RL's Dream

Walter Mosley

ISBN 10: 0393038025 / ISBN 13: 9780393038026

Published by W. W. Norton August 1995, 1995

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 36749

Bibliographic Details

• Title: RL's Dream
• Publisher: W. W. Norton August 1995
• Publication Date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393038025
• ISBN 13: 9780393038026
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: First Edition.
• Printing: First Edition
• Condition: Used - like new
• Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good
• Signed: Signed By Author
• Seller catalogs:
  • Mystery

About this title

Synopsis

When a black musician in New York is evicted for non-payment of rent, a white woman living in the same apartment block takes him in. He is Soupspoon Wise, a gentle jazz guitarist from Mississippi who has cancer. She is Kiki Waters, a drinking, swearing redhead from Arkansas who works on Wall Street. The novel traces their ménage.

RL’s Dream is a novel about the blues―as an expression of black poetry and black tragedy and how they sit in judgment on the American experience. In contemporary New York, aging bluesman Soupspoon Wise is alone, ill, and dying. He has played his music in a thousand bars, clubs, and juke joints, but never so memorably as the time he played with one Robert “RL” Johnson in the Mississippi delta. That brief, indelible encounter with the great genius of country blues haunts Soupspoon, much as Johnson himself is said to have been possessed by Satan. And so Soupspoon proceeds to tell his story to Kiki Waters, the young white woman who has taken him in, another refugee from a South she can neither deny nor escape.

About the Author

Walter Mosley is the author of four previous mystery novels in the Easy Rawlins series: Devil in a Blue Dress (basis for the acclaimed film starring Denzel Washington), A Red Death, White Butterfly, and Black Betty, a New York Times bestseller. In August 1995 he published his first non-genre novel, RL's Dream, to widespread praise. Mosley is the current president of the Mystery Writers of America, a member of the executive board of the PEN American Center and founder of its Open Book Committee, and is on the board of directors of the National Book Awards. His novels are now published in eighteen countries. He is at work on a book featuring a new character, a philosophical and tough ex-convict named Socrates Fortlow; sections have already appeared in Esquire and GQ. A native of Los Angeles, Mosley lives in New York City.