Divine Days

by Leon Forrest, Zachary Price (Preface by), Kenneth W Warren (Foreword by)

Overview

A virtuosic epic applauded by Stanley Crouch as "an adventurous masterwork that provides our literature with a signal moment," back in print in a definitive new edition

"I have an awful memory for faces, but an excellent one for voices," muses Joubert Jones, the aspiring playwright at the center of Divine Days. A kaleidoscopic whorl of characters, language, music, and Black experience, this saga follows Jones for one week in 1966 as he pursues the lore and legends of fictional Forest County, a place resembling Chicago's South Side. Joubert is a veteran, recently returned to the city, who works for his aunt Eloise's newspaper and pours drinks at her Night Light Lounge. He wants to write a play about Sugar-Groove, a drifter, "eternal wunderkind," and local folk hero who seems to have passed away. Sugar-Groove's disappearance recalls the subject of one of Joubert's earlier writing attempts--W. A. D. Ford, a protean, diabolical preacher who led a religious sect known as "Divine Days." Joubert takes notes as he learns about both tricksters, trying to understand their significance.

Divine Days introduces readers to a score of indelible characters: Imani, Joubert's girlfriend, an artist and social worker searching for her lost siblings and struggling to reconcile middle class life with her values and Black identity; Eloise, who raised Joubert and whose influence is at odds with his writerly ambitions; (Oscar) Williemain, a local barber, storyteller, and founder of the Royal Rites and Righteous Ramblings Club; and the Night Light's many patrons. With a structure inspired by James Joyce and jazz, Leon Forrest folds references to African American literature and cinema, Shakespeare, the Bible, and classical mythology into a heady quest that embraces life in all its tumult and adventure.

This edition brings Forrest's masterpiece back into print, incorporating hundreds of editorial changes that the author had requested from W. W. Norton, but were not made for their editions in 1993 and 1994. Much of the inventory from the original printing of the book by Another Chicago Press in 1992 had been destroyed in a disastrous warehouse fire.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780810145702
Publisher:	Seminary Offsets
Publication date:	02/15/2023
Pages:	1168
Sales rank:	425,785
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 8.90(h) x 2.70(d)

About the Author

LEON FORREST (1937–1997) was born in Chicago and taught at Northwestern University for more than two decades. His first novel, There Is a Tree More Ancient Than Eden, included an introduction by Ralph Ellison and was edited by Toni Morrison, who also worked with Forrest on two subsequent novels, The Bloodworth Orphans and Two Wings to Veil My Face. Originally published in 1992, Forrest’s masterpiece, DivineDays, was inspired by James Joyce’s Ulysses and hailed as “boldly musical” by the New York Times and “dazzling” by Publishers Weekly. Meteor in the Madhouse, a series of connected novellas narrated by Joubert Jones, was published posthumously by TriQuarterly Books in 2011, and Forrest was inducted into the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame in 2013. His papers are held at the McCormick Library of Special Collections and University Archives at Northwestern University.

KENNETH W. WARREN is the University of Chicago Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor. He is the author of What Was African American Literature?, So Black and Blue: Ralph Ellison and the Occasion of Criticism, and Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism.

ZACHARY PRICE is the grandson of Leon Forrest.

What People are Saying About This

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

The War and Peace of the African—American novel.

Toni Morrison

Brooding, hilarious, acerbic, and profoundly valued life has no more astute observer than Leon Forrest.

Editorial Reviews

Life has no more astute observer than Leon Forrest.” —Toni Morrison

“The War and Peace of African American literature.” —Henry Louis Gates Jr.

"Writers such as Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison have known about Leon Forrest for years, and one hopes 'Divine Days' finally will establish him in the minds of the people he has been chronicling for almost a generation." —Chicago Tribune (1992)

“With enormous energy and an uncanny range of oral styles—from high-flown preaching to down-and-dirty slang—this remarkable fourth novel by Forrest takes more than 1,100 pages to recount one week in the life of Joubert Jones.” —Publishers Weekly

“The technique of the novel is boldly musical. Mr. Forrest prefers to lay his symbols out clearly, so the reader consciously watches him do his stuff the way an audience listens to chorus after chorus of jazz inventions on a standard song's melody and chords.” —New York Times

“Divine Days is a hymn to the textures of an African American experience that rejects neat platitudes.” —The New York Review

“A work of range and scope, power and beauty . . . featuring a cast of characters truly Joycean in their larger-than-life proportions.” —Martin Brady, Chicago Sun-Times

“Almost every page of Divine Days offers abundant evidence that Leon Forrest is a writer of virtuosity and power . . . A landmark in the artistic representation of social and historical reality, a rich and complex entertainment that deserves our praise, respect, and gratitude.” —Arnold Rampersad, New York Newsday

From the Publisher

With enormous energy and an uncanny range of oral styles--from high-flown preaching to down-and-dirty slang--this remarkable fourth novel by Forrest ( Two Wings to Veil My Face ) takes more than 1100 pages to recount one week in the life of Joubert Jones, an aspiring playwright who has just returned to his home on Chicago's South Side after two years in the Army. Much of Jones's time is spent with the ``zany denizens'' of his Aunt Eloise's Night Light Lounge--a spectrum of humanity that includes drunkards, mystics, policemen and other spinners of tall tales--which was once the location for ``Divine Days,'' the religious revival house of con man and preacher W.A.D. Ford. ``Hypersensitively attuned to the sound of voices, babblings, other-worldlysic and worldly tongues,'' Jones has written a play about Ford's ``mysterious ritual services'' and is now bent on chronicling the memory of his older friend Sugar-Groove, a traveling raconteur whose earthy adventures, told to a young Jones, masked a different kind of spirituality than that suggested by Ford. The novel is meant to be a ``long-tongue saga'' touching on every aspect of African American life in the mid-1960s. In presenting life's ``connective patterns'' primarily through speeches, Forrest's work is more reminiscent of Henry Miller's obsessive narratives and Toni Morrison's mythic languages than James Joyce's internal explorations. Yet what ultimately allows Forrest to sustain a reader's interest throughout is his determination not only to show a range of oral styles, but to allow each and every character to demonstrate a sophisticated ease with all of these styles, using African American language and subject matter ``to create a synthesis out of all nightmares that our experiences kept throwing up at us.'' This is dazzling, dizzying, demanding and highly recommended. (June) .

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Almost every page of Divine Days offers abundant evidence that Leon Forrest is a writer of virtuosity and power….A landmark in the artistic representation of social and historical reality, a rich and complex entertainment that deserves our praise, respect, and gratitude.
New York Newsday

Arnold Rampersad

A work of range and scope, power and beauty. It arrives trumpeted as the black Ulysses and so it is…featuring a cast of characters truly Joycean in their larger—than—life proportions.
—Chicago Sun-Times

Martin Brady

"Simply put, Leon Forrest's massive masterpiece Divine Days is the War and Peace of the African-American novel."

Henry Louis Gates

"Almost every page offers abundant evidence that Leon Forrest is a writer of virtuosity and power. . . . A landmark in the artistic representation of social and historical reality, a rich and complex entertainment that deserves our praise, respect and gratitude."

New York Newsday - Arnold Rampersad

"An adventurous masterwork that provides our literature with a signal moment. . . . This epic detective story pulls in elements of the Gothic, the tall tale, the parable, the philosophical argument, the novel of ideas, the history lesson, the novel of manners and the sort of close observation Balzac, Mann and Hemingway would have admired."

New York Times Book Review - Stanley Crouch

"Divine Days is that rare thing in our self-conscious and ironic age—a full-out serious work of art."

New Republic - Sven Birkerts