rashidah ismaili

"In the vivid immediacy of her voice, Ismaili places us squarely in the company of those other great books—like Sarah E. Wright’s This Child’s Gonna Live, Rosa Guy’s Bird at My Window, and Baldwin’s Another Country —in which the known is only a condition of possibility.” – Dr. Eben Wood, CUNY

“This well established poet makes a brilliant debut in fiction with these complex, poetically detailed, interrelated stories of Blacks from Africa, the Caribbean and the USA who converge and form an artistic community in the early 1960s in the most easterly regions of Alphabet City .” –David Henderson, author of ‘Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky

“Ismaili charts the lower East side just prior to the turbulent, revolutionary Sixties, when the influence of Leroi Jones and the Black Arts Movement signaled a cultural sea-change.  Her characters persevere through desertion, loss, abandonment and betrayal, to achieve fulfillment in a fractured society.” – Vinnie Burrows 

“A sensuous and intimate portrait of a place and a generation. Belongs in the canon of American literary and socio-political classics, alongside Diane di Prima, James Baldwin, Grace Paley, Vivian Gornick, and Jack Kerouac. A masterpiece.”  – Sara Pritchard, author of Crackpots and Help Wanted: Female

Autobiography of the Lower East Side is a  novel in short stories, set in New York during the late nineteen-fifties and the turbulent decade that followed.  Inhale the exotic spices from tenement hallways, smell the sweat and garbage in the streets, feel the sweltering heat of summer in the City. Taste the texture and densities of African dishes: the rice and pepper sauce, stewed fruits, tagine, okra soup, bread and fish. Walk the alphabet streets in the daytime, weaving among pushcarts, or at night in the biting winds of winter, footsteps too close at your back. Sway to the cool jazz. Groove to the lilt of African voices reciting poetry, intoning prayers. Follow a junkie riding out a Jones, an anarchist handing out pamphlets, a pacifist leading a draft resister on the Underground route from New York City to Canada. The Autobiography of the Lower East Side pulsates with the heartbeat of Manhattan's Lower East Side in the 1960s, its artists and activists caught in the racial, sexual, political, and class tensions of the era.  Ismaili’s richly-evoked setting presents characters learning to survive in the jazz scene, the theater, and the arts while dealing with interracial relationships, abuse, addiction, and the toll of the Vietnam draft.