The Last Temptation of Sun Ra

Sun Ra (aka Herman "Sonny" Blunt or Blount) has returned to his native Birmingham, Alabama which has recently (summer of 1963) been the target of demonstrations led by Martin Luther King and others. Sonny has not come because of the demonstrations. Musician, composer, bandleader and modern religious visionary, perhaps the most idiosyncratic of all avant-garde jazzmen, he believes in following his intuitions, and he has recently been disturbed by a chatter of voices within his own mind --- a problem he had experienced in his youth, but thought he had left behind when he left Birmingham nearly two decades earlier. In an effort to understand the voices, he begins looking up people whom he knew before. In the meantime, a second narrative thread explores the world of white Birmingham, on display at Leon Fine's Big Pig, a barbecue mecca where members of all the white social classes mingle at lunchtime. Worlds in Collision by Immanuel Velikovsky is one of Sonny's favorite books. The worlds of

Like Sun Ra, Marc Kaplan is a native of Birmingham, Alabama. He authored a screenplay which ultimately became the movie Fast Break (Columbia Pictures, 1979). He subsequently entered graduate school at UCLA and received a doctorate in English in 1993 for work on William Blake. He has published scholarly articles on Blake and on Gabriel Garcia Marquez. He is a member of PEN International Writer's Society. He has been a professor in the English Department of Santa Monica College for the last sixteen years. The Last Temptation of Sun Ra is his first novel.