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Books by Robert Fleming
African American Writers
Handbook /
The Wisdom of the Elders
After Hours: A Collection of
Erotic Writing by Black Men /
Intimacy: Erotic Stories of Love, Lust, and Marriage by Black
Men
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After Hours: A Collection of
Erotic Writing by Black Men
Edited By Robert Fleming
Publishers Weekly Review
Readers and critics discouraged by so much
recent mainstream African-American fiction (especially romances)
will find plenty to enjoy in this collection, which aspires to
be more literary than smutty and succeeds in exploding a few
stereotypes in the process.
Contributors include such established figures
as National Book Award-winner Charles Johnson (Middle Passage)
and Alexs D. Pate (Amistad), as well as several newer
writers. Kenji Jasper's "Up" examines the hollowness
that follows the illicit thrill of sex for career advancement,
while Tracy Grant describes the unraveling of a young minister
tempted by his ex-lover in "The Apostle Charles."
"Wallbanging" by Brian Egleston is a lighthearted but
cautionary account of al fresco copulation on the Great Wall of
China from the perspective of a lawyer who can't believe the
stupidity of his clients.
Brian Peterson's "1-800-CONNECT" is
an amusing romp, even though writing about phone sex may seem
like a substitute for a substitute for the real thing. Often the
protagonists celebrate what it feels like to get the girl, but
not always to keep her: the relationship in Jervey Tervalon's
"Twisted" is derailed when Jordan finds out
progressively more troubling facts about his beloved Daphne, and
a woman is less than understanding when her 28-year-old
boyfriend finally reveals that he is till a virgin in Brandon
Massey's "The Question." There are a few duds among
these stories and novel excerpts, but overall the skill level is
high.
Forecast: Though written by men, and
largely about men, this collection will likely end up mostly in
the hands of women eager to discover secrets the other sex has
been keeping. * * *
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A Selection of the Black Expression
Book Club
Just the word "erotica" makes
hearts beat a little faster and minds wander to delicious,
dangerously taboo places. the nineteen original stories in this
collection, written by today's premier black male writers,
celebrate the heated dances of passion and intimacy with
lyricism and full-frontal candor without playing into racial,
cultural or social stereotypes.
After Hours: A Collection of
Erotic Writing by Black Men (A Plume Original), edited by
Robert Fleming, offers a fresh glimpse at the modern African
American man who is sensitive, alert, enterprising, and ready to
take care of business in the arenas of love, sex, and moral
responsibility.
"If there's one thing most people love,
it's great sex," writes Fleming in his introduction.
"Almost as good as experiencing it ourselves is good, hot,
provocative erotica, stories that give us a steamy sensual life,
a natural buzz. The stories in this collection were chosen for
the art and style of the story told, the sexual heat of the
scenes, and the universality of the themes and experience
presented." Featuring such authors as Charles Johnson, John
A. Williams, Colin Channer, Clarence Major, Arthur Flowers,
Kenji Jasper, Alexis D. Pate, Jervey Tervalon, Gary Phillips,
Cole Riley, and more, After Hours presents a strong
collective view of the contemporary Black man and his carnal
appetites, and explores the diversity and richness of the
African-American sexual experience.
Set against romantic backdrops from Mexico to
the South Seas, new Orleans to the Caribbean, this
groundbreaking, challenging, and sensually satisfying collection
explores unbridled lust, full-tilt erotic love, self
affirmation, and destructive obsession in insightful, frank
terms. * * *
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Review By J.D. Simmons
Robert Fleming's unique collection
of erotic short stories reveals black sensuality that's
imaginative and touching as well as breath-taking and
sweat-breaking. Stereotyped as studs and dominatrices, portrayed
in videos with gyrating booties backing it up to spraddle-legged
loins, black people rarely encounter literary and pop images
integrating their genital sexuality with head, heart, work,
commitment and soul hunger. So, Fleming has intentionally
selected stories about heterosexual coupling that illustrate a
principle claimed by Maya Angelou: the hottest erogenous zone is
between our ears, not between our legs. Have no fear, though;
fire down below is by no means neglected here. But it ain't porn
— sex reduced to its least human terms — when the
titillation flows from the pens of Old Masters like John A.
