Intercom

Literatures in English Professor Kasia Bartoszynska has published a review of Divine Days by Leon Forrest, a novel revered by writers and scholars from Kenneth Warren to Stanley Crouch to Toni Morrison. This republication of what some have referred to as the Ulysses of the South Side of Chicago is a cooperative effort of the Seminary Co-op Bookstores of Chicago and Northwestern University Press. In her review, Kasia calls Divine Days a kind of trickster tale, shifting among protagonists who are themselves constantly presenting a different face, a different name, a different side of their character. Playfully meta, the novel seems to anticipate and preempt all the things that critics are likely to say about it. Set in the 1960s, written in the 1980s, it nonetheless seems to speak, in remarkably prescient ways, to our present moment, and to debates about art, identity, and justice. Hopefully, this beautiful new edition will allow the novel to be recognized and appreciated as it deserves." Prof. Bartoszynska's review appears in the Los Angles Review of Books (click to read), one of the country's premier online journals of cross-over academic writing on literature, culture, and the arts.