FROM THE PUBLISHER

In this collection's opening autobiographical essay entitled "In the Light of Likeness - Transformed," Leon Forrest tells us that he came from a lower-middle-class Negro household on the South Side of Chicago. My father was a bartender on the Santa Fe Railroad and Daddy would read to me and my mother when he was at home. My mother read to me constantly. My great-grandmother lived with us until I was ten, and I used to read the Bible to her, mainly the Old Testament." Leon Forrest's lifetime love of words shines forth in the essays, articles, and book reviews that comprise this volume. We share his fine-tuned, careful perceptions in essays on the moment of epiphany in the black Baptist church, on Michael Jordan, on Toni Morrison's novel, Sula, on William Faulkner, on Billie Holiday, on the sculptor Richard Hunt, among many others. Book reviews address James Baldwin's Just Above My Head, Joyce Carol Oates' Son of the Morning, Rita Mae Brown's Six on One, and The Book of Sand by Jorge Luis Borges. In each, we learn something new, about literature, about life, about ourselves. The pieces in Relocation of the Spirit traverse twenty years in American culture. Leon Forrest was there as witness - and we are wiser for his observations.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

This rich collection of 27 essays and reviews reflects the deep engagement in culture, especially African American culture, by novelist Forrest, author of the recently heralded Divine Days and chair of the African American Studies department at Northwestern University. An autobiographical piece invokes the varied strands of the complex ``Negro-American culture'' and Forrest's desire to re-create that complexity in fiction. He examines his literary influences, especially Ralph Ellison and William Faulkner, and, in an address to a university convocation, expresses his recognition of the ways blacks and whites have transformed one another. Forrest was one of the non-Muslim editors of the Chicago-based Black Muslim newspaper Muhammad Speaks in the late '60s and early '70s, and several interesting articles here, including a long reflection on Elijah Muhammad, date from that period. Other entries are reprinted from newspapers and literary magazines; some, including a luminous exposition on basketball superstar Michael Jordan, are previously unpublished. Forrest's sinuous and assured style makes this reading consistently interesting. (Feb.)

Library Journal