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WYATT MASON-"Calling From Somewhere Above" |
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Contributed by Wyatt Mason
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Upon pulling a paperback copy of Ralph Ellison's Juneteenth off one of my shelves the other day, a friend expressed frustration with its cover. Not its design (a perfectly attractive blue book) but its content. A reader, my friend said, of Ellison's earlier novel, Invisible Man, who happened in a bookstore upon Juneteenth, would learn that this "NATIONAL BESTSELLER" is by the "Author of INVISIBLE MAN" but not that this work of fiction is, itself, a fiction: that Ellison's forty-year struggle to finish his second novel had not come to fruition and that Juneteenth was the title given to an unfinished book by a man not its author-a man whose name, tellingly, is kept from its cover. . . .
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