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Francisco

By: Alison Mills Newman
Narrated by: Alison Mills Newman
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Publisher's summary

A lost masterpiece of American literature about the creative evolution of a young Black woman in California and her intense relationship with an indie filmmaker.

Alison Mills Newman’s innovative, genre-bending novel has long been out of print and impossible to find. A “fluently funky mix of standard and nonstandard English,” as the poet and scholar Harryette Mullen once put it, Francisco is the first-person account of a young actress and musician and her growing disillusionment with her success in Hollywood. Her wildly original and vivid voice chronicles a free-spirited life with her filmmaker lover, visiting friends and family up and down California, as well as her involvement in the 1970s Black Arts Movement.

Love and friendship, long, meaningful conversations, parties and dancing—Francisco celebrates, as she improvises in the book, “the workings of a positive alive life that is good value, quality, carin, truth…the gift of art for the survival of the human heart".

©1974, 2023 Alison Mills Newman; Saidiya Hartman (P)2023 New Directions Publishing Corp.
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Autobiographical Novel from the 70s

Francisco by Alison Mills Newman is a fun ride that centers Alison (yes, the protagonist shares a first name, and apparently an identity, with the author), and her love for her man, Francisco.

Francisco is a filmmaker who is always hard at work or attending functions that usually include people who he'd like to know or who he possibly should know. He tends to be so busy with his work and all of discontents that Alison wonders when her & him will have time to simply love on each other.

Alison is also talented. She can act, she can sing, but she is invested in Francisco, and through this investment, we explore race, especially as it pertains to Hollywood and Revolution. We explore all of the other good stuff, too: class, gender, ambition, creativity, originality, loyalty, sex.

A nice bonus is learning about how Newman herself now renounces the lifestyle depicted in this novel, which is apparently a life that she used to live. Not sure what it says about me as I just saw young people being young during the 70s. God bless her.

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