Department of English

• Thursday, March 30, 2017 - 6:00pm to 8:00pm

Penn Book Center 130 S Philadelphia, PA 19104

Join us for a reading and discussion of Claude McKay's newly discovered novel Amiable with Big Teeth.

When Jean-Christophe Cloutier and Brent Hayes Edwards discovered Claude McKay’s final novel Amiable with Big Teeth in 2009, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. hailed the discovery as “a major event [which] dramatically expands the canon of novels written by Harlem Renaissance writers." 

Building on the already extraordinary legacy of McKay’s life and work, this colorful, dramatic novel centers on the effort by Harlem intelligentsia to organize support for the liberation of Mussolini-occupied Ethiopia, a crucial but largely forgotten event in American history.

At once a penetrating satire of political machinations in Depression-era Harlem and a far-reaching story of global intrigue and romance, Amiable with Big Teeth plunges into the concerns, anxieties, hopes, and dreams of African-Americans at a moment of crisis for the soul of Harlem—and America.