The Junk-Drawer Corner-Store Front-Porch Blues

The Junk-Drawer Corner-Store Front Porch Blues by John R. Powers  210 pp.

Years ago I read The Last Catholic in America, Do Black Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up?, and The Unoriginal Sinner and the Ice-Cream God by this same author. Even though I wasn't a Catholic school kid, enough of my friends were, and I found those books very funny. I was in search of those in our catalog when I discovered this book. (I loaned out my copies of the others years ago and they were never returned..) This is not in the same vein as Powers other books which mainly involve growing up and going to Catholic schools. In this story Donald Cooper returns to his hometown because his elderly mother has broken her hip. She sends him on an errand to retrieve items from the family home which he has not been to in years, having left after a family tragedy. Visiting his old neighborhood and home brings up memories, both good and bad, and he comes to terms with what had happened so many years ago. It's a nice book and a good story.

Erasure by Percival Everett

Erasure by Percival Everett, 265 pages, fiction. Our June Book Group title.
In this 2001 novel, written when the Urban Fiction genre was becoming more popular, Thelonius "Monk" Ellison, an English professor and the author of dense, experimental (and unpopular) fiction, finds his life hitting a rough patch. His relationships with his brother and sister change dramatically, his mother's health is rapidly declining, and he finds letters from his late father in which secrets are revealed. At the same time, his literary career has stalled. Angered over the popularity of a new, urban title, We Lives in da Ghetto, and the continued difficulty he has with his own work (books that are parodies of French poststructuralists or re-tellings of Euripides and Aeschylus) being labeled either as African-American fiction, or as "not black enough", he writes his own modernized Native Son, and the consequences both enrich and confound him.
Patrick