DisIntegration, William Melvin Kelley
DisIntegration, William Melvin Kelley
List: $15.00 | Sale: $10.50
Club: $7.50

Dis//Integration
2 Novelas & 3 Stories & a Little Play

Author: William Melvin Kelley

Narrator: Bailey Carr, Gabrielle Adkins, Keith Szarabajka, Luke Slattery, Jay Smooth, Angel Pean

Unabridged: 5 hr 5 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 10/22/2024


Synopsis

An odyssey through time in which past and future combine and re-combine to give the arc of a full life, by the "brilliant" (The New Yorker) author of A Different Drummer.

"[A] lost giant of American literature." —The New Yorker

The linked "2 novelas, 3 stories, and a little play" that make up DIS//INTEGRATION follow the life journeys of Charles "Chig" Dunford from his Nanny Eva sermonizing from her front porch, when he is only seventeen, to his peripatetic studies in Reupeo (an anagram of Europe) as a college student, to his unsettled bachelorhood as an English professor at a small Vermont college, where he continues to struggle to finish his life-long study of the Reupeonese author Dupukshamin and find true love.

Along the way, as Chig's sentimental education unfolds, we meet an array of memorable characters:  John Hoenir, the Hemingway-esque expatriate novelist who takes Chig under his wing; Wendy Whitman, an actress passing for white, who breaks Chig's heart; Merry, his troubled teen-age niece who Chig, in middle-age, agrees to look after; Raymond Winograd, the villainous department chair; Renka Bravo, the alluring dancer who might just make Chig an honest man; and one hundred Africans mysteriously chained together in the lower decks of Chig's homeward-bound transatlantic liner.

About The Author

WILLIAM MELVIN KELLEY was born in New York City in 1937 and attended the Fieldston School and Harvard. The author of four novels and a short story collection, he was a writer in residence at the State University of New York at Geneseo and taught at The New School and Sarah Lawrence College. He was awarded the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for lifetime achievement and the Dana Reed Prize for creative writing. He died in 2017.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Jesse on April 16, 2025

Like most posthumously published books pieced together from fragments, Dis//Integration is for the completionist only, but it’s still a nice epilogue of sorts for Chig Dunford, one of the main characters in Dancers on the Shore and Dunfords Travels Everywheres. The subtitle “2 Novellas & 3 Short Sto......more

Goodreads review by HugoWonderstruck on February 02, 2025

The "2 novellas & 3 stories & a little play" subtitle is a little misleading. Besides the play, it is a little unclear what is a novella and what is a story. It is basically just marketing. "Dis//Integration" has some great moments, especially in the Joyce-inspired last section, but it also seems li......more


Quotes

"A posthumously published work by a major (if unsung) Black novelist reminds readers of his imaginative brio, verbal ingenuity, and abrasive wit. . . . All you can do is marvel at Kelley’s arresting collage-like portrait of the artist as an intellectual nomad, clinging to the core of what makes him human—and humane. There’s cleverness and craft in abundance here. Also, wisdom and even warmth." --Kirkus Reviews (starred review)