Serious Music

A thrilling, darkly comic journey of a Black musician making his way from the trenches of the Somme, to the jazz clubs of Harlem, to the illicit inner sanctum of Woodrow Wilson's White House, by the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author of James. In 1918, Arthur Champion is one of a handful of Black students attending the Oberlin Conservatory of Music when he runs afoul of a vindictive professor and finds himself unceremoniously enlisted in the United States Army. What ensues is one man's sweeping voyage through the decade, a kaleidoscopic view of America during seismic social shifts from the author hailed by The Chicago Tribune as "our current Great American Novelist." A brilliant interrogation of racism and ownership in art, Serious Music is a breakneck, high-octane read, thrumming with the electrifying humor and rigorous moral clarity that is the hallmark of this masterful writer's contribution to American letters.

PERCIVAL EVERETT is a Distinguished Professor of English at USC and the author of Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner James. His other most recent books include Dr. No, The Trees, Telephone, So Much Blue, Erasure, and I Am Not Sidney Poitier. He has received the NBCC Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award, The Windham Campbell Prize from Yale University, and the Stowe Prize for Literary Activism. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, the writer Danzy Senna, and their children.