Williams and Clarence Major, the lush vision of Syracuse
University fiction professor Arthur Flowers and the feminist
consciousness of New Orleans arts guru Kalamu Ya Salaam, who
edited The Black Collegian for more than a decade and has moved
on to co-found a multi-media publishing company, lead a poetry
performance ensemble and cut a spoken-word CD.
These men and a deft crew of next-wave writers
beguile us with true erotica: flowing technicolor dream
sequences in locales that seduce, like the Maui of Earl Sewell's
opulently descriptive tale, "Rock Me Baby." In this
edgy fantasy a man used to owning and controlling finds himself
on a boat, captive and captivated by a knife-wielding woman who
immobilizes him in a thunderstorm on the Pacific Ocean and stirs
up his own personal typhoon by giving him...and he...well, you
gotta go there for yourself (it's good for that; taking a friend
along wouldn't be a bad thing either).
In "Where Strangers Meet," Bobby
Adams delivers a long invocation of sensuality like a Baptist
deacon doing the main prayer at Sunday service. Time after time,
when his panting pleas bring you to the crest, ready for the
release of "in Jesus name we pray, Amen," the good
brother pauses, takes another breath and commences to raise the
Spirit with even greater fervor, leaving you no choice but keep
on riding the crest. The premise: a couple, already in an
illicit relationship, decides to spice it up even more with a
re-enactment of a first meeting. As Adams says at the start of
the story, "There is something erotic about just the
thought of meeting some unknown person for the first time and
getting so turned on that you are completely willing to risk
compromising your traditional ideas of acquaintance, courtship
and ethics in order to just go ahead and get taboo love."
Well, after first using the pencil to prune this rather
cumbersome sentence, I would sign on to the sentiment. I mean,
we've all been there, haven't we? (Seventeen, cross-country
train, suddenly and inexplicably hands-on with my seatmate, a
soldier in crisp Army khaki probably not much older than me, but
I was so ignorant I didn't know why after a while he walked bent
over to the bathroom with little wet spots on his fly.)
Fleming has been a canny editor here.
After
Hours opens with a nifty giggle from National Book Award-winner
Charles Johnson (he who displayed green-eyed bad grace when Toni
Morrison received the 1993 Nobel Prize in literature, tut tut
tut). After that understated opener, the themes and styles of
the stories are nicely interspersed so the collection doesn't
become an indistinguishable stream of slurps, sucks and trigger
words. The second story, "Twisted," fulfills its title
on more than one level, using a sparse, linear prose, while the
next, Flowers' "Once Upon a Time" is opulently
Southern as crepe myrtle, the surreal South of kudzu-covered
forest and Spanish moss hanging from the poplar trees. Later,
"1-800-CONNECT" shows the real miracle of modern
technology, and Brian Egleston's "Wallbanging"
delivers a pair of sex-obsessed globetrotters who should have
remembered they weren't in Kansas any more.
Women and men do and get done equally in After
Hours' erotic universe. Women who complain that men don't know
from romance might pick up on the wonder and yearning threading
through these stories. At the very least they show that black
men can dream of sex that's more than friction and of women who
are eagerly, voluptuously sexual and also loveable, smart,
self-respecting and respectable. It might not be the worst idea
in the world to give After Hours to teens of both sexes who are
immersed in rap culture's version of sex — just to suggest
making the deep raunch sweeter and more personal than the
g-string bump-and-grind to narcotic beats, assaultive language
and modal-minor groans typical of much pop. Maybe help get JuWan
and Shaneekwa to read more? Okay, whatever.
Anyway, Fleming's done a fine piece of work
with this anthology. It's an After Hours joint self-aware,
self-loving people can enter without checking brain and class at
the door.
First published: July 30, 2002
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Judy Dothard Simmons is an award-winning poet,
feature writer, broadcaster and editor. Question and comments
for her should be addressed to dexta@cableone.net Robert Fleming has written numerous articles for Essence,
Black Enterprise, The Source, and The New York Times,
among others. He is the author of the
African American Writers
Handbook and
The Wisdom of the Elders. His poetry, essays,
and fiction have appeared in numerous periodical and books, including
Brown Sugar (available from Plume). He lives in New York City.
After Hours (256p)
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.— WashingtonPost
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Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.
As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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