since way before Christmas, and my arthritis been accumulating something terrible . . .” “Miss Pariss,” I said wearily, “I’ve been sent by New Black Woman Magazine to interview you, or at least seek your permission for such an interview—” Nervously I fumbled in my jacket pocket for the letter Gracie had had her secretary prepare for me, neatly typed and very officious looking on heavy bond paper, and bearing the self-consciously elegant New Black Woman letterhead. I pushed the crisp letter through the crack of the door but Miss Pariss only took another step backward. “I already been interviewed by the welfare people,” she said, sidestepping the letter, “three times—twice at the Center, and they didn’t even pay my busfare, and once by some pimplyassed dude who came snoop