Amiable with Big Teeth: A Novel of the Love Affair between the Communists and the Poor Black Sheep of Harlem
About this audiobook
The unexpected discovery in 2009 of a completed manuscript of Claude McKay’s final novel was celebrated as one of the most significant literary events in recent years. Building on the already extraordinary legacy of McKay’s life and work, this colorful, dramatic novel centers on the efforts by Harlem intelligentsia to organize support for the liberation of fascist-controlled Ethiopia, a crucial but largely forgotten event in American history.
At once a penetrating satire of political machinations in Depression-era Harlem and a far-reaching story of global intrigue and romance, Amiable with Big Teeth plunges into the concerns, anxieties, hopes, and dreams of African Americans at a moment of crisis for the soul of Harlem—and America.
About the author
Claude McKay (1889–1948), born Festus Claudius McKay, is widely regarded as one of the most important literary and political writers of the interwar period and the Harlem Renaissance. Born in Jamaica, he moved to the United States in 1912 to study at the Tuskegee Institute. In 1928 he published his most famous novel, Home to Harlem, which won the Harmon Gold Award for Literature. In 1977 he was named the national poet of Jamaica.
Jean-Christophe Cloutier is an assistant professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the editor of Jack Kerouac’s original French writings, La vie est d’hommage, and translator of Kerouac’s two French novellas in The Unknown Kerouac: Rare, Unpublished & Newly Translated Writings, and his essay on the first collaboration between Ralph Ellison and Gordon Parks appears in Invisible Man: Gordon Parks and Ralph Ellison in Harlem.
Brent Hayes Edwards is a professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. His books include The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism and Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination.
Prentice Onayemi is an Earphones Award–winning audiobook narrator and a voice and film actor who is known for his roles in The Steam-Room Crooner, AmeriQua, and as Joey in the Tony Award–winning play War Horse.
