Chain Reading

Book Details

Written by Trey Ellis and Bertram D. Ashe.
Buy this on Amazon ($19.95)

Editorial Review (from Amazon.com)

Trey Ellis's playful, irreverent, and uproariously funny debut novel Platitudes, first published in 1988, takes on conflicts within the African American literary community. Dewayne Wellington, a failing black experimental novelist, and Isshee Ayam, a radical feminist author, collaborate on Dewayne's latest sexist comedy. Alternately telling the story about the coming of age of Earle and Dorothy—two black middle-class teenagers, sex-starved in New York City—the battling writers sneak ever, and dangerously, closer to reconciling their literary disputes.

This edition of Platitudes also includes "The New Black Aesthetic," a groundbreaking essay by Ellis that appeared in the journal Callaloo.

"I was zapped by Trey Ellis's humongous talent. His book, Platitudes, is delightfully rad. He dares to have the gumption to write comically about American literary politics." (Ishmael Reed)

"A stunning first novel. Blending the genres of the epistolary and satire, Ellis has produced a novel at once socially engaged and artistically fresh, hilariously funny and intellectually compelling. His is a major talent and this is a wonderful read." (Henry Louis Gates, Jr.)

"This novel takes off like love at first sight. In its wonderfully comic atmosphere, it is smart and sassy, sensitive and intelligent. The author understands and cherishes his literary ancestors, and manages, at the same time, to be absolutely himself—in his own voice and of his generation." (Clarence Major)

"Cracklingly inventive and seriously comic; maybe we have here an older, wiser and darker Holden Caulfield." (John A. Williams)

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