"Reading Wright is a steep, stinging pleasure."—Dwight Garner, New York TimesIn this incisive, satirical collection of three classic American novels by Charles Wright—hailed by the New York Times as "malevolent, bitter, glittering"—a young, black intellectual from the South struggles to make it in New York City. This special compilation includes a foreword by acclaimed poet and novelist Ishmael Reed, who calls Wright, "Richard Pryor on paper."As fresh and poignant as when originally published in the sixties and seventies, The Messenger, The Wig, and Absolutely Nothing to get Alarmed About form Charles Wright's remarkable New York City trilogy. By turns brutally funny and starkly real, these three autobiographical novels create a memorable portrait of a young, working-class, black intellectual—a man caught between the bohemian elite of Greenwich Village and the dregs of male...

Charles Wright called his seventh collection Zone Journals to emphasize how the poems draw on time and place as their starting point. But despite the air of immediacy and informality, they are artfully composed, informed as always by Wright's profound sense of subliminal order.